Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Ashland's 2021 Investor Day. My name is Seth Mrozek, Director, Ashland Investor Relations. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. During the course of the morning, we will be referencing slides that are currently being webcast as part of the live virtual event. These slides are also available on the investor relations section of the ashland.com website. Before we begin, I'd like to bring your attention to our forward-looking statements and Reg G declaration on slide two. I will ask that you familiarize yourself with the language and terms and limitations on the slide as they do pertain to information that we're going to cover today. In addition, as we discussed on our earnings call earlier this week, we are now reporting the results of our Performance Adhesives business in discontinued operations.
As such, the information in today's presentation excludes the results of the Performance Adhesives business. On slide three, you will see a brief overview of today's agenda. Over the next couple of hours, you will hear directly from multiple members of Ashland's senior leadership team. Following these presentations, we will host a moderated Q&A session. Also note that during the webcast, you can submit a question at any time via the Q&A box located below the video and slide area of your screen. Please enter your question, then hit Submit, and we will do our best to address the question during the Q&A session. After we finish the live event, I will encourage each of you to explore our virtual innovation trade show, in which you will be able to view presentations and content related to many of our exciting new innovations and product developments.
Ashland leaders will also be available to answer your questions during these sessions via a live Q&A chat. Today's content will be available via Ashland's website for the next 12 months. We are presenting live this morning from our Wilmington, Delaware headquarters and research campus. Please note that we are following all site policies and protocols related to COVID-19. Furthermore, all of the folks participating here today are fully vaccinated against COVID.
Now, I'd like to introduce our speakers. Joining me here today in Wilmington are Guillermo Novo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Kevin Willis, Chief Financial Officer; Ashok Kalyana, Senior Vice President, Life Sciences; Xiaolan Wang, Senior Vice President, Personal Care; and Min Chong, Senior Vice President, Specialty Additives and Intermediates. One final note. I'd like to recognize and thank the folks at Ashland who have worked tirelessly over the past months to bring today's events to you. We are grateful for their expertise and efforts. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and CEO, Guillermo Novo.
Thank you, Seth, and welcome everyone to our Ashland Investor Day. It's my pleasure to host you today on this special event. Many of you have been tracking Ashland for over the years and have already built your views and perspectives on the company. I'll say that this is a company that's been on a journey of transformation, and we've changed. Today, we're a focused additive and specialty ingredients company, with businesses that are consumer-focused and are technology-driven and ESG-enabled. Our strategy is to achieve sustainable, profitable growth. Our goal today is to introduce you to our company profile, to communicate our Ashland strategy for profitable growth, to share our long-term objectives, and to provide some insights into our innovation portfolio. Can we go to the next slide, please?
Ashland's been around for decades, but the company we are today is a 12-year-old company, and it's really made up of the acquisition of four companies that were leaders in their markets in their own right, Hercules, ISP, Pharmachem, and more recently, the Schülke preservative business. Please go to the next slide. We're a changed company with sales of $2.1 billion and focused on additives and specialty ingredients with markets that are much more consumer-focused and driven and resilient. We have a strong financial profile. We have leadership positions on these high-quality, resilient, consumer-driven markets. We have a best-in-class infrastructure around the world to support our business. We're investing in our core businesses, especially if you look at pharma, Personal Care, and architectural coatings. We have a strong innovation culture and capabilities. Sustainability is not just an objective.
Sustainability of our technology base is strong, and we see ESG as a significant growth and profitability driver for our business. Please go to next slide, please. We have a strong foundation on which to build. We have strong businesses, strong infrastructure, strong technology, strong customer relationships. Our focus today really is on driving consistent execution, solid growth, high margins, and strong free cash flow. Go next slide, please. We've changed, but who are we today? What I'd like to do in the next part of the presentation is give you a perspective of the Ashland of today. What is the profile of our company? What drives us? And how we've changed in the last two years to improve our profitability. Can we go to next slide, please? Our purpose is simple. It's to responsibly solve for a better world.
Our vision is to provide this through science in everything that we do. Science is how we create value for our customers. Our customers is what enables us to create value for ourselves and our other stakeholders. Our way is driven by integrity. It's about our values, our respect for people, the integrity that we have as a company, how we treat our people, our responsibility in the community, and our responsibility for the world that we share today. Next slide, please. We have a world-class portfolio of businesses with sales of $2.1 billion, EBITDA of $495 million, EBITDA margins of 23.4% and adjusted EPS of $3.75 a share. Life Sciences is our largest business and represents 35% of our sales.
Personal Care represents 28%, Specialty Additives 31%, and Intermediates 6%. We have global scale in what we do. Our biggest region is actually Europe. EMEA is 36% of our overall portfolio, followed by North America, Asia, and Latin America. For the businesses in Specialty Additives and ingredients, we are one of the larger players with scale. Can we go to the next slide, please? The core message today is about the coherence of our portfolio and of our strategy. We have critical products in the additives and ingredients portfolio that are critical must-do delivery of technologies to our customers. 90% of our portfolio is this integrated portfolio of additives and ingredients. Through this integration, we can get both specialization by tailoring these additives to specific market applications, and we can get scale that we can leverage.
Creating a specialty additive at a small scale is easy. Creating a multi-hundred million dollar additives portfolio is much more difficult. Our advantage is that we've been able to do that. It's built around some core businesses, pharma, Personal Care, and coatings, and then we leverage these technologies, as you'll see, in some future slides, to get that scale across multiple other markets. We have two other businesses. There's the smaller part. They're not integrated into the core additive part of our portfolio, but they are integrated in some of our skills and capabilities. Our nutraceutical business is a standalone business. It's mostly U.S.-based, providing active ingredients and custom manufacturing for our customers in the U.S.
What they do leverage is some of our pharma oral solid dose formulation capabilities, our quality control, our regulatory type capabilities. We have our Intermediates business, which is really about integration, back integration into our vinyl pyrrolidone business. It provides most of the production to our downstream businesses, and then we leverage for value in our merchant markets as we move forward. Can we go to the next slide? That scale, that ability to drive both focus, specialization, and scale for value is our core advantage, and this is where the cohesiveness of our portfolio comes in. We develop unique technologies, and we're able to position them across multiple markets. Our key engines, as I said, are our core businesses, pharma, Personal Care, and coatings. That's where we invest most of the research.
We have very strong positions in markets like nutrition, like construction, like Performance Specialties, Energy and Resources, and we can adapt those technologies for those applications and get that needed scale. The other strong message is if you look at our portfolio, it's the ESG balance that we have. Our portfolios, by their nature, have a very strong ESG foundation. At a time when ESG is a major growth driver, transformational driver for all industries, this positions us well for the future. Go to the next slide, please. As I said, we have the focus, the coherent portfolio, but we also have the scale. We have a global footprint.
I've been in many companies, and I can tell you, as I look at all the lab capabilities, manufacturing capabilities, they're best in class versus anything I've seen in any other company. We have 20 labs, 36 manufacturing facilities, 31 offices, and 3,800 fantastic team members in Ashland that have been in these industries. They're experts, have great relationships, that we are counting on to really drive the success of the company. The business leaders will get in much more detail on the businesses, but I do wanna touch base on just some of the high-level profiles. Life Sciences, not only is the biggest business, it has all of them have very nice EBITDA margins. It has 26.5% EBITDA margins. Key focus on pharmaceuticals, on nutrition, on nutraceuticals. Personal Care also has very nice margins, 27.2% EBITDA margins.
Its focus, obviously, on Personal Care is the core market, but they participate in many of the segments, skin, hair, oral, and even, we participate in home care. We have a very broad portfolio of technologies. As you'll hear today, ESG is one of the major drivers. It's not just the sustainability of the products, but how it's changing the consumer and their perceptions and wants into clean beauty and other aspects of the products that we bring. Specialty Additives also has fantastic margins, 24.1%. They actually cover a number of different segments and are able to position many of our technologies across all those segments.
Architectural coatings, as you'll see, is the largest part of the portfolio, and there we are the leaders in rheology. As you'll see, we would like to transform that business to be more like Personal Care or our pharma business that bring to bear a broader portfolio so that we can leverage our full skills and capabilities in those markets. Then lastly, we have our Intermediates business. Currently, it enjoys very high margins, given some of the market dynamics at 27%, but that business is all about integration. Not just cost for value in our upstream business, but security of supply. We have a very well-positioned asset that in the last year with all these storms have proven to be very valuable for us. And it serves actually very nice markets.
Our downstream, our merchant market business focus on semiconductor, on battery production for the electric vehicles, on active ingredients for pharma and ag, and on coatings, all very resilient markets, and we have a very strong position here in the U.S. Can we go next slide? We have a very high-quality customer mix as a company. Our top 20 customers represent 29% of our sales, and our top 100 customers, about 60% of our sales. 47% of our sales are from major multinationals. We're present also 15% of our sales with all the major regional players in all the markets we serve. We see distributors as our partners, and they represent 24% of our sales. Our largest customer represents more or less 2% of our sales.
Oral care is the only market where we have higher concentration of customer and products. Coatings, we have also some very large customers, but the product portfolio that we bring is much broader than in the oral care space. Can we go next slide? One big change. In the past, we've always talked about consumer and industrial. If we look at our current portfolio, the reality is that 80% of our portfolio is consumer-focused and markets. Pharma, nutrition, nutraceuticals, Personal Care, obviously very consumer. If you look at our Specialty Additives, decorative coatings is the largest business, and as you all know, it is very consumer-focused, be it the DIY market and even the contractor market.
Very steady, very stable, very GDP-driven, and with a lot of the same consumer engagement on selection of color, selection of the products they want, if they paint themselves or not. Very consumer driven portfolio, and this is exciting in the terms of the resilience of the portfolio. I think in the last two years, in the middle of a crisis, you've seen how stable our demand has been, even with all these ups and downs of storms and supply chain. It provides an opportunity for higher margins. These are valuable products where we bring in the special ingredients that enhance performance. As you'll see, there are very favorable megatrends that will continue to make these markets grow and change, and change in a way where we can bring technology to bear. Can we go next slide?
As I said, megatrends are very important, very favorable for us, and you'll hear much more from the general managers of each of the businesses. If you look at aging population, global urbanization, rising middle class, all those are creating new needs, changes in what the consumers want, be it more affordable healthcare, personalized treatments. It's not clean beauty. We see how personalization of products for the home, for your personal life, for your Personal Care or for your health is increasing. This creates a great opportunity for us to innovate. ESG is a major megatrend for us. It's not just doing the right things, it's gonna change our industries. If you look at all our industries, it's gonna affect all our industries, but Personal Care is probably our spearhead.
That industry is much more advanced than others because of the nature of their consumer demand. Consumers want products that meet the ESG expectations that are growing today, and those expectations are also changing their view of the products beyond sustainability. It's about how it impacts them and their families. This clean beauty is very much related to the some of the changes in ESG, but it's creating other needs for newer products, and you'll see some of the things we've done, as an example, the Schülke & Mayr acquisition that bring products that meet some of these other greater needs. Lastly, it's about technology. A lot of new technologies are changing, and we see an opportunity for growth.
Be it biotech in the pharma space, the use of artificial intelligence, you'll see some examples of things we're doing, not just at the corporate side, but in R&D, in manufacturing, to leverage artificial intelligence. Areas like electrification, we have products that are growing. We're exploring all those areas to build our next generation of businesses. Can we go to the next slide, please? ESG is not just something that we need to do because it's the right thing to do. It's an integral part to our future. When we look at ESG, like other companies, we look at all the activities and objectives we need to meet around our environment, our social, and our governance and ethics activities. When we look at the environment, we break it down into three areas of work and activity.
One is sustainable sourcing. Are we a responsible user of the resources in the world? Because we have a strong base of natural-based products or naturally derived products, we also need to be responsible in the sourcing of those products, in the communities that are sourcing this. We're working, and as you'll hear, with NGOs and other groups to make sure that we're meeting those requirements. Sustainable operations is about our plants and operations. Energy, water, waste, greenhouse gases. Are we reducing it? What are we doing in those areas? Then at the core, which is really about who we are. It's about innovation, therefore sustainable solutions. Those two things match.
The changes that this world is gonna go, not just in the next few years, in the next two decades, will drive the need for new technologies. Technology is a key part to the solution, and we are very well-positioned to really gain from those areas. We'll share a little bit of what we're doing on the solution side of the equation. Next slide, please. There's a lot of activities that we're doing, but we're showing clear commitment. In February, we joined the Paris Agreement, so that we're committed to maintaining temperature rise to one and a half degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels, and we're taking actions on our side to help with that.
We also joined the UN Global Compact, and we're incorporating a lot of their goals, not just into our ESG strategies, but into our strategy. ESG is an integral part of our strategy as our business, our strategy around our innovation and our strategy around the future. There's a lot of examples that I can give you, things that we're doing around EcoVadis, around energy reductions, and I'll talk about a little bit next slide. On the social activity, we're committed not just to diversity, but to the communities that we operate in.
Science, as I said, is at the core of what we do, and we see STEM as a vehicle for a company of our size that we can concentrate our effort and leverage STEM activities within the communities that we help, that we participate to help, so we're gonna be channeling a lot of the resources there. On the governance side, Ashland's always had a very strong governance profile on its corporate side. We're expanding that. You'll see us talk a little bit more about it, but our entire organization from the board, the management team, and all the employees, we're expanding literacy. We're talking more openly and sharing what our targets are, what the issues. We're increasing visibility internally about our own performance in the different areas so that we can drive change.
