Hi everyone, this is Rachel Vatnsdal from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team here at J.P. Morgan. Today I'm joined by Michael Stubblefield and Tom Slozek, CEO and CFO of Avantor. Today, the first part will be presentation, the second half will be Q&A based. We have mic runners throughout the room, you either can ask a question in person or for those of you listening live on the webcast online, you can submit Q&A through the portal. Michael, with that, why don't you take it off?
Excellent. Thank you, Rachel. Good morning, everyone. It's really great to be back here in San Francisco to kick off a new year and all the sunny weather that we're enjoying here in town. Certainly appreciate you joining us for our presentation today. As Rachel mentioned, I'm joined on the stand here by Tom Szlosek, our CFO, and Christina Jones, our Vice President of Investor Relations is here with us as well. Following my remarks today, Tom and I will be happy to take your questions. Before we get started, though, I wanted to summarize a couple of important points from the disclaimer shown here on slide two.
In my presentation and in the Q&A that follows, we'll be providing forward-looking statements that reflect our current views but are not guarantees of future performance. Also, our presentation does include some non-GAAP measures, and a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures is included in the appendix to the presentation. Let's get started on slide 3. As you've heard us talk about, from the beginning, at Avantor, everything that we do is tied to our mission of setting science in motion to create a better world. And we're extremely proud of the role that we play in enabling scientific breakthroughs. Our integrated business model is grounded in supporting our customers from discovery to delivery.
Uniquely, we're embedded in virtually every stage of our customers' most important research, scale-up, manufacturing activities that they do perform. Now, with the turn of the calendar, it's natural to do a bit of reflection on the year that just passed. Certainly as I reflect on 2022, by any measure, it was certainly a dynamic year. I'm pleased with the strength and resilience exhibited by our core business, especially in biopharma, as well as another year of strong margin performance and deleveraging. The macro environment has certainly been more challenging than we had anticipated.
As we commented, in the fourth quarter, we do anticipate some of these headwinds persisting with us into 2023, including the roll-off of the COVID-related revenues that we've enjoyed over the last couple of years, ongoing currency headwinds, as well as continued consumables destocking. We're looking forward to sharing our fourth quarter and full year results, as well as our formal 2023 guidance, at our earnings call that's scheduled for February 3rd. Today, I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk to you about our leading business model and the key growth drivers that will yield strong performance in 2023 and well beyond. Let me start by emphasizing a few critical elements of our model that are highlighted here on page 4.
Notably, more than 85% of our revenue is recurring, enabling a resilient business that has proven to perform well across economic cycles. Importantly, over 70% of our revenue is earned in Life Science Applications with strong secular growth drivers. We've made great progress towards our 2025 goal of having more than 60% of our revenue derived from proprietary branded products and services that are supplemented by innovative third-party offerings from our critical supplier partners. As shown on slide 4, Avantor serves attractive high-growth end markets. These four end markets have common characteristics, including high regulatory oversight and complex development processes. We realize significant operational synergies by serving them with a common product portfolio, as well as, you know, significant shared supply chain infrastructure.
Starting with the largest of our four end markets in biopharma, we serve as a one-stop-shop to support our customers' R&D efforts. We're a leading manufacturer of custom materials and single-use solutions for the high-growth bioproduction workflows that are critical to this area. We're certainly aware of the current debates about the health and strength of the bioprocessing space. As we look ahead in 2023, we're certainly confident in the setup as we approach this new year, driven by, you know, strong fundamental demand across legacy, you know, monoclonal antibody therapies, as well as the demand for new therapies and a healthy pipeline of candidates across all modalities, including monoclonals, cell and gene therapy, and mRNA.
Moving counterclockwise here, our healthcare offering supports critical diagnostic workflows, as well as, we supply in a rather unique way, enabling content for implantable medical devices. We also provide precise, reliable research products for the laboratory environment and education and government settings. We serve research and production applications for some of the world's most demanding environments within our advanced technologies and advanced materials end market. Importantly, collectively, these four end markets represent a total addressable market of more than $80 billion and enable our mid-single-digit plus organic revenue algorithm. Perhaps even more importantly, across all of these end markets, we are helping accelerate science and serving patients and customers in the communities around the world.
