Good morning, everyone. Hello. I think I know everybody in the room today. If I don't, I hope to meet you later. We'll get started. My name is Mark Namaroff. I'm the head of IR for Brooks Automation. I joined Brooks about eight months ago, and I have to tell you, I'm really proud to be such a part of this great organization. We have a great day planned for you today, or hopefully you've learned a lot more about Brooks and what our strategy is moving forward. Before I get started, I just have a few housekeeping items to go through. I'm sure you've heard the drill before. The presentations and the Q&A session are being webcast live. They will be on our website at www.brooks.com. They'll be up there for about 90 days after the conclusion of the event today.
Also, the presentation materials today will be posted on our website, and they'll be available after the conclusion of the event. For the Q&A session, we will have some microphones to pass around, so as you're asking questions, we please ask that you also identify yourself, your name and your company for the webcast, and also for the speakers up on stage answering your questions. Please wait for the microphone to come around. Cell phones, if you can mute your cell phones, that's great. If you need to make a call, listen, we know that you need to probably make calls. We're going to have a break midway through the morning. You can make calls. There's also a foyer out in the front, so if you need to use your phone, please go out in the foyer and you can use your phone. We would really appreciate that.
Lastly, we really value your opinion and feedback on today's event. We've left some surveys on every one of your tables. We would like to ask that after the conclusion of the event today, if you could fill out the surveys, provide your feedback to us, hand the surveys to Sherry in the front as you're leaving the facility, that would be great. You're going to pick up your gift at that time. We really appreciate your feedback. It really helps us out a lot. Now I'd like to go through our safe harbor statement and discuss the use of non-GAAP financials for the people on the webcast. If you can just bear with me for a minute. I know you've heard this before.
I would like to remind everyone in attendance and on the webcast that we'll be making a number of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. There are many factors that may cause actual financial results or other events that differ from those identified in such forward-looking statements. I would refer you to the safe harbor slide on our presentation materials posted on our website and our various filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We make no obligation to update these forward-looking statements should future financial data or events occur that differ from the forward-looking statements presented today. We also refer to a number of non-GAAP financial measures, which are used in addition to and in conjunction with results presented in accordance with GAAP.
We believe that non-GAAP measures provide an additional way to view the aspects of our operations and performance. When considered with GAAP financials and the reconciliation of GAAP measures, they provide an even more complete understanding of Brooks' business. Non-GAAP measures should not be relied upon to the exclusion of GAAP measures themselves. In addition, I'd like to mention that all financial projections throughout the presentation today, other than ROIC, exclude amortization of intangibles, restructuring expense, and other special charges. With that, I'd like to get started with the program today. I'd like to introduce our CFO, Lindon Robertson , to make some opening comments. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our day. This is a huge day for us. We have always said that we would do this every two years and not take your time every year, but a lot has happened in this past year. We divested of a business, and we've acquired a large business. Our portfolio has changed. Even more important, our business model has progressed with those changes and wrapped around those changes and encompassed it, and we think that we're in an even stronger position today than if we had tried to do this the day we acquired GENEWIZ. To that point, you're also going to get a sense of the GENEWIZ business. In other words, we didn't want to update our model the day we acquired.
We wanted to own it for a while, get to know it, make sure that when we saw it, when we drove it ourselves, when we got to know the team, that it was everything that we thought when we bought it. We're really happy to tell you it's everything we thought and more. Today, one of the particular highlights is you're going to get to know that business, and you're going to get to hear from Amy Liao, the head of GENEWIZ. In this context, before I go right to the agenda, let me just highlight to you've already been mingling if you're in the room here, and obviously we have a lot of people on the website, so you don't get this advantage.
In the room, we have included much of our management team from Brooks Automation across all the business units, some of the sales team, but it's our executive team. I have to tell you, we couldn't be more proud to have them and to show them to you, and this has been the benefit in our practice in each of our Investor Days. We just really encourage you in the break time, as we go to the lunch period, you're going to have a chance to talk with them, get to know them, and I encourage you to take advantage of that because I think it's a real benefit of the day for those of you who are here in the room. Let's go to the agenda. I'm really happy to introduce the speakers.