Transparency is a key driver for change. That's how we managed the last two years driving some very important transformations during a very difficult time, and that's the same attitude that we wanna do. We wanna do the right things. We're not gonna be necessarily perfect in everything we do, but our momentum is taking us in the right direction. I'm very proud of the organization, from everyone from the board through any of our plants, labs, and all the work they do. Please go to the next slide. We've committed to our science-based targets. We're working on them. We expect to submit them and get them approved in roughly about 18 months, but we're not waiting until then. We have very specific goals that we've set for ourselves that we're continuing to work.
The bar will raise once we have those science-based targets, but we have very clear objectives for 2025. As an example, for renewable energy, we wanna have 25% of our energy be coming from renewable by 2025 and 100% by 2030. In EcoVadis, in working with our suppliers, doing audits, working with NGOs on all the active procurement activities that we do in the different communities, so a lot of work in our sourcing activities. On our operational side, all sites, plants, labs, offices, very clear goals around energy, around water, around waste, and around greenhouse gases. On the governance side, that we continue to expand our activities. This is a key topic in all our board meetings.
It's a key topic in all our executive meetings. It's a key topic in all our reviews of progress in executing our strategy and our operating activities. As I said, we're increasing the transparency internally and as you'll see externally on what we're doing. Next slide, please. One of the key areas for us, as I said, is this whole sustainability opportunity for growth, for innovation. When we look at our portfolio, you know, there's a lot of noise because, you know, there's different testing protocols, different industries look at different things and call things a little bit differently. We sell products to multiple industries, so we could end up with a product that is classified in one way in one industry and in a different way because they use different test methods.
Rather than react to everybody, what we are doing is we're fortunate to have a very strong team that's just focused on sustainability, on understanding the biodegradability profile of our products that helps us work not only internally, but also with our customers on understanding the biodegradability of our products, the products in use with our customers. When we look at our products to see the sustainability profile, we look at, is it natural? Is it naturally derived? What is that biodegradability profile, and under what tests? Because these tests are just screening tests. You know, we're doing tests beyond that to really understand the fundamentals, but we want to make sure that we're using science and data to really inform us and guide us into the next steps.
Then we don't only just look at our products, we also look at our products in the formulations, because the performance of the products can change when you just test the product itself. We do a lot of work there. The other part that we do is, maybe our product isn't sustainable, but is it helping our customers achieve their sustainability targets? Which products are they? What benefits are they bringing? We do service the areas like pharma. We wanna also make sure that we understand how our products help society. Are we solving some of the healthcare problems? Are we making healthcare more affordable? And those kinds of things. Looking both at that environmental sustainability, but that social aspect of it also. If we go to next slide.
What excites us about a lot is that we already start in a time of change. We're starting with a fundamentally strong sustainability profile. 61% of our sales are from products that are highly sustainable. They're natural, naturally derived, or inherently biodegradable under the OECD testing protocols. This is the protocol that's mostly used by our Personal Care business, which is probably the most advanced, as I said. 22% of our sales are sustainable in use. Our customers take these products and use them in driving their sustainability agenda. Think, for example, water-based coatings. They're replacing solvent-based coatings. If we can improve the performance, if we can drive that changeover, obviously that's very good in terms of sustainability. We have about 17% of our portfolio that we would classify as lower sustainability.
Those are either synthetic products or they're not inherently biodegradable under these rules. In these areas, we're doing more tests. What we're finding, some products are actually biodegradable. It's just they don't meet those tests, and we're generating the data for two reasons. One, if the product is truly biodegradable, we can present that data with customers and help them make the trade-offs because sometimes there's performance issues that the customer is looking at. Again, we're using it, the science. The other part we use this data is to understand the mechanisms of biodegradability for our products, so that as we develop next-generation products, we can incorporate that in developing more sustainable products. The other thing that excites us is if you look at the gross profit side. 68% of our gross profit comes from these higher sustainability products.
The message is the higher sustainability products are more profitable for us. Why? Because that's what our markets want, number one, and two, because that's where the new technology is being developed. We can achieve both growth and profitability in group improvement. Next slide, please. As a science-based company whose success depends on the relationships that we have with customers, trust, interaction with them, creating value for them, we understand that people are at the center of what we do. Success for Ashland depends on our people. As a global company with 70% of its revenue outside the U.S., we understand that global diversity and inclusion is absolutely critical for us. Today, 44% of our board is either female or diverse male.
If we look at our top 17 leaders, 30% are female, 53% have lived internationally or worked outside the U.S. If we use the U.S. definition of diversity, 59% of our leadership is diverse. I'm very proud of the team, the diversity, but especially the contributions they make to the company and how well we work together as a team, bringing different perspectives, different experiences from different companies, different regions, you know, different attitudes about things that we want to do. It enriches our discussion, but we know that that's not good enough. We need to do more. Today, for the company, 28% of our global team is female. We would like to see that grow to 35%-40% over the next decade.
In the U.S., females and diverse males make about 41% of our employee group. 24% of that group identifies itself as ethnically diverse. We would like to get that total diversity score over 50% in the next decade. We understand that diversity is not just a U.S. thing. We're a global company. We need to educate all parts of the world on the differences, the issues that we have because we manage teams all over the world. We want to develop strong international leaders that understands the issues in the U.S. and Europe and other parts of the world and vice versa. Diversity is critical globally. We are working with all our regional teams in that education program, but also to develop regional specific diversity inclusion goals that can help us really thrive.
This is an area of competitive advantage for us if we can really rally these very talented individuals and excite them about our future. Please go to next slide. You've seen the changes that we've done. You see the company, the profile that we now have. It's very different. The reports you have from 10 years ago, seven years ago, put them away. That's not who we are. They're not gonna be relevant moving forward because we have a very different portfolio. I'd like to spend the next few slides talking a little bit about the changes that we've done. Before I do that, I wanna cover two topics. One, answering some of the questions that I've gotten from you as I joined this company.
Two, I wanna talk about some of the changes that we have implemented in the last two years. When I joined, a lot of questions that I got was about our performance, especially our performance versus peers. You know, our operating resilience, our cost structures, our margins, our growth. What I will say is on the operating resilience, we had a very different portfolio. You'll see now our portfolio matches a lot more the peer groups that you have been pointing out. I think over the last two years, you've seen more of that resilient performance, and you've seen what we've done. I'm really happy to tell you that most of the questions I get today is moving away from the past and to the future. Everybody likes that where margins are improving.
The questions now are, how much can the margins improve, and what about growth? Where are you taking growth? The key core question that I know many of you have is the growth question, and what's not just about the future, but what's the foundation on which we're building on because of all the noise from the past. Let me take you through, if you can go to the next slide, through a little bit of history of growth and show you all, you know, all the details so that you can understand how we see our portfolio. If you look at the total company, over the last five years, 2016- 2021, and this is the portfolio that we have today, it grew at 2.6%. During that time, we had two things happen.
We exited some businesses, we exited a construction products joint venture in China, we exited a CMC plant in China, and more recently, we exited some purchase for resale business in the Personal Care business. Those were the right thing to do. Unprofitable or low-margin businesses, so no question that that was the right thing to do for the businesses. Then we had in 2019 a large business loss in the oral care space. A big customer that reformulated, they were using an active ingredient that they wanted to remove because it was bioaccumulative, and our product was a carrier of that active ingredient. Therefore, with the reformulation, it impacted us. It was not driven by competitive dynamics, it was not driven by new technologies.
It really was a policy decision that the customer implemented and we understand why. We take those two parts out of the portfolio, and we look at the portfolio we have today. It actually grew at 4% with obviously much stronger growth rate pre-COVID, and the last two years, more flattish, but very resilient. We didn't see the big drops that other companies did. Let's dig into that base business. What happened there? If we go into the middle part of the slide, and we break it down. I'll talk about it in terms of this cohesive portfolio, this integrated strategy that we have that it's at our core.
I break it down into our core businesses, pharma, personal care, and coatings, which I know all of you are asking a lot of questions about. We look at that other group of all these other integrated businesses that are critical for us, and then we look at Pharmachem, which obviously helped us in the growth because it came in the middle in terms of M&A, but we had our own issues. In Pharmachem, we also had some issues in 2019. We lost some business with our largest nutraceutical company customer. They decided to insource production. We were producing for them. They were under a little pressure for other corporate reasons and made an internal decision to take their production captive. Obviously, it impacted us.
Again, not a decision driven by competitive dynamics or technology, more of a policy decision by our customer. We also had in our Avoca business, which is our sclareolide fragrance carrier business, our largest customer developed an alternative technology. They still buy from us 'cause our products are natural-based products, but they have shifted some of the volumes, and that has impacted us. For both of those businesses, the good news is the nutraceutical business is back up. The team has gained new business and is growing, but obviously, in this time period, we did see an impact. The same thing with Avoca. We've stabilized the sclareolide business, but we're using their capabilities of biotechnology really to develop new products and offer new services to our customers.
If you take out the Pharmachem, we grew at about 2% during this period of time and pretty stable. If you look at that integrated group of businesses, they were flat to down over that, depending on the time period that you look at. The big issue there really was Energy and Resources. In the last two years, oil and gas exploration dropped. And in that business, the business dropped by half. It was a significant impact, and we're still working through it. We were able to maintain pretty steady performance, which means the other businesses actually were pretty resilient during that period of time. Now let's look at our core business, our foundation on which we are growing and investing for growth.
That business grew at almost 3%, 2.9%, and again, very steady across the time period. What's interesting, which I assume for some of you that was not as visible, all the businesses have grown during this period of time. Pharma grew at 3.8% with more acceleration in the pre-COVID timeframe. Obviously, 2021, besides the demand, there was a lot of supply chain and other impacts that impacted all our business, but they all grew. Personal Care grew 1.5%, and again, very stable. Actually, during the pandemic, even with some of our markets getting impacted, it actually grew 1.9%. Coatings grew 3.5%, and as you know, there's been a huge recovery in that business and very strong demand.
The message is, how are we doing? The core of our businesses are healthy. They've always been stable. This is for a long period of time. They've been hidden gems in a broader portfolio with a lot of other noise, dynamics, petrochemicals, and this is now who we are, and this is the foundation on which we're building our future. Next slide, please. What have we done? Based on these things, we've changed the company. We get it. We need to improve our performance. We've moved to a more business-centric model. We've brought a lot more discipline in our processes, our focus around each of the businesses, and we're investing in our organization. We talk about ownership and accountability, but you just don't give that. You have to enable it. How do we train people? How do they get to learn to work together?
Are we giving them the right tools to really drive performance? We've done a lot of things in these groups. They're self-contained. They have all the resources they need, all the functional presence to make decisions to drive their strategy, drive their innovation portfolios, drive their operating activities. Also on the S&OP process, that's a core process on which we drive our P&L, our balance sheet, and you've seen the results, margin expansion, better cash flow, and more importantly, very strong capital allocation. How we manage our capital and where we invest has been very different. It's not been only changes in the operational side, it's also on the strategic side. We've changed our portfolio.
You know the changes we've made in the adhesive side, but also with the Schülke & Mayr acquisition and other activities where we're driving growth and really building this cohesive strategy around an additives and ingredients portfolio. Growth accelerators are our top priority right now, and it's really about accelerating and increasing the impact of our innovation portfolio. Our businesses have grown, but no, they have not grown at the rate we want them or we expect them to. It's really getting that added impact to grow. It's where we're driving our investment, making sure that we're more focused on consumer-focused markets, looking at some of the ESG-driven technology drivers, and making sure that we have clarity on the M&A priorities that we have.
That has really driven us to a very high focus on margin expansion and free cash flow conversions, and you know the results have been pretty strong in that area. They're fundamental, and we're on a journey to continue that as we move forward. We have a lot of clarity on what our growth path is and what our focus is. It's about this operating resilience. It's about maintaining the strategic focus on this coherent portfolio. It's about innovation, accelerating it, and increasing the impact. It's about disciplined capital allocation, investing per our strategy, making sure that we're rewarding our shareholders, and we're prudent stewards of capital. Next slide. We're very excited. I hope you feel as excited as I do about the portfolio. We have a strong, cohesive portfolio of additives and ingredients.
We have leadership positions in very attractive and resilient markets with solid growth dynamics. We have businesses that are built on very high-value drivers, where additives, low cost in use, high value in use. A lot of complexity. Complexity is our friend. We can manage it. That's how we can find opportunities to create value for our customers. It's about technology and innovation. Our customers want more than just technology. They want quality. They want reliability. They want our regulatory support because of the markets. It's an industry that sets a very high bar. We're very excited to be leaders in this industry, and we're very excited about the future. Now let me pass it on to Kevin to translate what this all means into our financial profile. Kevin?
Thanks, Guillermo. Good morning, everyone. A lot has happened over the past two years. The macro has obviously been incredibly challenging and closer to home. Ashland has transformed on multiple fronts. I'll spend some time now talking about where we are today, including an update on the sale of Performance Adhesives, the financial profile of the company without adhesives, some key balance sheet upgrades we've made, including the establishment and initial funding of the environmental trust, and very importantly, show you how Ashland's current and expected financial profile compares to several high-value peers with similar business portfolios. By restructuring how we operate and manage the business and reducing the cost structure over the past two years, we've seen improved organic growth. EBITDA margins are up 250 basis points.