As we move to slide five, I wanted to highlight the unique way that we serve these four end markets. You know, we essentially do two very distinct things for these customers in these end markets. First, shown here on the left-hand side of the slide, we provide comprehensive products and services that enable our laboratory customers to achieve precise analytical results. That's true whether it's a research, or a diagnostic, or a quality assurance, or a quality control workflow. Our offering into this space would include products such as ultra-high purity chemicals, high- precision consumables, equipment and instrumentation, and a variety of on-site services, including inventory management, bioreactor setup, or even media preparation. On the right-hand side of the slide, you see the other thing that we do for our customers.
We provide customized materials produced to exacting specifications for our customers' commercialized platforms. This would include our leading position with process ingredients, excipients, and single-use solutions for the bioprocessing space, but it would also include our high purity custom silicone formulation platform for medical applications. Slide 6 shows what sets us apart and highlights our differentiated value proposition. We have a unique set of capabilities which supports our customer's journey throughout the scientific process. I think one of the hallmarks of our platform is that we are with our customer every step of the way. Our portfolio includes over 6 million SKUs that support the research and production applications that I've described, as well as the, you know, innovative, proprietary content and the third-party offerings that we include in our portfolio.
We have a very robust and vast global network of infrastructure that includes more than 30 manufacturing sites, more than 50 distribution centers, and more than 13 innovation centers that help us to deliver to customer locations around the world. Empowering our network are our broad team of material scientists, and process engineers, and quality and regulatory experts that support our customer-centric innovation model. The heart of the model is our more than 3,700 sales professionals that give us unparalleled customer access to more than 300,000 customer locations in more than 180 countries around the world.
This differentiated value proposition, you know, ultimately, you know, translates and enables us to keep, you know, life-changing science moving forward and supports our, you know, long-term financial algorithm, you know, that we've talked about for a couple of years. The slide 7 summarizes the key elements of this algorithm, specifically 4%-6%, you know, organic growth, 50-100 basis points of annual margin expansion, mid-teens+ adjusted EPS growth, and significant capital allocation flexibility. These elements of our financial algorithm are underpinned by our Avantor Business System, which drives operational rigor and execution throughout our business. ABS, as we refer to it, provides our associates a common framework for growth and productivity as well as leadership.
At its core, it emphasizes database decision-making, process rigor, and problem-solving, and it ultimately is a core element of our culture. Moving to slide eight, you can see that we have a proven track record of performance. Since our IPO in 2019, we've outperformed our long-term financial algorithm on all metrics, including delivering 6.5% organic revenue CAGR, 130 basis points per year of average margin expansion, 37% CAGR in adjusted net income, and we've expanded free cash flow by 2.5 times. As we've, you know, flagged some headwinds that we will incorporate into our formal 2023 guidance, we certainly don't view any of them as structural, and we maintain our confidence that this financial algorithm holds up well over the long term. Moving to slide nine.
Importantly, our strong financial performance has enabled us to significantly strengthen our balance sheet and created significant flexibility for us. As you can see on the chart on the left, we've reduced net leverage from over 7x to the mid 3s. We've cut interest expense in half, and we reduced our cost of debt to approximately 4%. In the near term, as we've talked about here recently, deleveraging, you know, remains our top priority, as we look to preserve long-term capital flexibility, as well as, you know, our efforts to try to manage, you know, interest expense for 2023 in a similar range as we've realized in 2022, despite the rising rate environment that we're operating in.
Now, we've talked a lot over the last several years about the rationale for, you know, the transformation we've driven and the combined platform that we have built. As I look back over the last, you know, four or five years on how that strategy has played out, I wanted to highlight what I think are some of the important aspects of this evolution that have ultimately yielded a much stronger, more resilient, and more relevant platform than ever before. Over the last several years, we've nearly doubled the growth rate of our laboratory platform by leveraging our integrated offering, our commitment to innovation, our investments in our supply chain and digital capabilities, and our focus on commercial excellence.