Some of them, if you've been with us, you know them because we've been the same team largely for the last number of years. Steve Schwartz, CEO. He's in the 10th year of leading the business this year. If you look at Steve's background, he's electrical engineer by training. He spent 14 years with Applied Materials from the time they were less than $1 billion, and he left as one of the segment leaders when they were more than $10 billion. Perhaps even more interesting is in the last 10 years, he's helped carve the way in helping to set the standards and decide what does the cold chain of custody look like in life sciences around sample management, and then extended that into the adjacencies. Well, wait a minute, there's sample-based services that includes things like GENEWIZ.
He's accumulated something that nobody else has, and he's, no doubt, recognized now as one of the experts in the industry around what it takes to manage the billions of samples that are on the globe. He's going to obviously speak to you as the CEO, and you'll see him later in the agenda now that he has taken on the role of sample management, to put his thumbprint and help shape that business. He'll be here in the second half as well, speaking specifically to that business. Right after Steve in his CEO remarks, Dave Jarzynka, who's the President of Semiconductor Solutions, will be with us. He's a 30-year veteran in the semiconductor space. He's in his 15th year with Brooks at this stage.
I say that, I will highlight that interestingly, his very first year in his career, he started with Brooks Automation, but then he went on a path with Intel and with IBM and took some leadership roles there, and he came back to Brooks Automation and has been the leader of the entire semiconductor business since 2016. Couldn't be more proud of him and the expertise he brings, combined with Steve, to really position the product on what it takes to solve the industry's next problem and to create, as Dave's going to talk to you, about helping the customer with a process advantage. That's our aim, is always to help advance the semiconductor customer's process advantage. After Steve comes back up and speaks about the sample management solutions, you're going to get a highlight of the day, I think, getting to know Amy Liao. Amy is interesting.
She's one of 250 PhDs in the GENEWIZ business, but she's only one of two of the original co-founders of the business. She's been with GENEWIZ from the moment that it became a concept, and they launched the business 20 years ago, and she came on and has really brought a perspective of not just GENEWIZ and sequencing and synthesis, what it means to the world to advance the science. What an exciting world it is right now, right? In healthcare and life sciences, of all the advancements that are taking place, sequencing and synthesis is at the core of the research. She's also brought a really interesting business perspective. Think about it, 20 years entrepreneurial spirit, keeping the business moving, making the investments in time, helping to drive the disciplines to grow a business as she has.
We're really pleased that you'll get to hear from her today. At the end, you're stuck with me. I'm sorry about that. At the end, I'll come back and show you some of the numbers, what it all adds up to, and we'll talk about targets and numbers going forward. With that, I'm going to now go ahead and introduce Steve Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer of Brooks Automation. Steve?
Thank you, Lindon. I'll add my welcome to everybody. We're delighted to have you here. A lot of things to talk about today, and different from when we have one-on-one investor meetings or we have a more one-way conversation on earnings call. This day gives us a chance to unpack the business a little bit to give you more granularity and, in particular, gives you more insight into, as Lindon said, the management team and the workings of the business. We're pleased to have you here today. A lot of things that we want to cover. The company's all about execution. I think you look at the recent history of the company from where we've been and the driver that we have in and around implementation of a strategy, we depend on execution.
The execution that we've brought to this business, the things that we've committed to do and then done engender tremendous trust with the investor base and with our customers, we think give us tremendous pride in terms of accomplishment, and we believe generated tremendous value for the shareholders. You hear about that today. You'll hear it in all of the presentations that you have, and Lindon will wrap it up and talk about the implementation and the execution profile that we have as a company. We'll talk about value creation, and we have a unique business model. We're in businesses that aren't very crowded, actually. We've been leaders in spaces that are a bit unusual, and we're really proud of the value creation mechanism that we have.
We'll talk about that in some detail because it lends a lot of insight into from where we've been and how we'll capture what we see as an even bigger market opportunity going forward. Lindon mentioned GENEWIZ. You'll get an insight into GENEWIZ. You'll get a look at the business. You'll hear from the management team. We'll talk about a transition and integration that's gone extremely well. We've done 15 acquisitions. The smoothest of those is the largest of those and the most recent of those, it's GENEWIZ, and it's a testament to the capability of the team and the leadership team to really embrace the opportunity at Brooks and how to bring that to the fore. You'll hear it loud and clear, and it gives us tremendous confidence about doing the next acquisition. We'll talk about two strong platforms, life sciences and semiconductor.