We've transformed our cash-generating ability through consistent EBITDA growth and by significantly improving discipline around CapEx and working capital. We've upgraded and de-risked the balance sheet, extending maturities and reducing interest rates, creating and funding the environmental trust. This creates flexibility and optionality, not only to commit to organic growth investments, which we're very excited about, but also the confidence to invest in quality, bolt-on acquisitions, such as Schülke & Mayr, and return significant capital to shareholders, both now and in the future. Just a few highlights from the past two years of hard work. We've moved from a more functionally driven company to one that is BU-centric, with control and accountability over the P&L and significant portions of the balance sheet in the hands of BU management and their teams, which has enabled us to improve our performance and reduce $100 million of cost in SG&A and COGS.
Maintenance and stay in business capital spend has improved, not by starving the business, but by being more focused, disciplined, and intentional about how and where we spend those limited resources. These changes have resulted in significantly better cash generation and increased our capital allocation flexibility. We just provided an update on the adhesive sale on the earnings call, so I won't spend much time on it, but I do wanna offer some color. The transaction closing, which we expect to happen in the March quarter, is very much on track. The Ashland and Arkema teams are working well together to get the business carved out of Ashland, which includes a fully functioning version of SAP that we will deliver to Arkema to run the business day one and carving out and enabling all related systems and processes to support that. We're very pleased with the progress.
Both the Ashland and Arkema teams have a great deal of experience carving out and integrating businesses, and we expect this to go very smoothly. We're now, of course, reporting adhesives as discontinued operations, as I outlined on the earnings call, and we've already allocated $450 million of the proceeds to an accelerated share repurchase program that is currently in progress. There are a lot of numbers here, and I'd like to draw your attention to a few key items and provide my observations on those. First, from a top-line perspective, revenues are back to pre-pandemic levels, inclusive of the exited low-margin personal care product lines. Second, EBITDA has grown at a 6% CAGR over the past two years in spite of the pandemic and significant difficulties around raw material availability and logistics.
Third, EBITDA margin has improved 250 basis points, making significant headway even during the heat of the pandemic in 2020. Finally, we've significantly improved cash generation, netting $361 million of free cash flow during fiscal 2021. In short, Ashland is a resilient business and has achieved impressive results over the past two years. Let's now turn to the balance sheet. The balance sheet is in great shape, and we've accomplished some nice upgrades recently. We issued $450 million of 10-year senior notes, both reducing cash interest by over $5 million and extending maturities. We like our maturity profile and are comfortable with normalized leverage in the two to three times net debt to EBITDA range. Obviously, we'll be much lower than that after the adhesives transaction closes, but more on that later.
Liquidity has been and continues to remain strong. We've created the environmental trust with an initial $90 million of funding and expect to add additional cash to the trust as we liquidate remediated land, some of which has significant value but is on the balance sheet at little or no value today, which should reduce both current and future funding of these remediation activities from operating cash. In addition to the current share repurchase underway, we have $350 million remaining on our existing authorization. We have a lot of flexibility today in terms of organic and bolt-on investments as well as continuing to return capital to shareholders. Here you see the details of the trust in terms of funding mechanics, expected values. There are three takeaways I'd like for you to get from this.
First, these actions enhance our longstanding commitment to environmental responsibility for these legacy sites. Second, with the creation and funding of the trust, our objective is to economically defease this liability and make it self-funding through the trust. Third, we're matching the legacy environmental liability and related changes over time to the trust and its returns, treating both as key items for adjusted financial reporting to allow better understanding of the current business and related results. Objectively, Ashland has been a company in transformation for over a decade. I've personally been involved in approximately 50 transactions, large and small, during my tenure here. That level of change can make a company very difficult to understand and hard to compare to others in terms of both portfolio and performance. Our portfolio and our peer group have evolved over time, and to be fair, it's been something of a moving target.
With the announcement of the Performance Adhesives transaction, we've become a pure-play ingredients and additives business, and we should be compared to similar businesses in the space. We've looked at a number of high-value companies in the ingredients and additives space and have chosen four that we believe are similar to us in portfolio quality and financial performance. The companies on this page vary in size, but their portfolios are consistent with ours and we believe are appropriate comps to our business. First, I'd like to take you through recent performance. The Ashland performance represents our fiscal year 2021 actuals. The performance of the peers is based on information published by the companies and third-party expectations of their performance for 2021. One other comment here: two of the peers have recently made large acquisitions, making the sales and EBITDA growth numbers less meaningful.
Our sales growth is generally in line with the peers, while our EBITDA growth at 10% is at the high end of the group, and our EBITDA margin, which should continue to expand, is higher than all but one of the peers. In terms of future expectations, again, these numbers are based on company filings and third-party expectations, both for Ashland as well as the peers. As you can see, Ashland compares very well to this peer group across the board with mid-single-digit top-line growth, EBITDA margins near the top of the pack, and a very strong EBITDA growth CAGR that's also top quartile compared to these peers. The disconnect, and it's massive, is around valuation.
At around 12.5x EBITDA, Ashland is valued over 50% lower than company B, and company C's multiple is well over twice ours. We believe this disconnect represents a significant multiple expansion opportunity for Ashland, and we are excited to close the gap. We've not only changed, we've improved significantly. The team has operated at a high level during incredibly difficult circumstances between the pandemic and the ensuing global supply chain issues from post-Winter Storm Uri, and that continues to play out in our results. The past two years has been both difficult and exciting as we've repositioned and strengthened the company for current and future growth and significant value creation. At this point, I think we're turning it over to Ashok.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. My name is Ashok Kalyana. I'm the Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Life Sciences business unit. Let me take the next 15 minutes to share with you our life sciences current participation, our areas of focus in building a premier life sciences portfolio. Our portfolio is comprised of three consumer segments: pharma, nutraceuticals, and nutrition. Pharma is the core of our life sciences portfolio, and our main participation is within oral solid dosage tablets, where we are a global leader. Nutraceuticals portfolio, as Guillermo had indicated, is from the acquisition of Pharmachem, and it's primarily a U.S. based business. Nutrition is our third segment, where we have strong participation within select applications. If you look at our participation, it's mainly via low-usage, high-impact additives, which goes into a variety of applications.
We do have a broad product portfolio and a customer base. We have a very long-standing participation in this space, and that gives us the privilege of having strong customer relationship with many leading companies in these markets. Next slide. From a revenue breakdown point of view, pharma makes up close to 60% of our revenues, with nutrition and nutraceuticals making up close to 20%. Last year, our revenues was $737 million in revenues, with an EBITDA margin of 26.5%. From an addressable market point of view, like I had mentioned, our participation within pharma is very broad and within the oral solid space. Our products gets used in a wide range of branded and generic prescription drugs and over-the-counter products. We have a nascent participation within injectables, where we want to expand aggressively.
Beyond oral and injectable dosage, we have niche participation in the broader biomedical space, particularly in the consumables with our diagnostic films. Our participation with the nutraceuticals is via custom formulations and specialty ingredients. Within nutrition, our participation is in select applications within food and beverage space. If you look at the overall growth rate within pharma and nutrition, it tracks closer to that of GDP, while the market for nutraceuticals is growing at a much higher pace than the GDP. This slide gives you a sense of our business diversification across regions, customers, and product mix. Our reach is truly global for pharma, and our revenue mix is very well diversified across the four regions. Our channel to market is a direct-to-sale model with select use of distribution to cover the long tail of customers.
If you look at our customer mix, we do have a very broad customer base, with top 100 customers only making up 60% of our revenues. From a technology product mix point of view, we have the broadest product portfolio for the OSD market and have strong technical and commercial presence in key pharma hubs all across the globe. This capability, backed by strong regulatory support and reliable supply, really puts us to serve as a trusted partner for our customer base. What is our strategy? Our strategy for Life Sciences is to build a premier life science portfolio with pharma as the centerpiece. Three elements for our growth strategy. Number one, broaden our pharma participation. Two, strengthen nutraceuticals. Three, leverage the broad Ashland portfolio within the nutrition space. Let me talk a little bit about more specifics as it relates to broadening of our pharma.
First and foremost, we have to maintain the leadership position in OSD to address the future needs of this industry. Second, expand with urgency into injectables and the broader biomed consumable space. Three, pipeline is absolutely essential for pharma, and we need to continue to build out the pipeline, both from a sales and from an innovation point of view. Finally, we need to continue to fund the growth-oriented initiatives, whether it's capacity expansions or putting in new capabilities. Within strengthening the nutraceuticals agenda, the focus is really about refining our participation strategy and expanding our product offerings. Finally, with the nutrition, we will focus on leveraging the broader Ashland portfolio, focusing on select applications and continuing to optimize our cost to serve. Next slide, please. Understanding the relevant market trends really helps us prioritize our initiatives within these three markets.
The three key trends that shape our agenda within pharma, and Guillermo had already alluded to this, is first and foremost, rising middle class and affordable healthcare. This trend will continue to drive demand for generics in tablets, and more importantly, biosimilars will continue to see increased growth in the coming years. Safe, easy care, patient-centric formulations will also drive changes in both product development and manufacturing within the pharmaceutical industry. This will enable growth in markets such as controlled release tablets as well as long-acting injectables. Technology advancements in manufacturing and biotechnology will also see rapid growth for advanced biologics, new modes of drug delivery, and changes in drug manufacturing. If you look at nutrition and nutraceutical markets, consumers continue to be focused on maintaining their health and lifestyle with diet choices and their lifestyle choices.
This includes incorporating more plant-based foods into their diets, making food choices based on selecting ingredients with perceived health benefits, such as organic or non-GMO or vegan. Nutraceuticals are no longer just multivitamins that you take with breakfast. Consumers are seeking products today to support their lifestyle throughout the day for multiple usage occasions. They are seeking delivery systems beyond traditional tablets, such as stick packs and gummies, which now provide flexibility, portability, and palatability. With these trends as a backdrop, let me talk through specifics of our broadening of our pharma agenda. Again, it all starts with delivering consistent, steady growth with our oral solid franchise, and we are in the best position to do it. We have a broad customer base, a wide application, exposure, and this really puts us in a better place to address the future needs.
If you look at the tablet composition and look at various materials that gets used, we pretty much participate in all the categories except actives and fillers. Within these categories, we have the broadest and the strongest portfolio in the industry. We are leaders in spaces such as binders and in disintegrants. But there are also certain segments where we have significant room to grow. Controlled release and coatings is one example. Like I talked about within the trends section, opportunity to innovate exist, whether it is shift to continuous manufacturing, move towards smaller tablets, or increase in controlled release profile products. Do check out our specific example of innovation with our controlled release polymers in our innovation showcase. We have fantastic relationship with leading companies in the innovator, generics, and CDMO space.
I'm very confident that with our continued focus on innovation, deep formulation expertise, technology portfolio that's broad, and global presence, we will grow the OSD Franchise consistently above market. Next slide. As I have shared, as part of the trends discussion, more and more products are being developed and launched within the biologic space. Their mode of delivery are not tablets, it's injectables. If you look at the top 10 blockbuster drugs in 2020, five of them happen to be in biologics. If you look at the new entities that are entering into the research and discovery mode over the last five years, you will see rapid growth in advanced biologics. Within injectables, our specific area of focus is polymers and high-value excipients, which are needed in drug formulation and delivery.
Use of polymers is really getting a lot of interest within this injectable format as they have looked at possible options for developing long-acting injectables for advanced drug delivery and regenerative therapies. The need for specialized excipients, such as high-purity stabilizers, will continue to rise as advanced biologics take traction as routes for new treatments. Our focus is really to focus on these two dimensions within this injectable space. Some of the polymers that gets used in injectables will also have relevance into the broader biomedical consumable space. In addition, we also have niche participation in the consumable space, like I mentioned before, with our diagnostic films. Our plan is to continue to strengthen our participation in such space as we advance our agenda within the injectable portfolio. Do take a look at our diagnostic film overview under our innovation showcase.
Let me talk through specifically what we are going to do as it relates to our injectables agenda. Our immediate focus is to establish a foothold with our Viatel biodegradable polymers. This is an acquisition that we made a few years ago, and our team is focused on building a strong momentum and have made significant strides in building a strong pipeline last year. We do have a video on this part, and so please check out this innovation as well. The picture to the right of the screen gives us a view of our new expanded manufacturing facility in Mullingar, Ireland. While we are focused on commercializing these polymers, our teams are focused on increasing our innovation efforts to broaden our product portfolio, whether it's custom polymers or the high-value functional excipients that I talked about.
We realize that this is a space where we need to strengthen our capability, and acquisition is certainly a key priority for us to strengthen our participation here. Our aspiration is to build a sizable portfolio within this space over the next five years. The next slide lays out the timeline within pharma as it relates to pipeline conversion. You know, timeline to realize these opportunities are certainly longer in pharma and requires continued support of our customers' efforts. Certainly, opportunities within generics are much shorter in timeframe compared to the innovator space. Opportunities for share shift exist, but they are more driven by security of supply than price. As we focus our pharma agenda within OSD and injectables, it's absolutely critical for us to continue to build out the sales and innovation pipeline for the future health of the business.
Let me turn over and talk a little bit about what is our agenda with respect to nutraceuticals. It's about strengthening our participation. We have a dedicated team now focused on systematically working through some of the challenges that Guillermo had alluded. Key challenges that the team had to work through was heavy reliance on tolling business. We were more top-line driven than value, and our operational setup was not as efficient as it could be, and not a lot of focus was put in driving new product portfolio. I'm very proud to share that our teams have made very good progress in addressing these challenges in 2021 and laying a strong foundation for continued strength of this business moving forward. Next slide. As we look forward, what do we want to become in the nutraceutical space?