Now, one of the key drivers of you know, the combination with VWR was to, you know, leverage the customer access that they brought to give us broader exposure to the important bioproduction customer landscape. You can see here on the chart that we've successfully leveraged this access and have driven a more than fourfold increase in the number of bioproduction customers that we serve today compared to a few years ago, which enables us to strategically canvas nearly the entirety of the market and positions us and enables us to position our leading portfolio in this important growth driver of our business. It certainly translated into an increase in our exposure and our relevance across the key biologic therapies that are in the market today.
As I, you know, look into 2023 for our bioproduction platform, I think we're, you know, positioned to deliver another year of double-digit core organic revenue growth. Now importantly, you know, as part of our growth journey, we've also invested, you know, significantly in our Science for Goodness sustainability platform. We certainly recognize the role that Avantor plays in the life sciences ecosystem and remain committed to continuously improving the way that we embed environmental, social, and governance practices into our business. We made significant progress in 2022. We increased our scores across four major rating agencies, and we're on pace to exceed our 2025 target of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Now, we're currently actively working to accelerate our climate-related commitments in alignment with the latest science. We know there's much more work to do.
With our spirit of continuous improvement, we're holding ourselves accountable to expand on the progress that we've made, and you should expect to hear more from us on this important topic throughout the year and beyond. Now as we look ahead, we're confident that our business is well positioned for continued growth. Our growth strategy, as you can see on the slide here, is driven by three levers: customer-centric innovation, ongoing expansion investments, and M&A to augment our proprietary offerings. Let me touch on each of these in a bit more detail over the next few slides. Our innovation model is rooted in our deep customer access, which gives us the opportunity to work with researchers across all industries and geographies, and gives us a unique perspective into emerging trends and scientific needs.
We collaborate with customers at 13 global innovation centers, including our flagship center in New Jersey, as well as our newest location in Shanghai, to solve complex material challenges. This generates a meaningful innovation pipeline, which includes more than 1,500 active development projects, and each one of these projects supports a very specific customer-driven development opportunity that enables us to work side by side with our customers' research and development teams. Now to support the pipeline in 2022, we invested mid-single digits in innovation as a % of our self-manufactured revenues. Through our innovation activities, our customized solutions become specified into our customers' approved production platforms, which creates long-term recurring revenue streams that enhance the overall resiliency of our business.
Now as a proof point of the success that we're having with innovation, you can see we've grown revenue from new product introductions by more than threefold, and we're specified into approximately 85% of the top 20, you know, biologic drugs that are on the market today. You can see on the right-hand side, you know, some of the examples of recent NPIs that we've launched in our bioproduction platform across all relevant modalities. We've also invested in growth by adding new capacity, and we've talked a lot about our efforts to, you know, expand our capabilities, including our geographic profile and augment our manufacturing capabilities to support our new, you know, product introductions.
In 2022, we ramped up, you know, capital investments to approximately $150 million, which you can see is nearly a threefold increase from where we've been historically, you know, through investments in, you know, digital enhancements like, e-commerce, content enrichment, and a global quality management platform. Know that we've also opened a new distribution center that I was able to visit in the fourth quarter in Dublin, Ireland. We added a new cGMP manufacturing center in Singapore, and we increased our capacity across our manufacturing network, including, you know, some of our flagship sites in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Ohio.
While we talk a lot about our capital-light model that requires we invest roughly about 1%-2% of revenues, we're certainly eager and willing to make investments to continue to drive growth. The third lever to accelerate growth that I wanted to highlight is M&A. As you know, we've completed the integrations of our 2021 acquisitions, and we remain focused on delivering the commercial synergies that we had identified. Importantly, we've leveraged the learnings from these transactions to augment our model, including an expanded business development team and strategy team. We've made ongoing improvements to our target identification and our diligence methodology and a focus on building a robust pipeline based on our unique access to and insights from our network of customers and suppliers.
As we talked about at our investor day about a year ago, we've got more than $8 billion of M&A capacity through 2025, which we can deploy across our focus areas that are shown on the right-hand side of the slide, on targets that meet our financial criteria, which, as we've described before, you know, would include accretion to growth, accretion to margin, accretion to EPS, and yield a high single digits ROIC by year 5. While we'll continue to deploy capital on deleveraging here in the near term, M&A remains an important part of our long-term value creation algorithm. Before we move to Q&A, let me wrap up by just reiterating our focus on living our mission of setting science in motion to create a better world.