We always talk about two strong platforms, semiconductor and life sciences, but both are growing. Both are outgrowing the market at a tremendous rate. Now at equal size, we have a tremendous opportunity to build upon this platform of two strong businesses. Finally, a financial model for 2022, which will demonstrate to you an enormous growth opportunity and a commitment that we make to what will be outstanding performance just three years from now. With that, let me begin. Let's talk about the business. Two strong businesses, semiconductor and life sciences, almost of equal size, both contributing extraordinary growth over the past couple of years, and for which we think will continue, and also for something that we think we're being rewarded. Tremendous return to shareholders over the same period. We'll talk to you today about the way we capture some really unique opportunities in the market.
There's a strategy that you'll recognize that we're continuing to implement, but we implement it now from a stronger platform than we have in the past. We'll talk about how we intend to continue to grow from semiconductor and life sciences. We'll open to you a little bit about the value creation methodology, because it is different. The slides may look similar to what people do, applying a funnel and a value creation opportunity, but the implementation that we have is uniquely ours because of our size, because of our technical capability and the means by which we look at opportunities. We would like to describe that for you so you can understand not just how we've gotten to this point, but how we intend to go forward. We think it's a unique capability for the company.
We'll talk about how that rolls into tremendous opportunity as we go forward. Execute a consistent strategy. This is something that most of you are quite familiar with if you've been following Brooks for any period of time. Leadership is critical to us. We either lead in particular segments that we're in or we're on a path to be leaders. It's from this foundation that we'll continue to build and drive margin, drive value, and drive continued customer share. We'll talk about how we implement these capabilities inside the company to continue to exhibit high growth in semiconductor and life sciences, and we think we're positioned ourselves specifically to continue to outgrow in each of the spaces that we're in. Gross margin is the lifeblood for this company. It's the fuel by which we implement our growth strategy. We're keenly focused on gross margin.
Operating margin is a measure of our performance in this space. We'll continue to focus on both. You'll see improvements in both and pretty aggressive plans going forward, how we'll continue to make improvements. We think we've been extremely responsible stewards of capital, and we've used this strategy to continue to grow the business. Lindon will shed more light on this. He'll give you a lot more color about that, but the four-point strategy that we have is one that's served us particularly well and we'll continue to implement as we go forward. As Lindon mentioned, we were here just barely a year ago. We've accomplished an unbelievable amount in one year, and I want to shed a little bit of light on this right now. We did two major transformative deals in the year. One would have been enough and exhausting. We did two.
Acquisition of GENEWIZ, the divestiture of the cryogenic business, we reset the balance sheet in the process. We have a strong foundation on which to grow. We've made an incredible transformation in terms of the size of the life sciences business and the size of the semiconductor business. Equally as importantly, we've transformed the company. Fully 2/3 of the employees in the company today are life sciences employees. This is a dramatic shift from a company that was 100% semiconductor eight years ago. Further, 50% of the employees in the company today weren't at Brooks 18 months ago. Indeed, a tremendous accomplishment this year, a tremendous transformation for the company. Like all transformations, especially our transformation, we're never done.
We're going to report to you on the position that we have today and the continued next steps that we'll embark upon on what we think is a dramatic transformation. While we've been doing an enormous change to the company this year, we continue to run the business. We exhibit that in terms of incredible customer capture. We added more than 2,000 customers to the life sciences business this year. 130 design-in wins in semiconductor. I think everybody can understand what does it mean, 2,000 customers to life sciences. We capture a customer, we provide them services, we generate revenue. I want to give you a little bit more color on a term that we use, design-in wins, and why it's important to us. I think we've referred to it on calls. We've generated questions. Let me unpack that just a little bit for you.
In the manufacture of semiconductor devices, everything you just bought in your tablet or your phone is made from devices that were started 10 years ago, early on in R&D as technologies were developed, how to get to the next generation of technology. After a customer qualifies different process steps, very complicated process steps in R&D, when they're ready to assemble this and to create an entire semiconductor device, they'll build a pilot line. This pilot line will string all those processes together to make sure that they fit together and they can yield a working device at the end. A pilot line is usually built two or three years in advance of a manufacturing line.