We want to be that preferred partner and manufacturer for niche specialty products. We will focus on tailor-made solutions for customers who value custom formulations which are complex. Complex is our friend and our manufacturing expertise that we can lean on. Certainly, we have a lot of strengths from our manufacturing expertise, whether it's particle engineering, fermentation, or controlled release, where we are very good at. Delivery systems is a classic example of how we are able to leverage polymers from pharma to provide convenient and new choices for customers within the nutraceutical space. We have this as a case study as part of our innovation showcase, so please do check it out. I'm confident that this approach will enable us to not only grow the top line at a faster pace, but also make substantial improvements in our profitability.
Finally, with the nutrition, the priority is very straightforward. We will leverage the broad Ashland portfolio to participate in this space. It is a targeted participation, but the good thing is, where we do play, we have an extremely strong position. Our participation is strong within food application within our CMC chemistry. We are market leaders within beer and wine clarifier business, and we do have a video that showcases how we are customizing our cellulose-based polymers to take part in the plant-based protein trend as well. We will continue to look for ways to improve the cost structure to be more efficient as we serve this segment. Let me conclude by summarizing the multiple levers we are focused in building a premier Life Sciences portfolio.
A portfolio that can surpass $1 billion over the next five years with margins of about 30% from an EBITDA perspective. A portfolio that shows robust organic growth via OSD Franchise. Our leadership position puts us in a great place to address the future needs of this industry. A portfolio where we have a sizable presence in injectables. We are not only accelerating our Viatel portfolio, but along with strong innovation efforts and M&A. As we continue to expand into injectables, we will continue to look for opportunities to build out another vertical beyond OSD.
We would also have a very strong and profitable nutraceuticals business as well. In conclusion, the focus again for pharma is three things, broadening the pharma, strengthening nutraceuticals, and leveraging the nutrition business. In conclusion, on behalf of the entire Life Sciences team, let me thank you for taking the time to hear about our plans in building a premier Life Sciences portfolio. Thank you.
Good morning, good afternoon. My name is Xiaolan Wang. I'm the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ashland Personal Care business. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to introduce to you our very beautiful business, Personal Care business. Ashland Personal Care business is a global leader in personal care solutions. We operate in consumer and ESG-driven markets, and we have leading positions in cellulosic-based rheology and hair fixative ingredients. We are among leaders in premium biofunctional actives and microbial protection solutions. We have a unique and strong position in natural and nature-derived technology platform, which are based on renewable polysaccharide, which is one of the most abundant natural raw material. Polysaccharide is a class of material made of many units of sugar, such as cellulosic, guar, and cassia.
About 50% of our current portfolio are nature or nature derived, and we have a global footprint, not only in sales marketing, but also in innovation centers as well as manufacturing facilities. Ashland Personal Care business is a large, global specialty ingredients business. Our turnover is $592 million in fiscal year 2021, with an EBITDA of $161 million. Adjusted EBITDA ratio is slightly above 27%. Skincare is our largest leading market segment with 42% of overall sales. EMEA is our largest sales region with 40% of the total sales. North America is 30%. Asia and LATAM are 17% and 12% respectively. Global-wide, we have eight innovation centers and 16 manufacturing plants. Our business have 600 employees working in sales, marketing, business development, research, supply chain, manufacturing, and other functions.
We operate in a large and attractive market, which is under ESG transformation. Our overall accessible market is well over $6.5 billion, and the market growth rate is at around GDP level. We have a broad participation in each of the market segments. For example, in skincare, our solutions go into face cream, body cleansing, sun care, and also rinse-off applications. Hair care includes styling, shampoo and conditioning, as well as scalp care and also treatment. From the ingredients category perspective, Ashland Personal Care participates in the additives space. We are strong in non-silicone conditioning polymers, rheology control agents, premium biofunctionals, and microprotection solutions. We also participate in specialty emollients and emulsifiers.
We are not in the field of surfactant, color ingredients, inorganic rheology agents, and silicones. We are no longer an active player in the UV filter actives, and we are a pure additive player and are close to $600 million revenue in fiscal 2021 is from Specialty Additives. We have innovation centers in four major continents, one in U.S., which is in Bridgewater, New Jersey, in North America, and then four in Europe, this including our biofunctional competency center in Sophia Antipolis in France, and our microbial protection center in Hamburg in Germany. We also have two innovation centers in Asia, one in Shanghai and one in Mumbai, plus another innovation center in São Paulo in Brazil. Globally, we have eight innovation centers in total.
We also manufacturing our product in 16 plants globally, nine in North America, five in Europe, and two in Asia. Well, as you can see, our footprint is truly global, with well-established R&D centers and manufacturing capability. This is not just only in Western Europe and North America, but also in growing regions such as Asia and Latin. Asia is the largest global beauty care retailing market, has the highest growth rate and relatively low per capita consumption of beauty care product. With rising middle class, we anticipate a strong growth in Asia. We decided to add a new biofunctional plant in our existing site in Nanjing, China, and the expansion project is progressing very well according to our plan. As you're aware, our industry is changing. Consumer behavior and demand are changing.
Consumer desires both physical and mental health and well-being benefits in addition to the traditional beauty care. Increasingly, our consumers make purchasing decisions based on if the products are using sustainable ingredients and are cruelty-free, fair trade, renewably sourced, sustainably sourced, and also biodegradable. In addition, consumers want products to meet their specific individual needs and contain local ingredients. We reviewed these trends and these trends will provide great growth opportunities for Ashland as we have the technologies and also the capability to innovate for evolving consumer preferences and enable this industry transformation. Well, not just the consumer behavior and demands are changing. Our customers are also embracing these changes and accelerating their pace to drive industry ESG transformation. The graph shows that new product launch frequency with naturality claims doubled in recent five years compared with the prior five-year period.
Top ten multinationals beauty care brand owners are among the key drivers to move the industry towards natural beauty care. In fact, our customer have set very clear sustainability goals and require their strategic partners, such as Ashland, to meet their sustainability expectations. For example, among many sustainability goals, L'Oréal specifically set a target that by 2030, 95% of ingredients in their formula will be bio-based, derived from abundant minerals or from circular processes. With the understanding of the market trend, market dynamic, our customer expectations, and also our own competencies, we define our growth strategy with an emphasis on sustainability-driven innovation. We will pivot our innovation to sustainable technology platforms and broaden our natural and nature-derived and biodegradable portfolio. We will enhance the strong customer relationships and capitalize on consumer-driven mega trends.
We will focus our resource on high-margin portfolio, expand biofunctionals geographically, and target merger acquisition on differentiated technology, particularly biotech and natural-based portfolio. Our goal is to deliver above market growth and achieve EBITDA margin greater than 30%. As mentioned earlier, acquisition is an important strategic lever to expand our business. Let me share with you our recent example. We have completed a Schülke Personal Care business acquisition. With enhanced microbiology, this acquisition is in line with our strategy to expand biotechnology. It also fits our strategy to expand high-margin additive portfolio that's aligned with the clean beauty trend. Schülke Personal Care is one of the leading supplier of microbial protection solutions. It has a global scale, strong market reputation, established technical sales team, and strong customer relationships. It has a track record of a strong, profitable growth.
With this acquisition, we expanded additive portfolio, strengthened our core segments, particularly skincare. As you can see with the Schülke Personal Care acquisition, our sales to personal care to skincare will increase from current 37% before acquisition to 44% on full year pro forma basis. With Ashland global manufacturing footprint, we will establish acquired portfolio manufacturing capabilities in our existing site. In fact, we're already starting. We're just manufacturing the Schülke & Mayr's portfolio in Freetown. This is our plant in U.S. This acquisition also position us very well to accelerate growth from both Ashland and Schülke innovation in microbial protection space. One example is before acquisition, Ashland launched the Phyteq Raspberry preservation. Raspberry ketone exists in nature. With the help of artificial intelligence, Ashland discovered its antimicrobial boosting property.
This material also compatible with skin's natural microbiome and help to protect the skin elasticity. With the joint teams, our raspberry ketone sales pipeline is increasing at a much more accelerated rate. Ashland Personal Care business is based on a very solid technology foundation, our tight technology competency, including nature-derived polysaccharide science, such as cellulosic and guar derivatives. We are also strong in synthetic ingredients. Extraction and bioprocessing of natural is another core competency, for example, botanical extraction and fermentation for our biofunctionals portfolio. Our strength of formulation expertise is very well-recognized by the industry. We are also strong in artificial intelligence-assisted molecular modeling and bioinformatics. This particular capability speeds up our product innovation and our ability to discover and also design ingredients that can enhance, as well as enhance our ability to understand the synergistic effects of components in the system.
Our fundamental science, measurement science, such as biodegradation testing capability, support us to validate our claims with scientific data. In-house testing capability give us not only just the data conveniently, but the accumulated knowledge of biodegradability also provides insight that help us to design or discover biodegradable ingredients. Strength in the processing technology is another pillar which enable us to convert scientific discovery to commercial scale production. Well, besides the scientific strengths, we have a strong foundation to build upon and expand our natural and nature derived franchise. About 50% of our current portfolio is natural and nature derived. This include patented natural ingredients based on proprietary sustainable technologies such as plant small RNA extraction technology. We have a leading position in cellulosic-based ingredients, which are based on upcycled natural waste or sustainably sourced raw material.
It's always very exciting to talk about innovation and technology, so let me share with you a couple of examples of our recent innovation in natural and nature-derived ingredients. We have just launched two new products during New York Suppliers' Day earlier this week. Well, as we talked about, consumers are increasingly aware that what they use has an impact on the planet. They are demanding beauty products with high level of performance and sensory experiences, but based on ingredients with biodegradability and naturality. These two products we just launched are biodegradable, nature-derived ingredients for leave-on and rinse-off applications. These ingredients not only meet consumers' demands of sustainability, but also meet technical performance parameters as well as sensory experiences, such as texture, richness, flow, smoothness, foam, density, pleasant skin feel, et cetera.
Yeah. I would also add to say the ingredients we created, like the Natrathix, it's the skin feel is so wonderful, and then we already hear positive feedback from our customer. You know, this is not just a natural product, but it performs in a superb way. Yeah. I would also want to add these two ingredients is cold processing possible, and this is important aspect our customer expecting. TexturePure also can formulate very well with the sulfate-free system, which is desired by the industry.
I do believe these two products hit all the high expectations of our customer, and we are expecting $20 million-$30 million annual sales by year five from these two new products. This also forms a part of the total $80 million-$120 million revenue in five to seven years from our nature-derived research platform. Let me also talk about two new biofunctionals that we launched recently. Santalwood is our first biofunctional active developed from artificial intelligence. It is inspired by forest therapy, a new approach to well-being to defy skin aging. Santalwood is obtained by upcycling wood chips from the essential oil distillation as part of the virtuous circular economy. Nightessence biofunctional is a solution to help skin to reset overnight for renewed and illuminated skin in the morning. It uses our extraction technology and captures the bio uniqueness of lavender flower.
We have a very strong customer traction of these two products, including formulations of high-end brand owners. We already know this is in their formulation. Our biofunctional business demonstrated double-digit growth in past five years, and we are expecting to double our sales again in next five years, driven by innovative ingredients that with substantiated claims. We are uniquely positioned to capture the ESG-driven growth with our natural and nature-derived franchise. Ashland has the technology competencies and a rich innovation pipeline in this space. We have a manufacturing capability and have geographic reach and scale. Fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2023 new product launches from our natural and nature-derived research platform will add $80 million-$120 million new businesses in five to seven years, mostly by replacing non-biodegradable synthetic technologies. Beauty care market moves towards biodegradability, naturality, and renewability.
This transformation is consumer-driven, embraced by our customers, and increasingly supported by regulation. Ashland plays an important role in this transformation as we have the leading technology and we are a technology enabler that be able to provide viable solutions to make this transformation happen. We are aiming to achieve above $1 billion revenue business with greater than 30% EBITDA margin in five years' time. We have aligned our organization to business-centric structure and management team is empowered with a clear P&L accountability. We have strengthened our operating processes. As we talked earlier, we also have completed Schülke Personal Care acquisition, which accelerates our portfolio transformation. We have defined our innovation direction and strategy and enriched ESG-driven innovation portfolio. We are expanding biofunctional footprint in China. We are focusing our resource on differentiated technologies and also portfolio.
Further than this, we have defined our strategy to achieve accelerated growth in skincare. For haircare, we recognize a consumer preference for natural look and natural styling. We will defend our current market position in styling and rebalance our effort to intentionally grow in hair treatment, shampoo, and conditioning. For oral care, we will maintain our strong position in denture adhesive and grow with the market. We will also focus more on value segments such as whitening and gum care. We will continue to grow our premium biofunctionals and expand into broader biofunctional segments, continue integration of our microbial protection business, and drive growth from natural and nature-derived portfolio. All of this will be powered by innovation.
With our strategy and actions, we will achieve above-market growth driven by the ESG-centered innovation and achieve above $1 billion revenue and greater than 30% EBITDA business in five years' time. Thank you very much for your attention.
Hello everyone. My name is Min Chong. I am Senior Vice President and General Manager for our Additives and Intermediates business unit. Today, I'm really excited to represent the roughly 1,000 employees that make up our business unit and to share with you why we are all excited about our future. Our message, which we want you to take away, is that Specialty Additives is well-positioned for above-market organic growth. We will achieve this by focusing on, first, geographic growth, second, architectural coatings, and third, margin enhancement. What is Specialty Additives business? We are a leader in specialty additives, specifically in rheology, with global reach via our manufacturing and laboratory asset footprint, as well as our industry-leading experts located in all of the key regions. The applications in which we participate are architectural coatings, industrial and specialty coatings, construction, and a wide range of specialty applications.