Our more than 14,000 associates around the world have a passion for science and for working hand-in-hand with the world's leading researchers and scientists and for solving complex problems. Our business model is proven. The value we bring is clear, and it's in our DNA to be focused on continuous improvement. We've demonstrated that we can execute in a dynamic environment, and our core business, you know, remains quite strong. As I look into 2023 and beyond, we're well-positioned for, you know, continued high levels of performance. Ultimately, I hope that you're as excited about Avantor as I am. Thank you for your attention today and for your interest in our business. Thank you, Rachel, for the opportunity to present.
Tom and I'll now be happy to take your questions.
Perfect. Thank you, Michael. Everyone in the room, if you do have any questions, again, feel free to raise your hand. We do have mic runners throughout the room. Michael, maybe just to kick it off here. You even mentioned yourself that 2022 has kind of been a noisy year for Avantor. Now that we're nearing the end of it, I guess, what are just the key message that you want people to take away from this year heading into 2023?
I think where I would start is just by highlighting and reinforcing the strength and performance of our core business. We've delivered another strong year of growth and margin expansion and free cash generation, which, you know, will persist for us, you know, well into the future. You know, certainly we encountered a more dynamic and uncertain environment than we'd anticipated. You know, COVID revenues rolled off quicker than planned. Our, you know, the three transactions in 2021 underperformed our deal model. You know, some of the supply chain constraints that flowed from, you know, the unwind of, you know, the COVID pandemic, you know, certainly created some headwinds that we hadn't anticipated in the year.
As you look through that noise, I think it is important, and I think it's how we look at the business. The strength of the core business is fully intact. I point to, you know, biopharma. We've had another really outstanding year of growth, you know, led by, you know, double-digit growth of our, of our bioproduction platform. I think we're, you know, we're well positioned as we, as we look ahead.
Great. Maybe if we can dive into some of those issues that you've faced throughout the year. Just on the consumable stocking with liquid handling, customers were facing supply chain constraints, they were probably over-purchasing, and now we're seeing them work down that level of inventory. Can you just give us the latest in terms of how many more quarters do you think it'll take to really work through that destocking? As a follow-up, you know, some investors are concerned that this could actually be share loss as opposed to some potential stocking. What gives you confidence that this is truly just stocking related and not some underlying share shift?
Yeah, great question. I think, you know, I begin by highlighting, you know, that the stocking dynamics that we've seen, you know, certainly are a reflection of the unprecedented constraints that the value chain experienced, you know, throughout the supply chain. What we, you know, in retrospect, have observed is that, you know, for, you know, product categories, where, you know, there was alternative, you know, sources available in the marketplace, you know, our customers, you know, around the world moved to try to, you know, secure their supply chains.
Where you found that occur is in, you know, maybe some of the more the commoditized portions of our, of our portfolio, and in this case, you know, some of the staple liquid handling consumables that you, that you referenced. We are confident that it, you know, is something that will be temporary and, you know, transitionary in nature. As we've talked over the last couple of quarters, you know, we anticipate, you know, this continually improving, you know, through the first half of 2023, and I don't think our perspective on that has changed. We obviously stay close to our customers, and we'll continue to do that to understand, you know, how their supply chains are improving.
You know, as we work with our suppliers, as we look at market data, as we do various, you know, market checks on this, we are confident that it is, you know, limited to a supply chain constraint and not something broader, you know, like share shift. In fact, we had a tremendous year of customer retention, customer renewals, and as hopefully as you saw from the press release this morning, we've also, you know, had some exciting, you know, new contract wins this year. In fact, we didn't lose a single contract that we had in our business, and our renewal and win rate was at, you know, record levels.
We continue to be very well-positioned with our customers and, you know, are confident that the compelling offering and value that we bring to our customers is well-recognized. You know, we can triangulate with our suppliers of these, of these products and, you know that they're seeing the same trends as we are, you know, throughout their other, you know, channels to the, to the market. Something to be with us probably for another, you know one-two quarters, but it'll, you know, gradually improve as we move through the year.