The pilot line will have limited capability, but the process tools that are qualified in a pilot line are the ones that will, unless there's a tremendous failure of some kind, the process tools that are part of a pilot line become manufacturing process tools two or three years later and volume production starts. When the semiconductor team wins a design-in win, critically, they get installed into the pilot line, and that's market share two or three years from now. The importance of a design-in win is that when we win business now, we know what market share looks like three years from now. This is critical. Dave Jarzynka's engineering team never works in today. They're two years to five years out capturing design-in wins that are secure market share for the future. Let me put 130 design-in wins in perspective.
I'm almost 10 years with the company. A couple times on calls we've reported to you we did 25 or 28 design-in wins in a quarter. That's an incredible accomplishment. 130 in one year is more than 30% more than we've ever done in a 12-month period. It's an incredible accomplishment. It's a testament to an unbelievably powerful engineering organization. I want to give everybody in here confidence. When Dave talks about what his market looks like, he certainly knows what his market share looks like. Irrespective of the behavior of the market, he's going to capture it. It'll become important when he talks about the things that he's winning today at the manufacturing site that he won actually five years ago in development. We think this combination of things continues to drive tremendous value, and it's a focus for the company.
Let me give you a look at the transformation. 100% semiconductor company in 2011. Over the past three years, we've had continued transformation. We're in a higher growth rate company with a higher gross margin profile. Revenue continues to increase. We almost doubled the percentage of the business in life sciences from 2015 to 2018. When we look at the change that we went through in just the past 12 months, we transformed once again. Two businesses almost equal size. We added GENEWIZ's capability to the company, which opens up entirely new vectors for growth for us. In addition to sample management in life sciences, in addition to semiconductor, we now have genomics analysis and molecular biology potential built into the company. In a four-year period, we doubled revenue, we increased gross margin by 700 basis points. The future looks incredibly bright.
I'm going to put this into personal perspective just for a minute. When we were still 100% semiconductor company at early 2011, we knew that we had to do something besides be a semiconductor cycle rider. We had a portfolio of capable semiconductor technologies, but we didn't have a future that was different from riding the cycles in semiconductor. We had $140 million of cash and no debt, and we had some ideas about how to approach the life sciences market. Besides that, we had a lot of courage. We embarked on this path. Eight years later, we have a fundamentally different company. This is the part for me that's palpable. Today, we have $170 million in net cash with very limited debt. We have infinitely more ideas about how to expand.
We have capability that we never had before, and we have equal amount of courage, but an order of magnitude more capability. We actually know something about the industries that we're in. We have infinitely more capability to go and launch from here and do this again. We are a long way from done. I have to say, one of the things that energizes this management team is when you grow accustomed to performance like this and you grow accustomed to behavior like this, you grow accustomed to it. You expect it and you demand it and you work for it, and it's what gets people out of bed and energized. I have to say, it's more than I can express in words. We love this kind of performance, and the management team that you see here, there are 30 of us here today.
We're all wrapped around this, and I think to a person, when you ask them about the transformation, we're just in the middle of it, and we imagine what could be. There's a lot more like this to be done. We're really enthusiastic about it. We'll do it responsibly, but we'll also do it very aggressively. I want to talk very specifically about how do we go after some of these unique opportunities that we identified in the market. Specifically, how do we ride these two strong platforms as we go forward? Two businesses of scale. The semiconductor guys remind me, yeah, they were the foundation of the company 41 years ago. They get to go first here, but it's not age before beauty, it's age and beauty before beauty, and I want to be really careful about my commentary.
We start with semi just because you guys called it. Here we go. I show here a 30-year history of wafer fabrication equipment spending. This is the amount of capital that's spent. It's basically the available market for equipment makers in the semiconductor equipment space. It's the driver of our opportunity at a fundamental level. The most important thing about the performance in this market today is the current state of semiconductor technology manufacturing depends on the capabilities that we have. Over the last five years, it's never been more true that semiconductors can only be manufactured by incorporating capabilities that we have. It's a stronger position than we've ever had at any time in the past, and one that we'll continue to ride going forward. I also want to be really clear, this is a cyclical market.