All are primarily consumer-driven markets. Our business unit provides critical mass for the Ashland cellulosic franchise, with very different volume dynamics when compared to Life Sciences and Personal Care. Our profile can be summarized by three areas, financial, key markets, and geographic sales. Financially, in fiscal year 2021, Specialty Additives delivered $655 million in sales, with roughly 60% coming from coatings. Performance Specialties and Construction are similar in size, comprising roughly 35%, and Energy and Resources is our smallest business line. We delivered $158 million in EBITDA and a little above 24% in EBITDA margins. From a key markets perspective, coatings account for approximately 60% of our total sales, and architectural coatings account for 56% of that.
Construction is our next largest market at 17%, followed by energy at 4% of our total sales. The remaining 18% of our sales is comprised of more than 20 other specialty markets. Our sales are pretty evenly distributed. North America has the largest footprint at 38%, and Latin America is by far our smallest region at 5% of our total sales. We do have four business lines in Specialty Additives. All business lines have an additives commonality. Our coatings business line includes additives for water-based architectural and industrial paints with a specific strategic focus on growth via geographic and portfolio expansion, with mid-single-digit growth targets. Our construction business line include dry mix and emulsion-based additives for the non-structural segment, with a strategic focus on enhancing profitability with mid-single-digit growth targets. Our Performance Specialties business lines includes additives for a wide range of markets and applications.
Performance Specialties is also the business line we leverage as the incubator for niche markets with potential for step change growth and scale, with high single-digit growth targets. Finally, our Energy and Resources business line includes additives for oil fields, paper, and mining. Energy and Resources also helps provide the volume scale for our cellulosic franchise with low single-digit growth targets. ESG, the rising middle class, and economic transformation are our key mega trends. From an ESG perspective, increasing global regulatory and consumer demands are primary drivers. We are focusing on innovation that responds to both customers' desires for water-based paint and support our customers' sustainability objectives, expanding our capabilities in Asia to more efficiently support the growth in this region and expanding biodegradable, low toxicity drilling products for the North Sea.
The second mega trend is the continuing rise of the middle class, who demand more environmentally friendly and higher performing products. Our additives, specific for the growing DIY market, our full range of additives, specific for the Asian market, as well as additives for the specialty coatings market used in 5G network cables, all examples of how we are well-positioned for this important trend. The third mega trend is the global economic transformation, or in simpler terms, the need for increased productivity as labor costs continue to increase. Our additives enable improvements in rheology for one coat paint applications. An example is all the major paint companies offering primer and paint in the same gallon of paint for one application. Also additives which enable setting cement at lower temperatures, allowing our customers' customers to extend their working days and their working season.
Our strategy is directly linked with our message to you today. We will deliver above market organic growth via our three strategic levers. To recap, first is geographic growth, second is growth beyond rheology, and third, margin enhancement in all business lines. Let's now talk about these strategic levers in more detail. Let me first talk about geographic growth. First thing I'd like to highlight is the amount of paint used in the different regions. As the global chart shows, different amount of paint is currently used in different regions, or as we talk about it in our industry, gallons per capita. North America leads the way, followed by Australia and Latin America, with all other regions using significantly less paint per capita. In addition to the amount of paint currently used, looking at the market is helpful.
As the pie chart shows, Asia is the largest market, with all other regions, excluding Australia and New Zealand, all similar in market size. Now, gallons per capita and market size clearly indicate plenty of room for geographic growth, and our business, Specialty Additives, is well-positioned. Let's now talk about the second strategic lever, expanding architectural coatings franchise beyond rheology. First, please allow me to briefly explain where we actually participate. The picture on the left shows you the breakdown of the global coatings market. Our focus, once again, is additives for water-based architectural paints. Now, why is architectural coatings market an attractive market? Architectural coatings is consumer-driven with stable growth. As already mentioned, plenty of room for geographic growth. Very focused on cost and use and value in use, and sustainability becoming more and more important.
All factors which not only make architectural coatings market attractive, but also reinforces why our position is attractive. Now, let's transition from the coatings market to a gallon of paint. As the picture on the left shows, in a gallon of architectural paint, we participate in roughly the 9%. Once again, the additives portion. Additives which deliver low cost in use, but high impact in the paint performance. As such, once an additive is part of a paint formulation, it's very, very sticky and not often replaced. Now, going back to the gallon of paint, our additives are used by all of the global industry leaders with whom we have very long history with. Also, we are present in all of the fast-growing regional leaders. When you look at our sales, our top 25 customers account for roughly 75% of our sales.
Once again, global and regional leaders with whom we have long and proven history. The picture on the left shows you the breakdown of the additives market into the different additive, additives segments, such as rheology, dispersants, and foam control. Further broken down by our position, our MNC competitors, and regional competitors. In the $1.2 billion rheology control segment, we are the global leader with roughly 24%. What is also obvious is all this additional space where we have little or no presence. Once again, little or no presence. Room for growth, where we have every right to participate, since we already have the global infrastructure, the long-standing customer relationships with all the leaders who actually also buy additives in all of these other segments. We already have presence in foam control and surfactants.
We just need to simply focus on these segments via innovation as well as bolt-on M&A. Another area is industrial coatings. Additives for industrial coatings is roughly a $1.9 billion market, where we have less than 1% share. Once again, less than 1% share at this time. Now, the waterborne portion is not as large in industrial coatings, but the trend to waterborne does exist, which we are well-positioned to capitalize on. As previously mentioned, in addition to our coatings business, our Construction and our Energy and Resources, and our Performance Specialties business make up our Specialty Additives. Our Construction business is primarily focused on enhancing profitability. We are in the process of executing a plan to change margin from high single digits to mid-20s. Our Energy and Resources business will remain highly cyclical, driven by our large sales in the oilfield segment.
Moving on to Performance Specialties, a business which we leverage the broad range of chemistries that are available at Ashland. The common linkage between these diverse markets is performance. Performance focused on binding, rheology, and dispersion. Now, let's talk about the third strategic lever, margin enhancement. Well, what we simply refer to internally as improving how we run our business day to day. What have we completed so far? Appropriate organization structure, supporting processes, and management cadence are all in place for a business-centric model. Whereas an integrated global team, we have full accountability. Once again, full accountability for every aspect of the P&L. We have completed the strategy refresh for all four business lines, and we have rightsized our cost structure and our inventory to align with our business model. We have completed phase I of our business portfolio trade-up and trade-out strategy.
We are now in the process of executing phase two of this business portfolio trade-up, trade-out strategy, delivering on our enhanced innovation portfolio, process and supply chain optimization, as well as capacity expansion on key constrained product lines. Also, we are actively working on bolt-on M&As, targeted specifically in the coatings business. What does all this mean? Through these actions, we are confident in delivering 300-400 basis points in margin improvement, and we are already well on our way. In closing, Specialty Additives, we will deliver above-market organic growth by, once again, geographic growth, organic growth in rheology, as well as expanding into adjacent segments in, as in other areas. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Min, Xiaolan, and Ashok, for your reviews. I hope all of you have gotten a greater insight on our business, and why we're so excited about the future, our technology, the power that we can bring with this coherent additive and ingredient portfolio on which we're investing to grow our future. To put all this together, we understand our key success factors. It's about leveraging the strong values that we have as a company. It's about innovation. It is at the core of our DNA and how we create value for our customers. It's that customer intimacy that we're running, and all this operational discipline that we're putting across all our businesses. Our strategic priorities in that context are very clear.
It is about growing that cohesive additives and ingredient portfolio strategy with quality. It's not just about growing in size, it's maintaining the level of quality as we drive that growth. It's about expanding our biotech opportunities and capabilities. Asia is the fastest-growing region. We have a very strong position in the region, and we will continue to advance and invest for growth there. We're committed to ESG. It's not just about doing the right things. It is a major growth opportunity and margin expansion opportunity because of its impact on innovation. We are investing in our people and our capabilities around the world, so that we can really leverage these consumer-focused in innovation-centric markets that we're in.
You heard some examples about using AI and our focus on expanding our digital transformation, and it's about discipline in our operations, but especially discipline in our capital allocation process. Well, you'll hear me repeat it. We are very focused on a very clear strategy. It's these three critical businesses around our cohesive additives and ingredients portfolio, but more specifically, it's about pharma, oral solid dose, and injectables. It's about Personal Care, ESG-driven technology expansion to build out our toolkit. Similarly, it's about coatings, architectural coatings, where we have this strong leadership position in rheology. We formulate, we recommend formulations for our customers, and we include every other additive to our customers.
We could be able to expand that portfolio and make that business look more like our Personal Care or our pharma oral solid dose, where we bring a more complete solution to our customers. As part of that integrated, cohesive portfolio, all these other segments have an important role to play. We are leaders in those markets. We can leverage our portfolio, drive this growth based on focus, specialization, and scale that give us a competitive advantage. M&A is gonna be core to our future. It is critical for us to expand our toolbox, but more importantly, to accelerate some of the growth areas, especially in areas like pharma, where the pipelines are a bit longer. When we talk about M&A, we're talking about pharma, Personal Care and coatings. That's the primary focus.
Our priorities are to really drive that high value additive portfolio, bring some of those kinds of businesses like Schülke, as an example, to improve our customer mix, to expand and accelerate our technology capabilities, to build on the scale that we have, strengthen any gaps that we may have, and to drive that geographic expansion. Each business, you've heard them, very clear on where they're investing their time and effort, and a very exciting portfolio. I will say, as we develop some of these new technologies, you will see over the next decade how these technologies, just like the rest of our cohesive portfolio, will then start migrating across different businesses. This is not about just products. This is about core technologies, which we can then later modify and grow into other areas.
Next slide. When we look at our M&A objectives, Schülke would be the perfect example of the type of bolt-on acquisitions that we want to drive. We'd like to do one, at least one, of those type of acquisitions a year, looking at $150 million-$100 million in revenue, EBITDA margin greater than 30%. We do understand these, although we leverage that portfolio, each of these businesses are very different. These are very different spaces. We're very aware that the valuations in each group are different. More importantly than just the valuation, the value propositions, how we analyze the opportunities in each of these spaces is different.
Some are in very fast-growing spaces with very high margins that have very strong pipelines that have been worked for a long period of time and we value at a different formula, where others that we can integrate, bring in cost synergies, bring in leveraging of our capabilities. We have a clear roadmap, and we will maintain a high level of discipline in how we invest. Go next slide. As we look at our long-term objectives, those have not changed. We wanna drive profitable growth 200-400 basis points over markets. These are very stable markets, and through innovation and a lot of the investments that we're doing, we'll bring in that above-market growth rates. We wanna continue to expand margins.
Our current objective is to expand them beyond 25%. As you'll hear from Kevin, we see a roadmap that can take us to above 30% over the coming years, driven by innovation, better management, M&A, and leveraging the scale that we have. As you can tell, we are focusing our resources on these core markets where we have leadership positions, so we can grow and leverage the resources we already have in that growth process. It's about discipline, capital allocation. This will be our formula to drive growth, drive margin expansion, and more importantly, to drive shareholder value creation. Kevin, let me pass it to you, and you can translate that into the financials.
Thanks, Guillermo. You've heard a lot about how our businesses plan to grow and create value over the next five years. Each has a cohesive strategy that makes sense, both for the individual business units as well as Ashland overall. I'll now take you through what that looks like in terms of our financial goals over the coming few years. One of the key themes you've heard today here is that Ashland has plenty of room to improve. We've organized the business, and each business unit is executing against their respective strategies. We've right-sized the cost structure. Phase one transformation is over. We're now in the midst of phase two, improved management and innovation impact. While this takes time, we're seeing traction and have developed tools and processes to more closely manage and monitor progress and drive accountability.
The next few years will be all about growth and portfolio change. Growth will take the form of organic and bolt-on M&A with a focus on high-quality growth that drives margin expansion, which should result in an EBITDA margin topping 30% if we're successful. To do this will require continued focus on our core businesses, accelerating innovation-related growth, and bolt-on deals similar to Schülke & Mayr. This will drive strong cash generation, which is critical to our capital allocation priorities. This is our formula for success. It's simple, it's easy to articulate.
High quality, mid-single digit top-line growth, combined with operating leverage to grow EBITDA margin by at least 100 basis points per year, requiring approximately $150 million-$200 million of organic growth investments, primarily in our cellulosics franchise, with top-line, EBITDA dollar and EBITDA margin to be accelerated by, on average, one high-quality bolt-on acquisition per year. Let's talk first about what organic growth can look like over the coming five years. We've created a very simple linear model here to illustrate this. To be fair, some years may be higher or lower, but directionally, it highlights our specific goals and objectives, which are high quality, mid-single digit top-line growth. Generating high single to low double-digit EBITDA growth, resulting in cumulative investable cash of $2.1 billion-$2.6 billion over the next five years.
In the near term, we'll receive net proceeds from the adhesives transaction of $1.2 billion-$1.3 billion. Combined with $2.1 billion-$2.6 billion of investable cash generated by the existing portfolio, results in total capital of $3.3 billion-$3.9 billion to invest over the coming five years. Our first priority is to invest organically in the business. As I said, we'll spend $150 million-$200 million over the coming three years, primarily to expand capacity in our cellulosics franchise. This both supports profitable growth and improves our sustainability profile. We plan to add high-quality assets and technologies to the portfolio by investing $2 billion-$2.5 billion for bolt-on acquisitions, as Guillermo discussed.