Great, helpful. Maybe what about from a macro perspective? You flagged some of the softness in Europe, also in some of your industrial segments related to Ritter. Can you just give us an update on how those businesses and the demand trended the last few weeks, you know, post 3Q in the latest update?
Yeah, as I mentioned in my presentation, you know, we're just in the midst of our close, and we'll give our fourth quarter results, you know, here in a few weeks. Would, you know, just rely on the kind of the comments that we've made, you know, probably early in the quarter in that, you know, as we, you know, entered the quarter, as we worked through the quarter, you know, there certainly are, you know, some headwinds that we had identified, and, I don't think we have anything to add to those.
You know, we've seen, you know, certainly a slowdown in some of the industrial related applications in Europe, and certainly some of the stocking phenomena that we talked about has, you know, played out as we had anticipated. You know, as I look at our setup for the quarter, as we head into our earnings, you know, close the books here over the next couple of weeks and, you know, prepare for our earnings call, you know, I think we're, you know, we're comfortable with the, you know, the setup that we've provided.
Great. Maybe just a question on 2023. I understand you're not providing formal guidance, but can you just kind of walk us through how you're approaching your philosophy towards guidance next year? Obviously, this year didn't pan out as we expected. You both have noted before that you want this to be a beat and raise story. How are you managing layering in some conservatism, especially with some of these question marks around macro, industrial and Europe, without, you know, sandbagging numbers too much. What's the latest on the philosophy towards guidance for 2023?
That's a great question. I don't know that we've necessarily, you know, would look to change our philosophy on how we, you know, try to guide, you know, on our performance. We try to be, you know, prudent and transparent in, you know, all of the information that we, you know, we provide in our, in our business. If I reflect on 2022 as I look ahead into 2023, you know, I think, you know, probably the one aspect of this that does need to be accounted for is just, you know, the dynamic nature and uncertainty around, you know, some of the macro factors that we've talked about.
You know, and probably important to, you know, give, you know, consideration to some of those factors as we prepare our guidance. You know, as I, you know, showed our long-term financial algorithm in my presentation that we have a high conviction around, in 2023 and in no different than in any year, that would always be the starting point for how we think about the year. Then we would layer in, you know, the various puts and takes for factors that weren't necessarily contemplated by that model. In 2023, that, you know, would certainly account for things like our view that we'll, you know, roll off all of our COVID related revenues, which is, you know, roughly $200 million or thereabouts.
You know, we anticipate ongoing, you know, currency headwinds that we'll factor in. We'll, you know, certainly try to take into account the inventory destocking in our liquid handling consumables that we've talked about. Of course, we'll, you know, also have to consider things like, you know, the inflation environment and, you know, where pricing is landing in those things. I don't know if the philosophy has necessarily changed, but, you know, I think we'll try to be prudent as we prepare the guidance to, you know, give, you know, due weight to the, you know, some of the uncertainty that's in the business today.
Great. Maybe just a follow-up on that since you flagged pricing. What's the latest that you guys are seeing on pricing? Historically, you've spoken about one-third price, two-thirds volume. obviously this year was an outpace on the pricing side of things. How should we think about that heading into 2023?
Yeah. Embedded in our mid-single- digit- plus organic algorithm would be a split of price and volume contribution of roughly one-third price, two-thirds volume. As we, you know, work through 2022 and the inflationary environment that we were operating in, you know, it became evident that we were gonna need to drive a much more aggressive, you know, pricing action than we had, you know, had to do before, which kind of flipped the algorithm. You know, we'll do the final math on it, you know, roughly, you know, two-thirds of our growth in 2022 will have come from price and roughly a third of that will have come from volume. I don't know, as I look into 2023, I don't know that the setup will be a lot different than that.
You know, inflation is still gonna be persistently high, you know, causing us to probably take into the market, or we have taken into the market, you know, pricing above our historical levels. That process has been ongoing for a couple of months, and I'd say, you know, it's actually gone, you know, quite well. We'll, you know, fold that into our, to our guidance. You know, will it be as high as, you know, what we delivered in 2022? I think that, you know, that's probably a bit of a question for me, but it's certainly gonna be, you know, well above our long-term algorithm.