When people look at this, they see a cyclical market, but also you see one that provides tremendous growth over the long term. When we look from this point forward, we see only opportunity ahead of us. We are in the data economy right now. When we talk about the connection of hundreds of billions of sensors and devices that will be connected to the Internet, the potential is incredible. The consumption of silicon is nothing like what we're about to see. We're going to artificial intelligence. We're going to autonomous vehicles. We're still in what we'll look back on as early days in semiconductor. The potential's incredible. That said, in 2019, we're in a down portion of a semiconductor cycle. The forecast for the wafer fab equipment spending this year are to be down 20% year-over-year from 2018.
This is not atypical of this market or this industry. What is incredible is that our technologies and capabilities continue to expand even in down environments. So much so that I think this requires a little bit of explanation because people do ask us quite frequently, "How is it in the down semiconductor market that you have growth?" Dave Jarzynka will give you a little bit more color, but I want to put it into perspective. Consistent with the semiconductor capital equipment industry that we serve on a broad basis globally. Our Tier 1 and other automation products are down with the industry. We're down $44 million from two boom years of 2017 and 2018. We're down $44 million in that portion of the semiconductor business in 2019.
That said, we have two core secular growth drivers that provide growth opportunity in excess of the decrease in the semiconductor capital equipment space. We're actually growing in semiconductor in a 20% down year because of the product capability that we have. I'll call your attention very specifically to two major areas. One, Contamination Control and advanced packaging. I'll give you a little bit more color on what these are. We refer to them, because I have you captive here for a minute, let me explain. Maybe as we talk about it in the future, it'll be more clear. In the Contamination Control business, we're up 70% year-over-year in a down semiconductor environment, this is because the needs of this technology are affecting almost every device manufacturer.
As the devices get more complicated, as the line widths and the dimensions continue to shrink, as the vertical structures continue to increase, the chemistries that are necessary to manufacture a semiconductor device are becoming severe. More than half of the elements in the periodic table are used to manufacture a current generation semiconductor device. When a wafer goes through a process with one of these harsh new chemistries, it comes out with residual contamination, volatile organic compounds, something that needs to be removed and cleaned from the wafer between process steps. When it comes out contaminated from one process step, it needs to be cleaned before it goes to the next one. The number of steps that the wafers go through from a cleaning standpoint is increasing exponentially as we go down in device generation.
Once we clean the wafer, rather than have it be recontaminated by a carrier that has some of those compounds on it, at the same time the wafer goes for cleaning, the carrier goes for cleaning. There's an expansion in the number of these Contamination Control devices that are part of the process flow that are increasing just because of the complexity of semiconductor. A secular growth driver, even if the amount of silicon manufactured was flat, the Contamination Control business will continue to increase so the devices can yield. It's a fact of the industry. Advanced packaging is a little bit different. Another growth business for us, we've been steadily growing over five years, an organic initiative inside the company to start to grow this advanced packaging.
By advanced packaging, what we refer to is, in your mobile devices, in your phone, in your tablet, you have more entertainment and computing power than anybody could ever have imagined. The amount of silicon that goes in to provide that power continues to get packed into really small form factors. The way these devices are manufactured is a silicon wafer is machined down. It is milled down to become very thin. Instead of being a rigid silicon wafer, it is machined down so that ultimately these devices can be stacked and fit into the form factor of your mobile device. When the wafer is milled down and machined, the stresses on one side where the semiconductor devices are causes the wafer to bow or to warp. It becomes a three-dimensional wafer, no longer as easy to handle as a rigid silicon wafer.
Moreover, sometimes it becomes translucent or transparent. Optically, we need to be able to detect a wafer that's much more complicated than before. The semiconductor engineering team has developed the means by which we handle these complex wafers for advanced packaging. Again, even in a down semiconductor environment, steady growth in this secular growth driver. The thing that makes us most enthusiastic about the position we have in semiconductor is ultimately the Tier 1 automation and the core products that drove business in 2017 and 2018 will come back. In any semiconductor environment, advanced packaging and Contamination Control will continue to drive growth for us over the foreseeable future. These are the earliest days of implementation of those technologies. We look at the market opportunity for semiconductor. We see a strong market opportunity.