These transactions should add between $250 million and $500 million to top line, $75 million-$150 million of EBITDA, and also accelerate organic growth similar to what we're seeing with the Schülke & Mayr acquisition, which is growing faster than the underlying Ashland portfolio. Returning capital to shareholders remains a very important component of our capital allocation priorities. Between dividends and share repurchase, we expect to return approximately $1.5 billion to shareholders over the next five years. While we will invest significant capital in the business, our valuation is abnormally low compared to our peers, and we will continue to invest in our own shares while this persists. We believe this is a compelling growth and value creation strategy.
If we accomplish what we've set out to do, by 2026, our growth CAGR will include top-line growth in the high single digits, EBITDA growth in the low teens, and an EBITDA margin in excess of 30%. It's an exciting time at Ashland, and we believe our investment thesis is incredibly compelling, especially when compared to similar companies in our space. Thank you.
Thanks, Kevin. To close, I hope you found today informative. I hope you've gotten a different perspective on Ashland and where we're going. You can go to the next slide. We have very clear priorities. We have a very clear roadmap. Operating resilience, maintaining that strategic focus around this cohesive additives and ingredients portfolio, driving innovation, both acceleration of innovation and increasing impact of innovation is at the core of what we do, leveraging that ESG transformation that's happening across the industries that we serve, and capital allocation discipline in everything we do. Organic growth, M&A, and even investments in resources and R&D and our own people. We wanna be very disciplined and align everything with our priorities. Next slide, please. We understand that innovation and collaboration with our customers is central to our business model.
This business model requires us to innovate and solve our customer's problem. This is core to our business model, but it's also core to our culture, and that is what drives our always solving culture at Ashland. Next slide. As Kevin indicated, what's the goal that we're working to? To reach sales of over $3 billion and EBITDA margins of over 30% with a very stable and resilient portfolio, and that we can create significant value for our shareholders and all our stakeholders. If we are successful in achieving this, all our stakeholders will benefit. Our customers will gain new technologies, new sustainable solutions to drive their own agendas. Our employees will have opportunities to grow and thrive in an exciting company that's doing good for the world, but is also doing good for all our stakeholders.
The communities we operate will have a responsible player in its midst that will be supporting them and investing to act responsibly, and our shareholders will gain from increased margins, increased cash flow, and hopefully increased valuation. Thank you very much. In closing, I hope the message is very clear. This is about a very different sort of company with a very different portfolio. It's about building around this cohesive additive and ingredient portfolio where we have leadership positions in high-quality markets that are much more consumer-led, very stable, very long-term growth. We can leverage the capabilities, the infrastructure, the talented people that we have in our team, and our focus is laser-focused around driving consistent execution, solid growth, high margins, and very strong free cash flow.
I thank everybody for your participation today, and I'm looking forward to talk to, not just today, but, in the coming weeks as we follow up on this discussion. Thank you very much, and we'll open it up for Q&A.
Thank you, Guillermo. Before we do open the line for Q&A, I did receive a question from a shareholder that I'd like to pass on. Can you please discuss any changes you have made over the past two years to your R&D platform to accelerate your innovation and product pipeline? Thank you.
We're working them in two dimensions. One is the alignment of our R&D portfolio to each businesses. Before we were in a very functional model where everybody was working together, but it was more R&D, commercial manufacturing. Now it's really integrated. As you've heard today, all the businesses leverage the portfolio that we have, but they have different agendas, different priorities, that they're driving. Alignment and ownership of the portfolio and managing our innovation or our stage-gate type process around how we run those projects and investments is absolutely critical. We cannot dictate innovation top-down. Innovation comes from our teams that are close to our customers. It's about energizing them, liberating them to drive innovation, and that's part of what we've done that's different.
The other part where our CTO, myself, and some of the finance organization is focused on is portfolio management. We take a much more disciplined approach now, as we would investing our money. It's not just the stock selection, it's the allocation. Are these portfolios, and we're doing a lot using AI also to help us, a lot more analytics to see what each portfolio can deliver, statistically modeling them and making sure that we are asking ourselves our hard questions, that we're not just falling in love with cool technology, that we're looking at the returns that we can get and making portfolio decisions on how we allocate.
That's probably the biggest change that we've done at a high level, is that alignment of the innovation to the businesses so that they know the needs and they can unleash that creativity to find the solutions for our customers, but that we maintain that capital allocation discipline. We look at our innovation portfolio like we do other investment portfolios with discipline, and that we monitor and track the returns we get for those investments.
Thank you, Guillermo. Operator, we'd like to go ahead and open the line for questions. If we could go ahead and do that, please. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Let's just dig into just Life Sciences growth across OSD and injectables, specifically your tech capabilities on the latter, your opportunities in Asia and India, and whether or not your two new growth expansions are linked to any specific customers, and or products, given the line of sight you have in the business? Thank you very much.
Thank you. Let me make a few questions, and then I'll pass it to Ashok to answer. Obviously, we enjoy a very strong global position, not just with the main primary pharma players, but also with a lot of generics, and a very strong footprint, both technically and commercially in most of these regions. One of the areas, as you say, is we are investing to expand our manufacturing and our supply capabilities, and that probably applies both to Personal Care and to our pharma franchise in terms of not just our current core ingredients, some of these newer technologies where we're growing it. Ashok, if you wanna comment on OSD and injectables.
Yeah. No, I would say with respect to expansions, like Guillermo had mentioned, the recent announcement for Benecel and Klucel expansions are more brownfield expansions leveraging our existing capabilities. As the caller noted, India is a key market for us. We are looking at formulation capabilities and expertise to be strengthened in that part of the world. That's where most of the generics are. That's where more and more of biosimilars and injectables will move. This is certainly an area for us that we continue to look into. But for now, these expansions are more brownfield, but certainly definitely plans are in place for strengthening it in markets such as India.
I would add, for example, in China, we have a very big manufacturing footprint, U.S., Europe. We're expanding, obviously, into Asia. China, we do have our one very large plant for our cellulosics, but we are investing there to expand. We already have into the investment that Xiaolan mentioned in biofunctionals. We also have formulation capabilities there. We're getting permits and it takes a while to get these things. I would say, India and Brazil, it would be other areas where we see large growth in the generics part of the portfolio. You wanna comment a little bit on the injectables also?
Yeah. Injectables, it's a very different space, right? You know, you don't need huge, massive infrastructure. It's about technology. It's about getting the right products. You know, certainly, you know, we are looking at strengthening the capabilities first within our existing network. You know, this is a huge area for expansion from an M&A perspective as well. As we were looking at candidates, it's not just whether it's in Europe or in North America. You're seeing fantastic companies that are all across the globe that are coming and developing new technologies. Certainly, you know, we will take into consideration where the opportunities are, but it's not like we have to do it in North America. It's certainly, you know, wherever the market is telling us to go. Like Guillermo indicated, you know, China, India, Brazil, Europe, and U.S. are the hotspots.
Currently, we're producing in Europe. As we grow and scale, then we'll define leveraging our infrastructure where we wanna make those investments.
Thank you very much. Chris, do you have a follow-up question?
I'll keep it to one more. Just on the Personal Care side, you know, biodegradability, natural ingredients, ESG, basically the focus of every single U.S. and European supplier that investors follow and that you mentioned in your PowerPoint. Could you just speak to and just further assess, you know, your actual competitive positioning, you know, versus some of those peers to which you're undervalued to?
Whether or not you believe you also have enough customer breadth in terms of those who have, you know, also a secular expansion in terms of what's happened to spending patterns. As well as some of the other, let's say, startup verticals in Europe as well, some of the smaller players that are gaining a little bit more market share. Just any color on your path forward, you know, digging into your growth algorithm in Personal Care would also be appreciated. Thank you very much.
Let me comment on the peers, and Xiaolan, you can comment a little bit of our technologies and the customer base, the regionalization of them. If you look at our peers, none of them are actually our competitors in many areas. These are peer groups in additives. They are in the same markets. They are playing with different technologies. None of them, you know, at least in Personal Care, they are not necessarily our major competitors. We actually do not have a major competitor given our portfolio.
We have competitors in specific product lines. As you know, we have seen in other areas, I mean, everybody in the space competes. It is different technologies. I think our portfolio should behave very similar to theirs, and especially as we get into some of the newer products. We're all attacking it from different perspectives, but we should enjoy that technology-driven innovation momentum with sustainability. You wanna comment?
Yes. Thank you very much, Guillermo. In terms of our technology, as Guillermo mentioned, we are pretty unique. We have both the synthetic and also nature derived. Also very important to mention that we also have actives, both the biofunctional and also microbial protection. From the customer perspective, we do have very good relationship with the multinationals, and we're working very closely with them. We do have a strong pipeline customer projects related to various technologies. Also, we're working with local hero accounts in all the regions. This is one of the area we particularly pay attention. The local heroes hero accounts, we also have a very good relationship, and we have development pipelines with this group of customer.
We also start to engage indies, and this is our recent iPortal provide self-service, so customer can find the right product or solutions for them. This is our first step to broaden our participation in the market by the penetration to the broader customer base. Yeah.
All right, let's go back to the phone line, please.
Thank you.
Your next question is from David Begleiter from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good morning. Guillermo, on Specialty Additives, on the 3-4 basis points of margin expansion, can you just break that down a little bit further in terms of how much might be from price versus, you know, cost catch-up, operating leverage, new products, you know, above market growth? Just decompose that expansion a little bit going forward.
Okay. Well, let me make two comments and then I'll ask Min also. Just for our discussion today, most of the margin expansion discussions really is about the longer term trends that we're working on that fundamentally shift our margins moving forward. Just pricing raw materials, we're managing through that, but we wanna make sure that we're making fundamental changes, as Min said, in the S&OP, changing how we run our plants, how we really bring in new capacity and innovation to change our mix. This is a business with a very large footprint. It's our most global manufacturing footprint, so we wanna make sure that we're leveraging that. On one side, I would say most of this journey to margin improvement, it's more than just price and raw materials.
It's about fundamental changes and prioritizing. We're not gonna invest in all the product lines equally. As we sell out, maybe the business that sells out is not Specialty Additives. These are the same additives that are sold in other businesses, so we move and allocate those, that valuable resource to the business that is best positioned to create value. Near term, as we talked, at the earnings call, it's a different dynamic. It is about pricing. We have two dynamics, raw materials going up, and we have a very tight, supply-demand balances. Pricing are moving up because of both of those issues. Min, if you could make some comments on that.
Yeah. The way we actually do this is we prioritize it in terms of, as Guillermo mentioned, short-term impact and things that are gonna take longer for actually materialize. For short-term items, you know, we've actually done a lot of that, and we're well on our way to achieve the 300-400 points improvement. That comes from, as Kevin mentioned, the right sizing of our cost structure. You know, we've right sized our COGS and SG&A to align with our respective business models. That's complete. The other part that's unique right now is with the capacity constraints and the underlying market demands.
We have ability to trade up, trade out, as well as what Guillermo mentioned, take pricing actions, and we've done that in fiscal year 2021, and we're also gonna continue to do that in fiscal year 2022. The other part that's gonna take a bit longer is the innovation side, right? Let's be very honest, innovation does take time. We had improvements to make in that area, and we're very comfortable with the changes we've made, and we're starting to see that. We have 12 new products scheduled for launch in fiscal year 2022, and that's gonna materialize. The other part is we have large plants, and we really starve the process improvement side of things, and we're actually resourcing that properly. All of our plant managers have clear visibility to their P&L for their plants.
They're investing time in these areas, and that's gonna come. For me, it's very exciting because we have clear visibility to how we're gonna get there. We've executed the actions that are short term. Like I said, well on our way to that 400 basis points improvement.
David, do you have a follow-up question?
I'm sorry.
Go ahead, David.
Yeah, I just have one more question on M&A. Can you describe the pipeline right now for these higher margin acquisitions? Does your EBITDA margin targets include synergies, both cost and revenue synergies?
We have very clear pipelines, each business. You know, this is an area that we're working both bottoms up and top-down, depending on the opportunities. We need to recognize that each business is very different. You know, they are looking for different things in terms of the portfolio they bring. Later on, we will be able to leverage them, but we wanna make sure that the core justification is valid, that we can create value on the main investment that we're doing. But they're very different, as I said. You know, think of pharma. As we said, you cannot change anything in pharma in the short term. It's about the pipeline. If you're gonna get into a new area, you're buying into a pipeline.
As a buyer, you're probably gonna modify things three, four years down the line. It is a different valuation. It is a different analysis that we do. I don't think we compare. It's really looking at each of those, what we can bring, for example, what that acquisition brings for us in terms of the value that they've already invested in, and then we look at how we can augment it. I would say in the pharma space, it usually has a longer timeline, more strategic long-term views on what we do. If you look at some of bringing in more bolt-ons, a new technology for Personal Care or an additive that we can bring into our architectural coatings franchise, that has all of the above. It can be growth.
Think about buying a smaller regional player in a specific additive or ingredient for one of these businesses. We can move that and globalize it much faster than that company could ever grow, and I think that's where we can generate growth. Equally, you can see, you know, to sell more products to the same architectural coatings customers, we don't need to double our size, we don't need to double our resources. We can get leverage and synergy. We look at each one differently. We look at the basis of the value, and we consider all those sources of value in our evaluation.