Great. That's helpful. Maybe from a top line perspective on 2023, you've given us that framework of starting with that 4%-6% long-term guide. Net-net, there's gonna be about a 5% combined headwind from FX and some of the COVID roll-off according to your 3Q comments. On top of that, we have to layer in some of these headwinds related to destocking and then the macro environment. The street's at 0.5% decline on a reported basis for 2023. If you back out those numbers, that assumes just over a 1% headwind from those two combined macro and then destocking. You know, at first blush, is that reasonable in your view, or do you think the numbers need to come in a little bit just given some of these macro concerns?
Yeah, I don't think, you know, we're planning to provide any additional commentary today beyond what we said at the, at the third quarter call and just, you know, pointing to some of the factors that we'll look to take into account. You know, we'll refresh that as we work through the close here and, you know, apply, you know, maybe a more current view of FX rates and, you know, we'll do the final tally on COVID re-revenues and such that we realized, you know, last year. We've now, you know, fast-forwarded a couple of months, you know, have a more pointed view probably on how pricing and inflation is gonna play out at least in our cost of goods sold and raw materials and such.
You know, I think we're also trying to, you know, be diligent in our planning process. You know, we'll take advantage of the next couple of weeks to lock in all the assumptions, and I'll be, you know, happy to share that with you here in a few weeks.
Helpful. Maybe shifting over to some of the recent deals. Masterflex this year was pressured by some of the supply chain constraints, also a little bit of destocking related to the tubing. Can you just give us what is the latest on these two dynamics? Do you still feel confident in Masterflex's long-term growth of hitting that low- to mid-teens top line?
This Masterflex franchise that we've acquired is a terrific platform for us, and it brought to us, you know, significant content and technologies that are really anchored in all of the modalities in the bioproduction workflow. It is one of the two leading brands in the space, and it's well entrenched and, you know, the gold standard for, you know, this technology platform, and it's a great addition to our portfolio. You know, it's as advertised, we're, you know, extremely excited to have it. Integration has gone well.
The performance in 2022 was a little bit lighter than we, you know, had anticipated given the, you know, some of the factors that you mentioned, you know, some of the currency exposure, you know, the roll-off of COVID revenues that the platform had supported, as well as, you know, some of the stocking dynamics, you know, related to the normalization of the supply chain on the back end of the pandemic. You know, there's a great order book. You know, supply chains are improving, particularly for some of the constrained components that support our peristaltic pump platform.
When you look at, you know, the application of the technology, you know, not only in current, you know, platforms that are on the market today, it's also gonna be an important, you know, technology that our customers that are working particularly in some of the more niche areas and some of the more personalized applications driven by, you know, Cell and Gene Therapy and mRNA. You know, we think the setup for this asset is really, really promising long term, and, you know, it will certainly grow in line with the rest of our bioproduction portfolio.
Great. Question here on Ritter. You recently rerated that longer-term growth profile. You brought it into mid-single to high single digits long term versus that initial expectations of high singles at the time of the deal announcement. There's been a lot of moving parts with Ritter. Can you just kinda walk us through what is the current size of that Ritter portfolio ex-COVID, and how is that portfolio spread across various end markets? You know, outside of some of the industrial softness, are there areas where you've outperformed or underperformed relative to expectations so far?
Yeah. If I just replay the setup for the Ritter business and the rationale for buying that business, it was really to give us, you know, an anchoring technology that supplements the significant content that we provide to, you know, the liquid handling or the high- throughput liquid handling workflows, you know, where we already have a significant amount of content to serve both the healthcare as well as the broader diagnostics, you know, space. When I look at it from a macro perspective, you know, the products that we produce at Ritter support, you know, growth in those areas that historically has been that mid- to high single-digit levels.
As we've unpacked, you know, the business now that we've owned it for about the last 18 months or so, you know, when you kind of work through the noise of, you know, the COVID revenues rolling off faster than planned, you know, given the reset on PCR testing, as well as, you know, working through some of the destocking, you know, impacts that we've seen. You know, we're confident that the business, you know, is growing in line with the end user demand in that, in that space. I think we're at a point here, that, you know, we're really in a position as the supply chain has normalized, as, you know, excess inventories in the channel have started to subside.