We were at a $1.8 billion available market growing to $2 billion. I also want to put this into perspective. We took the peak level of 2018. If we show modest growth, I think this is a reasonable assumption for us. It'll be a very strong semiconductor environment for us. At the same time, whether the industry is up or the industry is down, Contamination Control and advanced packaging will continue to drive growth. Dave will talk to you about his market share gains and how we tend to exploit what we think is a really healthy market with tremendous prospects for continued profitability. Now I'm going to turn to life sciences, which is exhibiting its own significant transformation and growth characteristics.
From this chart, you can see why we're so enthusiastic about the prospects we have in life sciences and the opportunities being driven by tremendous explosion and discovery. We've shown this chart before as an illustrative purpose to give you an idea about the demand for sample management. The same drivers that drive the increasing amount of samples are the drivers that drive opportunities for GENEWIZ. Since we identified the opportunity for GENEWIZ, we couple more potential onto the same growth drivers. From the earliest days of drug discovery with chemical compounds, we moved on to biological drugs, and now the promise of cell and gene therapy. Everything that drives this market drives opportunities for people who support these markets, and for sure, that's Brooks Automation with its sample management and genomic capability. The raw materials in this industry, if you will, raw materials are samples.
About 20 years ago, since the genome was sequenced, these samples have become biological samples. For the most part, those biological samples are stored frozen. Put it in perspective, we store about 50 million samples for customers in outsource sample management business, and the installed capacity of our large automated storage. We have hundreds of millions of samples of capacity, and even with that kind of performance, we're barely penetrated in the sample management opportunity that exists globally. Similarly, GENEWIZ, which was founded just off the left edge of this timeline, 1999, has also been a beneficiary of these growth trends. Much so that during the last five years, GENEWIZ exhibited a compound annual growth rate of 20%. They've taken full advantage of this opportunity. They continue to outgrow an already rapidly growing market.
We think discovery is fuel that will continue to drive expansion in both of the businesses, sample management and genomics, and there's no sign of any slowdown here for the coming years, maybe decades. A case in point is the GENEWIZ opportunity. You'll hear from Amy in a moment. She talks about the GENEWIZ opportunity. The foundation of the business is three strong segments. Sanger sequencing, which is the gold standard for sequencing. It's been around for 40 years. It's an enormous and growing market, and we're the market leader. Even after 40 years, the market continues to expand. Next-generation sequencing is at the forefront of all discovery, and gene synthesis, literally the manufacturing, the writing of genes, is something at the heart of all the activity going on with cell and gene therapy. The prospects here are incredibly strong.
A 20% growth rate is significantly higher than an already strong 13% market growth rate. We continue to gain share. We have tremendous opportunity in front of us with GENEWIZ. As we said, all discovery, all development, the foundation of this opportunity is samples. We show here an incredible market opportunity for the management of samples, storage, transport, tracking, and the management of entire collections for large companies, and the establishment of collections for small companies. The numbers we show here are slightly different from what we've shown in the past. We show a $6 billion market opportunity growing to $9 billion. We show a 10% growth rate. The market size that we show is a little bit higher, the market growth rate, a little bit lower. Let me pause here for a minute to explain these numbers and the confidence we have behind them.
In and around the sample management space, there's not a Gartner. There's not a reliable single source for quantification of the market or the progress of the market. We hired an independent, very well-known third-party research firm to conduct an independent look at the market opportunity for samples. Their conclusions are well-founded in the assumptions in an enormous base of research that they put together. They've concluded that, again, a $6 billion market, I believe 10% growth, is something that we believe is a really good foundation. Not so different from what we talked about before, but one with which we have more confidence. I will say that it's clear, and we'll talk about this as sample man at the time, we've grown recently at a growth rate below the 10% opportunity. We slowed from a 20% rate to 14%, and recently, a 7% organic growth rate.
The market opportunity is tremendous. We're confident that the product portfolio that we have is the right one for the market. There are some issues that we've begun to remedy that give us tremendous confidence that we'll get back up above this growth rate. We have tremendous information also about the segmentation of the market, the trends that exist, only give us more confidence. It'll inform more of our go-to-market approach. The position that we have in sample management is unique. The market opportunity is huge. When we put this together, we're looking at a tenfold increase over a decade in the available market to the company. Systematically what we've done is we've taken core capabilities in the company. Back in 2011, we had automation and controlled environments, and we had cryogenic technology capability, which we applied to a near adjacency in life sciences sample management.