David, thank you for your questions. I'd like to go back to the phone line for the next question, please.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from John McNulty from BMO Capital. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking my question. Maybe a question on the Life Sciences side, just because it is kind of a long duration science business, but it also seems like it's very heavily focused on the innovation side. Can you speak to a vitality index, or is that the right way to think about it? Kinda where are you now, and where do you hope to be, say, out five years from now?
Let me quick comment, and I'll pass it to Ashok. I mean, it is all about the pipeline ultimately. We're looking at trends, you know, what are our customers doing in terms of new developments? Where are the new efforts that they're putting in? We gotta look much further ahead in terms of the spaces that are of high interest. I think Ashok can comment on some of those specific polymer spaces and such. It's really about that pipeline management is the critical index that we really need to look at.
Yeah. No, great question, John. I think we look at it in a couple of different ways. You know, one is what is our innovation pipeline? You know, what is the pipeline value and where it is within our own innovation cycle, and how is it evolving over a period of time? That's one. Number two is the sales pipeline of existing products that is getting into new formulations. I think within new formulations, like I shared, there are a couple of opportunities, different types of opportunities. Some are in the innovator space where you are getting in very early on into the clinical stages, and there you are trying to track how you're progressing. The key there is get in early and make sure that you're supporting them through the clinical stage.
The second one is, as these products are moving from branded to generic, how are you taking advantage of these conversions? You have a very clear visibility of when these products are going off patent, and the teams are really focused on connecting with our generic customers to see, are we able to capture that conversion as products move off patent. The third, obviously, is also share shift opportunities. There are certainly places where.
You know, customers are looking for reliability of supply. They want that second source, and we also manage the pipeline from that. I think it's a healthy balance of looking at it both innovation for new products as well as commercially launched products. Even within the customer's view, tracking it and having a good relative weighting across these various stages ensures that we are continuously eking out above market growth.
John, do you have a follow-up question?
Yeah, I do. Actually, if I could ask one on the Specialty Additives side. I guess, you know, it sounds like there, you know, you've got the trade up and trade out part. I guess, can you help us to understand how much business you kind of view as over the next one to two years where you may be trading out and just how we should be thinking about that as, you know, at least a potential short-term revenue headwind as we look at 2022 and 2023?
Do you wanna pass that?
Yeah. From an overall financial perspective, when you look at 2021 and 2022, as I said before, the industry is capacity constrained, okay? From a key cellulosic, SPU, such as HEC and others. We actually have 1%-2% revenue growth in fiscal year 2022, but we have significantly higher growth numbers related to our margins because the opportunity does exist, where we're shifting volume from, for example, Latin America, which is much lower in profitability, and we're moving it to the U.S. or Europe because other suppliers simply doesn't have the capacity nor the asset footprint that we do, that we can do that. You're gonna see pretty flat revenue growth from a Specialty Additives perspective, but mid-single-digit or high single-digit growth from a profitability perspective.
Thank you for your questions, John. I'd like to go back to the operator for the next question.
Thank you. Next question is from Vincent Anderson from Stifel. Your line is open.
Yeah, thank you. Also thanks for narrowing down your total addressable market metrics there to just those where your portfolio actually participates. That's pretty helpful. This was really pretty well presented around end markets, you know, the company still remains heavily rooted in some fairly large asset bases and core chemistries. When you think about the portfolio outside of cellulose ethers and PVP, you know, what kind of technology or asset bases do you see as most attractive for building out as new platforms? You know, for instance, like your fermentation capabilities, or is your M&A pipeline really defined by product to end market rather than specific supporting technologies or assets?
You know, I think in our existing infrastructure portfolio, most of the investment is to support our underlying business and support geographic growth. I mean, the world is growing. These are core technologies. By the way, our biggest asset, if it's the cellulosic franchise in a sustainability-driven environment, polysaccharides, all these sugars are a critical chemistry. We're incredibly positioned, and that's why we're excited about our core as a major growth driver. We will continue to improve them. I think the issue is as we develop some of these technologies, you know, we talk about cellulosics, but there are a number of different technologies, manufacturings. HEC is not one product. We make different products, different technologies in different plants. Same thing, you know, if you look at all of our derivatives.
When we say we invest cellulosics, it doesn't mean that we're you know, just building a big plant and that's it. Our Benecel, our Klucel product lines are very different from other product lines in our portfolio. I would say if you look at our M&A priorities within each group, they are not to get bigger in where we have strength. We are already a big player there, and we have the capabilities to do that organically. I think it'd be more prudent and more valuable investment to allocate those dollars, those resources that we have with discipline in areas that bring new capabilities. In pharma, a lot of the OSD excipients are not necessarily within our portfolio. We already have the broadest portfolio. It's other technologies that we can bring in.
Injectables is a totally different technology base, really look going much more into the biotech. As you heard from Xiaolan, everything in Personal Care is about sustainability, so it's about more asset light, more technology driven, natural derived products. Not only expanding to get into those products, but as the question was, the customer base are changing. A lot of these locals, these local heroes, these indie companies, being able to produce those and develop. Moving our production of functional biofunctionals to China is not just a supply chain move. It's about now developing new products in China for our customers in China with resources from China, and we can do that in other parts of the world.
Equally, if you look at our Specialty Additives business, expanding beyond rheology means we gotta get into other chemistries. Again, we wanna look at opportunities that really expand and broaden our portfolio.
Vincent, do you have a follow-up question?
I do, if you don't mind. Thanks. That leads pretty well into my next one, actually. As I think about nutraceuticals specifically, I'm just trying to understand from your comments if you're looking at the strategy there as pushing it more towards a service business or trying to build out branded products to a greater extent. Kind of regardless of the answer, you know, I understand the overall market has attractive growth metrics. How comfortable are you with kind of the staying power of any one nutraceutical product, even though it seems to be a bit more subject to consumer trends?
Quick comment, then Ashok, you can comment on the specific. I think we're very comfortable with the business. I think the team now really has its arm around a very clear strategy to drive both growth and improvement. It is really about partnership with those high-quality customers that really run a very disciplined operation, that they value quality, they value regulatory support, and are very serious on the value that they want from us. We have a very close relationship with all these customers, a lot of new customers that are growing. We're very happy with the portfolio.
We do see that, you know, we're gonna maintain it most likely U.S. focus, because as you go into other regions, to your question, you know, the other countries can get a little bit more complicated in terms of regulatory and how we globalize that part of the business. For the business we have, we're very happy with it, and I think there's a lot more room to not only drive growth, but improve the overall performance of that business. If you wanna talk about the different technologies.
Yeah. No, I would say the focus continues to be along those two dimensions that you talked about, which is custom formulations, where we really work with a specific customer to tailor a solution. Not only coming up with the formulation, but also how to put it together the final product. That will continue to be the key focus for the time being. Moving towards branded ingredients does take time. It requires clinical trials. It requires the discovery of new, unique ingredients. That's the more mid to longer term agenda that we want to move towards. It gets to your point about diversification and making the business much more sticky. In terms of the end markets that we are focusing on, like you noticed, the addressable market that we put in is not the entire nutraceuticals market.
We are really focusing on the high-end niche markets, and that itself is a much bigger market. You know, it's around $600 million and continues to grow high single digit. Maybe the trends continue to evolve. The idea is that we continue to partner with a diversified customer base, as well as focus on technologies that are much more stickier. For example, fermentation is a key technology that within the nutraceutical space, we have that expertise. That expertise of fermentation could go into a variety of end markets. It could be immunity, it could be other end markets as well. Delivery systems, the polymer systems that we used in pharma to deliver controlled release, again, that efficacy could be delivered regardless of which end markets it's going into.
Being smart about our participation strategy is where we are moving towards, and really leveraging our core competencies such that you're building a much more stickier, durable business that you can continue to enjoy over a longer period of time.
Vincent, thank you for your questions. Operator, can we go back to the phone line for the next question, please?
Your next question is from John Roberts of UBS. Your line is open.
Thank you. Maybe just to follow up on that. You discussed nutraceuticals as standalone, the same way you discussed the solvents and ingredients segment. Should we view that as potentially non-core, but you're just not sure yet?
I mean, just to be very direct, I mean, what's core is core. It's this integrated additives and ingredients part of our portfolio. That is the core. We can't—it's not easily separable. So we really—it's the entire model on which we build on. You can't exit, other companies have tried, and it gets very complicated to manage supply chains and all that. So for our value creation, it's really looking at that core integrated additives and ingredients portfolio, and what we drive. It's 90%. I would expect that that's gonna continue to grow. Now, these other businesses, they're good businesses, and like I said, there is other integration values. And I think it's more about the quality of the business. You know, we see an opportunity to create much more value.
We obviously hit a few bumps in the road two years ago, but it's doing very, very well in the portfolio. You know, it's an area that our own leadership team can move around because its capabilities, experience around formulations. You know, a lot of this is all pill technology or food technology. We have a lot of the skills that we can leverage. Maybe not on the product itself, but on the talent. The other part that it is, and as we evolve, it will be more valuable, is the biotech area. As Ashok was mentioning, you've heard the word fermentation, purification, all these new natural products. These are capabilities that we're starting to look at leveraging.
One of the things that Pharmachem brought to us, and we don't talk about Pharmachem anymore internally. It's nutraceuticals, and this whole Avoca biotech technology that we have is leveraging it. How can we develop new products? A lot of the products that the Personal Care team is developing is, you know, based on a lot of these technologies. Can we get more new natural products out of those technologies? There is much more integration, but it's not in that product level. It's on the skills of our team and on the capabilities that we wanna build for the future.
John, do you have a follow-up question?
I do. Then when you exited adhesives, specialty additives was kinda left alone as the industrial specialty, and I assume you're gonna kinda drop the industrial specialty kind of area there. The specialty additive is now kind of split between what you're focusing on as consumer, which is the water-based decorative paint, but you've got industrial products in there as well. Do you move the industrial products and specialty additives over with Intermediates and solvents or somehow make that segment really focused on consumer?
This is about integration, and it goes back to the message about our integrated additives and ingredients portfolio. If you look at that slide where you see the technologies and how they cross. The way that we gain scale is to leverage these technologies that we develop for a specific application and then find more homes. I think the Specialty Additives in all the businesses have homes that they're positioning these products. If you look at our Specialty Additives portfolio, I do think if you look at it, the majority of it is not industrial. It's actually consumer oriented. We talk about architectural coatings, but we're going a lot into inks that go into a lot of consumer packaging and other areas that are more consumer-focused.
We're going, you know, we have automotive. We have now, products going into, battery technology. These are great areas that if we can fit the technology, leverage the scale, it's to our competitive advantage. It's not things that we're gonna just cut out because they're part of our, integration. We just wanna keep the resources and maximize the value of the businesses. The core investments, we're not confused. These areas leverage, we will invest to grow them, but the core is pharma, Personal Care, and architectural coatings because over the next decade, we see plenty of room for us to grow. Expanding that pharma portfolio, strengthen it beyond oral solid dose. We wanna go into the injectables and the biotech.
Expand that toolbox of technologies we bring as one of the major suppliers of the Personal Care industry. We want to make sure that we're leading through with these more sustainable ESG-driven technologies. This architectural franchise where we are already one of the large leaders, but I'd like that business to become much more like the other ones, that when we do a formulation, we're putting five ingredients, not just two. That's really the focus area for us.
John, thank you for your questions. Operator, could we go back to the line for the next question, please?
Your next question is from Daniel Rizzo of Jefferies. Your line is open.
Hey, thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. What do you see as a necessary internal rate of return on $100 million-$250 million of annual growth investments that you're making to kind of hit the sales and margin targets?
Well, let me comment, and then, Kevin, you can take this one. As I said, we're putting a high bar given our discipline across all of the opportunities. Obviously, the highest return is gonna be organic growth, and that's why we're gonna prioritize those kinds of investments. As we look at our M&A type growth, again, the valuations are it's not just the multiple we pay, it's gonna be based on growth, on margin expansion, synergy potentials that we have, and I think there each one is gonna be pretty unique.
I think the more that, you know, my general perspective would be the more bolt on that really is about leveraging and plug and play into our business, like Ashok and Min will have a much higher return just because we can move it faster and grow. The transformational parts that really are very high-quality businesses, they'll come with high value just because it takes us into a very different perspective. Some of these bio-functional spaces in Personal Care, some of these injectable spaces or biotech spaces in pharma are gonna be much more high-end in terms of growth rates and margin potential. Kevin, you wanna comment or chime in?
Yeah, sure. On the organic investments, to be clear, those are all at existing facilities, so there's a ton of leverage to be gained there. Most of these investments you're looking at returns in the high teens to mid- to high 20s, depending on the product line, depending on the plant, depending on the ultimate end market that these products go into. It's low risk, it's high return, it's a no-brainer to do. In terms of the M&A piece, we've got a cost of capital of 8%-9%, and we have a very high level of discipline internally. The things we don't do are just as important as the things we do, perhaps more important oftentimes. We'll maintain that discipline throughout this process. We're gonna generate a ton of cash over the coming years.
We're getting a ton of cash from the adhesives transaction here in just a few months. It's incumbent upon us to deliver value with that capital, and that's exactly what we plan to do. When we look at an inorganic investment, if it's a higher multiple, it's gotta be higher growth. It's gotta be higher margin. It's obviously gotta fit. Those are probably worth more from a multiple perspective, but you also have higher expectations of them. In no case are we looking to buy businesses from an M&A perspective that don't meet risk-adjusted return hurdles that are typically in the low teens at a minimum. That's the way we think about that, and again, with a high degree of discipline around these things.