You know, we're in a position now to really start to drive hard after the commercial synergies that we identified and really leverage the more than 3,700 sales associates around the world that already call on these customers that are consuming these products, and are already selling them, you know, significant content, and can, you know, naturally position this high-precision consumables portfolio alongside that. We've been working really hard throughout 2022 to expand the portfolio. That was one of the things we had identified during diligence was that the portfolio was probably a bit too narrow for what our customers were gonna require. We've been, you know, right from the beginning, had initiated a number of investments to strengthen the portfolio.
You know, we're looking forward in the first half of this year to bring on, you know, some of those exciting capabilities that will even position us, you know, better with our, with our customers. We've got an active pipeline and, you know, certainly a lot of focus on it. I think, you know, similar to Masterflex, I think we're, you know, quite optimistic about the long-term potential of this business.
Great. Maybe going back to some of your earlier comments around contracts. Today, you recently announced that multi-year supply and services agreement with Catalent, and you flagged these multi-year contract extensions in the past as well with top-tier biopharma accounts. Can you walk us through how much of Avantor's growth is really coming from new account wins like this versus existing accounts? What details can you tell us about this Catalent agreement? Which parts of the workflow? How many years do you think this will cover? Any color would be great.
Yeah. No, it's a great, it's a great question and allows me to give a few insights into our business model. You know, when we unpack, you know, the various customer, you know, segments that we serve and we look at where our growth comes from, it is important to note that the customers that we've had the longest relationships with, and you know, that we manage, you know, in a, you know, pretty deliberate, you know, way through, you know, our strategic partners organization, that segment of customers, which probably, you know, represents more than 25% of our revenues, grows faster than any other segment of our business. One of the reasons for that is, you know, we've got a proven, you know, value proposition to these customers.
We've got great access, you know, throughout their organization. We serve them on a global basis, and we've got a great, you know, basis to work from to expose the entirety of their networks to our new capabilities. We certainly, you know, emphasize ongoing growth with our existing customers and look to expose, you know, more and more of our portfolio over time, you know, to these customers, you know, that we're serving. Now, importantly, our teams are also incented to, you know, continually be looking for, you know, new opportunities, you know, to either expand the relationships or, you know, change the positioning of our, you know, relationship from maybe, you know, more of a secondary or tertiary supplier to a primary supply position like we announced today with, you know, with Catalent.
These agreements, you know, it's not uncommon for them to cover, you know, three to five years and, you know, and outline the scope of, you know, the services that are offered here. I would say the, you know, the bulk of our, you know, revenues in our space, particularly when you think about, you know, serving laboratory customers, you know, with a comprehensive complex offering like we have, you know, our focus is there. We do get, you know, meaningful revenue growth each year from new customers, like we announced today.
Great. Then maybe one on capital deployment priorities. You've noted that you're gonna be prioritizing paying down debt and integrating those existing assets instead of pursuing additional M&A in the near term. At what point would you really consider getting back into the M&A game? Is that after reaching a certain debt level, paying off some of that remaining variable debt? Or is there a possibility that Avantor could, you know, do a deal in the back half of 2023 or is it really looking beyond that?
Yeah, well I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that our new head of, you know, business development and strategy is, you know, joining us at the conference this week, Kitty Sahin. You know, I would say, you know, that we've never really taken ourselves out of the M&A game. You know, we've been diligent, you know, throughout 2022 and we'll continue to do so, in, you know, building capabilities, building pipelines, screening opportunities, and staying very active. Now, as we've said, the bar is quite high given the current, you know, macro environment. You know, there's a continues to be a valuation disconnect between buyers and sellers.
You know, the debt markets are not exactly, you know, open and efficient at the moment, which would make it difficult to, you know, to get a deal done in the current environment. We remain active. You know, given these conditions, I think we're taking advantage of being able to accelerate the debt pay down, you know, de-risk the model a bit and give us more flexibility at, you know, if and when the right opportunity, you know, presents itself.
Perfect. With that, we are out of time. Thank you, Michael and Tom for joining us today.