As we're in the sample management business, we had an opportunity to see that we could add even more value applying those core capabilities to near adjacency of the genomic analysis space. What we've done is we've created an opportunity now from which we'll springboard with an $11 billion market opportunity to capture more organic opportunity, more inorganic opportunity, and the tremendous potential for a $750 million company in a $9 billion space. Now I want to talk specifically about how do we go after that. How does a company of our size and capability go after a $9 billion market chance? I want to talk to you very specifically about a value creation methodology that we've employed, and one that will continue to drive us forward. We have a strength in the early identification of market opportunities.
We have ability to get close, to solve critical customer problems, resolve those issues, bring these products to market, accelerate the development of these markets. I think we have a strong track record. Interestingly, I dare say that five years ago, we're talking about businesses now that nobody had an idea about five years ago. We talk about advanced packaging. We talk about Contamination Control. We talk about the cold chain of custody for sample management. We get to talk about AAV-ITR sequencing in the GENEWIZ business. These are new market, new chances, We have a mechanism by which we identify these critical problems and get them resolved. We do that through a combination of M&A and organic product development. Even though we're aggressive about going after these, we're still disciplined.
We have ROIC guidelines both for organic and inorganic opportunities in terms of what will pass muster, what will pass the hurdle. Over the years, we've developed the capability to integrate these businesses, these capabilities, these technologies, these people, these cultures into the company. We have a value creation methodology that we employ, and I'll step you through some examples right now. We have a proven opportunity generation engine. Actually, we have a proven opportunity identification person. John O'Brien, would you just quickly stand up? John O'Brien is the Vice President of business development. John's looked at more than 1,000 opportunities over the last nine years. If he's looking at his tablet or his phone, he's working on a deal, more than likely. 1,000 different opportunities. This is the method we apply for organic or inorganic opportunities.
From an organic space, this is how we got into advanced packaging. From an inorganic standpoint, M&A, it's how we found GENEWIZ. We apply the same principles at the top level. At the organic level, for internal development, it's pretty straightforward. We meet with the customer, we're close to the customer, we understand their challenges and their technical limitations on the roadmaps, and they share the problems with us that need to be solved. There, when we make a decision, it's usually about which technology will we employ, and what's our assessment of the market opportunity after we solve this problem. Is it just for this one customer, or it's going to expand to the market? When we apply those filters, we have a pretty good idea from an organic development standpoint, how to move forward.
When it comes to M&A, we apply many more criterion, but one that's particularly important to us and maybe unique to us. We don't acquire a company just to acquire it for the current performance. We need to be able to add value to any acquisition that we make. This is really critical for us. It may be engineering talent, it may be infusion of capital, it may be quality system, it may be back office, it may be the sales organization. Unless we can increase value in an acquisition that makes it part of Brooks, then we'll pass on the opportunity. That by the time we get to the bottom of the funnel, we come to a pretty straightforward categorization. Yes, no. Then there's one more bin, which is not now.
We've done some deals that we got very close to and realized that they weren't going to pencil out. We weren't going to be able to add all the value or some change happened in the company that we were going to wait out. We've done some deals by coming back one or two years later and then bringing them into the company. It's a unique application of capability, but it serves us extremely well. So much so that we did 15 acquisitions here since our first one in 2011 in life sciences. All of them have been good acquisitions. Each one of them has worked with varying degrees of success, but we don't have any that we're not proud of. Each and every one has helped to grow the business. One of the reasons is what we do after we acquire.
When we put a business plan together, we look at the capability and the value that we intend to add to the acquisition for the next 12 months minimum, we track our progress against the commitments we made to each other about how we're going to create value. How we're going to recognize the value from the transaction. Did we do what we said? Are we above? Are we behind? In every case, whether it's exceeding performance or it's below, we bring that feedback into the next acquisition that we do. I think that served us particularly well. We started with very small deals to get ourselves into life sciences, we employed the same technologies and learning to do a very successful acquisition in GENEWIZ, which is large and transformative. It also gives us high confidence going forward that we're ready for the next opportunity.