Dan, do you have a follow-up question?
I do. Thank you. Just one more clarification. You mentioned $900 million of EBITDA on $3.2 billion of sales in 2026. Simple math, that's a 28% margin. I was just wondering what that versus the 30% that you're looking for, where the delta is. Is that just dis-synergies or higher corporate costs going from M&A? What are the differences there?
You look at that roadmap of margin improvement, directionally that Kevin put in. We took top-down changes as we restructured the company, and that's obviously gave us a step growth. We're now in that second phase of improved management, and we're already seeing that. It's about these sell up, sell out activities that we're doing. It's about bringing in, launching these new innovations. Innovation. Why are we excited about innovation? 'Cause in our business, innovation usually comes with higher margins. It's differentiated products, so that'll be a mix improvement. It's about loading. Our plants are in a well position. As Kevin said, if we bring in more production into our plants, we're gonna get leverage there in terms of being smart about leveraging the asset bases that we have. M&A will obviously bring space.
The one area we will have cash, and we, you know, have high bars, but I wanna make it clear. You've heard our strategy. Our priorities are pharma, personal care, and architectural coatings. Don't expect us to go off in left field in other areas. We wanna grow, but we're not going to lose discipline just to get bigger. I think that's one thing that we learned. Just growth is not good enough. We're focused on our strategy. We will pay the best value that we can for the spaces, and we'll get the returns we want, but they have to be in these areas where they can return both high returns for us in terms of shareholder value, but they also have to align with this coherent portfolio.
We spent decades now in changing Ashland, and I'm newer to it, but I can see all the changes this organization has gone through. We finished that transformation, and we're gonna now stay disciplined to grow it. This message around we have a very cohesive portfolio on additive ingredients, on core markets where we have position of strength and where we really like those markets, is a very important message that that's where we're gonna invest. We do think those are the areas that we can get significant returns on our investment because of the quality of the portfolio.
If you go back to the organic growth model, kind of earlier in the presentation, what you'll see is our expectation would be improving EBITDA margin organically by about 100 basis points per year through, again, mid-single digit top line growth, low to high single digit to low double digit EBITDA growth, throughout the organic growth part of the equation. M&A should be additive and accretive to that. We've seen that with the Schülke acquisition. That deal has higher EBITDA margins than Ashland on the whole, and it grows faster. That's the kind of business that we're targeting as we look out into the market.
Dan, thank you for your questions. Operator, can we go back to the phone line for the next question, please?
Next question is from Mike Harrison from Seaport Research Partners. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning, and definitely appreciate all the details, the presentations you've provided today. My question is on the coatings area. Kind of the first piece is on industrial. You mentioned that you have about 1% market share within that business. A lot of those customers that you already serve in architectural are also producing industrial coatings. You mentioned that the tailwind as things are trending toward waterborne. So I guess maybe help understand why your market share there is currently so low and what actions need to be taken in order to grow that business.
Then over on the architectural side, the non-rheology modification opportunities, getting into more adjacent additives, that's been something that has been discussed in this business for a decade or more, going back to the Hercules days. It doesn't really seem to have materialized. Can you maybe just talk about kind of what are the obstacles? Have there just not been acquisition opportunities out there? Why haven't we seen that adjacent non-rheology modification opportunity growing sooner?
Thank you for the question. Just to highlight, and I'll let Min handle the industrial question in more detail. Remember, industrial coatings is a very big space, and it's not just, you know, many different types of technologies, solvent base, powder coatings, water-based coatings. You know, what you'll probably hear from Min, it's subsegments where we think water is really gonna play, and he can talk about that. Although it's a big segment, there's a lot of different technologies involved in that space. In terms of expanding, you know, I think my message would be back to the historic questions that many of you asked me, why? I don't know why. Not looking back on why.
I think, you know, I came from this industry. I've spent a lot of time with competitors of Ashland. There are a lot of opportunities. I think it's about focus. As we're indicating here today, we're not trying to do everything just for growth, and we have a ton of other markets that we're doing things, but the core message, to repeat, is very crystal clear. Pharma, Personal Care, and architectural coatings, that's where we're putting our energy and effort. There are opportunities. You saw the graph of how many regional players there are. I think it's just make it a priority and work it as we move forward. They're not easy to do, but you have to work them. You want to comment on both of those?
Yeah. First of all, from an industrial coatings perspective, actually that's where I spent most of my career, right? I come from the industrial background, the industrial coatings background. Just like we say, additives is attractive and sticky, that also applies to industrial coatings. There are large competitors that actually already play there. We know them, and their business attractive is because once you're in the formulation, it's very difficult to come out, just like it is for us in architectural coatings. We know we have that hurdle to sort of go after. The second part is, as Guillermo mentioned, there's many different chemistries in industrial coatings. We're being very, very focused. I think one thing you probably take away from the discussion today is discipline, focus. I mean, you heard that from all of us.
We're taking that approach in industrial coatings as well. Very focused on areas that we can really win by bringing in performance enhancements by innovation. We actually have several projects that are targeted for industrial coatings. Some are in wood coatings, where water-based is attractive. It is actually regulatory driven. There is a market pull in addition to a technology push that we're leveraging. What we sort of developed in-house is sort of a roadmap to $100 million that we're trying to do within industrial coatings. $20 million we think we could do via our existing products, just being very focused and disciplined on selling our existing products into this segment. The second is $30 million via innovation. As I said, two to three projects in our innovation pipeline already that we're actively working on that's targeting industrial coatings.
Then the remaining 50 is piggybacking off of M&A from architectural coatings. Because a lot of these M&A opportunities, they provide additives that not only play in architectural coatings, but it's synergies that you can leverage in industrial coatings. That's where we sort of are very disciplined in how we wanna tackle industrial coatings. From an architectural coatings perspective, as Guillermo said, you know, one of the things we don't wanna do, because like Guillermo, I don't know the history. What is actually liberating is when you have conversations with our team members, whether it's sales, marketing, and our scientists, and you say, "You know what? Take off the blinders from rheology. Look broadly in the marketplace. Let's take an entrepreneurial spirit. We may fail, but let's try." That has generated so many additional ideas, not only innovation-wise but also M&A targets.
Because as you saw from that chart, you know, we're one of the MNCs. There's other MNCs. They don't come out into the marketplace often. When they do, we will participate in that process. But we wanna be more aggressive, we wanna be offensive. We're looking at these smaller family-owned regional players, where through relationships and conversations, you can be more aggressive and offensive in that M&A opportunity. The other part, as Guillermo mentioned, is if you do that, there's a lot of synergy implications, not only from a regional perspective, but using our global footprint, we can take that and actually globalize it.
I can't talk about the history part of it, but I can guarantee you there are active discussions from an innovation side in the adjacent segments as well as M&A opportunities in these smaller companies that we are actively discussing and having conversations with. Now they take time because you have to build a relationship. You know, these family-owned businesses are not just gonna hand over their business to somebody. They wanna trust a potential buyer. That's where we're investing our time in.
Mike, do you have a follow-up question?
Yes, I do, and thanks for that. That's very helpful on the coatings front. My second question is for Guillermo. Going back to the slide that you showed on growth over the past few years, it seems like there are always some pockets of lower growth or where there are some customer dynamics that are working against you and dragging on growth. Just wondering about your confidence level that we've eliminated some of these pockets and kind of exited those areas where you feel like there's some downside as we go forward.
I think we've taken a lot of the actions. I mean, anything, you know, I'm not gonna go back beyond this portfolio, but if you look at our portfolio, we decided to exit things. That's our decision, and we're transparent about it. I think three things happened to the portfolio, three things in five years. They were impactful, too, with an acquisition. It's not relative to other company. This is not that dissimilar. I think the issue is we shouldn't be surprised, and that's the part that we've focused on. Looking at the core portfolio we have, we finally have a coherent portfolio. I go back to before, we had a lot of moving parts and noise. This is a very coherent portfolio.
As I look at those numbers, I say, okay, five years, two of which have been in the major challenge the world has seen with COVID, with supply chain. These last two years have been unprecedented. It's beyond economic, just the challenges, and look how we performed. We grew, we were stable. You know, others are recovering now. We're not recovering 'cause we never went down. We are in a very stable environment. Our big takeaway is, look, right now there is still a lot of challenges. This is not an easy year for us. It does not change our long-term direction. We will manage it. Just like if you had asked me two years ago when COVID was here, what are you gonna do? Look, we did what we had to do. We managed through well. I think we're very well positioned.
We managed not just the financial results, but the repositioning of the company, not just from a portfolio perspective, but from a strategic perspective of having clarity of where we're going, understanding the value that we can bring and the investments that we're making. It is about that discipline. I do think we have a very solid foundation. Look at the growth during this very difficult time, and I would challenge that if you look at take out M&A from a lot of other companies, the fundamental growth, we're probably in line with the market. Our area of improvement is about the part that we're not happy with is innovation-driven growth, the acceleration and the impact. I think this alignment and to the original question on how we're managing the portfolio, that's the biggest change. That's where I'm spending my time.
My worries is how are we driving that? How are we accelerating that? What can we do to enable? A lot of the investment is not just in capital, in plants, or M&A. Our bigger investment, continuous investment is in technology, and that's where we're spending a lot of time and effort.
Mike, thank you for your questions. Operator, can we go back to the phone line for our final question, please?
Your last question is from Mike Sison from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Hi, this is Richard on for Mike. Thanks for taking my question. My question relates to the sustainability slide, the profile where 61% of sales come from sustainable solutions. Can you break down in terms of, you know, where that is among the segments, and then the growth rate of that as you move forward?
I don't have right now the breakdowns by subsegments, but I will tell you if you look at just the core parts of the portfolio. What’s natural, what’s naturally derived and inherently biodegradable. Obviously, all the polysaccharides type chemistries, they're not all gonna meet the requirements, but the majority of our portfolio is very well positioned. All our cellulosics and guar, I mean, a big part of our portfolio falls in that category. Everything from biofunctionals through a lot of our cellulosic franchise and a lot of the new ingredients that we're developing in the Personal Care portfolio falls in that category. These are the faster-growing areas for us.
Our issue is that we're gonna see, I think, a lot of acceleration in some of these technologies as industries start to switch. Think of when an entire industry starts switching to away from microplastics, what that's gonna do for demand on some of these areas. We know there's growth. We're not exactly sure how quickly or how fast in some of these areas are gonna be, but over the next decade or two, you're gonna see a lot of transformation of the industry, and that's where we wanna be very well positioned, not just with our investments, but with our relationship with customers. We need to work together to plan through some of these transformations. You can't wish them to happen overnight because they require not just technology, they require investments, and that's about partnerships.
I think with our scale, we're gonna be in a very good position to be one of those go-to partners for all our customers, be it in pharma, be it in Personal Care, or be it in architectural coatings.
Do you have a follow-up question?
Yes. My follow-up would just be in terms of where do you see Ashland in the cycle, given that you're now 80% consumer-facing or, you know, what's normalized EBITDA for you going forward? You know, with recovery in international travel, how is that gonna impact you over the next year?
I would say on our portfolio. Obviously, this is a very different, and this is a part of our message. Don't look at the past as an indicator of the future because our portfolio has changed, right? We need to now base our models based on this new portfolio, which as you saw from you know, I think we've been extremely open on all the breakdown of the different growth drivers over the last five years. They've been stable, they've been resilient. I do think right now we will see some level of recovery. Architectural already has seen it and it's been very robust. In pharma, it's been strong last year. This year, we saw a little bit of softness, just funding of different drugs and supply chain issues.
It's a little bit harder to read there. We do see that recovering as things normalize. In Personal Care, clearly, we grew, but certain product lines grew more. We did have impact in, you know, changes in consumer behaviors that impacted demand in hair care, in oral care, and sun care. People didn't go on vacations, those kinds of things. The opening up, I think, will be good. We're expecting some part of that recovery. Hopefully, we'll see over the next few months how the winter goes if this momentum maintains. I think on the travel, two messages that I would give. One is demand will increase. I'm, you know, starting to travel a lot more, and that means planning. It means I need different products.
Everything I had, I've thrown away. I'm buying new things. It's gonna be new for everybody. That will increase demand in multiple areas, product services, food, products. I think the one area that we are being cognizant on our side is cost. As we open up, that we maintain discipline on, everybody wants to go out and travel, everybody wants to do things. We are trying to maintain also discipline just to make sure that as we open up, we're prioritizing and we're doing it in an organized way, disciplined way in line with the pickup in the businesses that we don't get ahead of ourselves.
Because I do think, there's gonna be an issue in managing that pickup and recovery with just prioritizing where you're investing your travel and entertainment expense dollars over the coming years. Discipline, this is gonna be a year of discipline in operations and in our strategic front.
Thank you all very much for your questions this morning. Guillermo, I'd like to turn it back over to you.
Well, thank you very much for everybody. I think we've tried to be as transparent as possible. We'll follow up with any questions that you have. This is a time to reposition our portfolio. This is. It's not just a different company. It's a 12-year-old company with a very different portfolio. It's about a coherent additive and ingredient portfolio that we can leverage in high-value markets that are more consumer market-centric, more resilient, where there's an opportunity to innovate. These are value-driven markets in terms of the not just the value in use, the cost in use and value in use. These are mission-critical properties that are important for our customers, not just in the performance, in the quality and reliability, for medical products.
We are really focusing on our customer base, on creating value, and on being a go-to partner as they advance through these difficult times, but more importantly, come out and they start getting back into leveraging innovation and driving a lot of their new product development.