I give a couple of case studies very quickly. The Contamination Control business was one, again, where we applied the unique capabilities we have. The Contamination Control business, they had some FOUP cleaners at a Tier 1 account performing so-so. They were just clearly ahead of the market, but we weren't sure there was a market that was going to evolve. We met them, we spent time with them, we learned about the market, but they couldn't get to critical scale, and the market wasn't expanding. It turns out that the technology that existed was excellent. The engineering capability was incomplete. The quality supply chain hadn't been established. Because we knew the customers, because we were close enough to the customers to know that this technology was going to solve a critical problem, we knew to act. We acquired the company. We made investments.
We took advantage of a core strong team. We supplemented it with members from the engineering group and quality and supply chain. In just five years, the business went 4x . We talked about Contamination Control. More importantly, we were correct that the market was going to expand if there was a capable supplier out there, and we've more than doubled the customer base, and Dave will talk to you about the momentum that's in place for how CCS is going to continue to move forward. Similarly, on the life sciences side, BioStorage Technologies, we had automated cold storage. We had consumables that would hold the samples inside our stores. To increase the capability of our cold chain of custody, adding an outsourced service provider to manage samples in an archive fashion was an important capability for us.
BioStorage Technologies was owned by a private equity firm, and they would continue to invest to grow the business modestly, but not in a big way. When we talk about the potential opportunity that exists, we think that the investments that we made, the ability that we had to go take a 3 million or 4 million sample collection and bring it into Indianapolis, we allowed them to accelerate the potential here. We doubled the business. We doubled the customer base. On the organic side, we talked about advanced packaging. Interestingly, the semiconductor team knew in a market that was just beginning to evolve, that the players were not going to be Tier 1 equipment makers, but rather Tier 2 equipment makers. The team worked with the Tier 2 equipment makers to address what was at the time, a very small market.
Now that the market's growing, it's attracting Tier 1, but our foundation is in place to handle these very complex substrates and advanced packaging. Our market position is becoming very secure, irrespective if it's a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 provider in the space. Because we need to do that, the organic growth has been tremendous. Similarly, on the storage business, our earliest acquisitions in life sciences were to acquire storage companies. Since then, we developed our own product portfolio. We doubled the business over a three-year period. This will continue to be a lumpy business, but the portfolio is uniquely ours, and from this point forward, all of the capabilities that we add into the storage space will be ours, and we'll drive and we'll control. Finally, from a methodology standpoint, we've become really good at doing integration.
When we do a life sciences deal, the life sciences team gets involved in diligence. When we do a semiconductor deal, the semiconductor team gets involved in diligence. When we do any deal, acquisition, or divestiture, HR, finance, legal, IT, the entire company, the support infrastructure of the company gets involved. This is an unbelievably heavy lift, and the things that we just accomplished this year were the kinds of things that a company much larger would be capable to do, yet we did it without adding any capability except for the people who had been with us doing 15 deals, 15 acquisitions, four divestitures. The same infrastructure team brought people on, brought cultures on, brought companies on, brought technologies on, brought new customer base on. We are really fit and ready to do the next thing.
When we talk about all the technical capabilities and technical prowess we have, it's the muscle memory we have on this internal capability that puts us in an incredibly strong position to continue to do this. It's not a dirty little secret. It's just something that we don't get to talk about, don't get to brag about. It's an unbelievable capability that we built into the company and will continue to ride going forward. Let's talk about what happens over the next years. We're focused on implementing the same consistent strategy, but we do it from a financial strength and a platform we've never had before. We have strong momentum, revenue growth, profitability growth. We intend by 2022 to be more than $1.1 billion in revenue.
As has been the recent history of the company, and we talk about a company that executes extremely well, we'll continue to make improvements in gross margin. These are tough gains, but it's something we do in normal course every day. The leverage provided by this opportunity will allow us to triple EPS by 2022. We're confident in the path and in the plans, and you'll hear it from the other speakers who come up today, but we're really positioned and geared for tremendous growth. To summarize for you, two strong positions in two strong markets. We have leadership spots, and we're really confident that the market opportunity provides us plenty of chance to continue to grow. We have a stronger financial profile than any time in the past.
This value creation engine that we talk about, the method by which we go about conquering these opportunities, is firmly in place. We have a value creation strategy that we'll continue to employ. $1.1 billion, tripling earnings. I have to put this in perspective right now. We're delighted that you're here today. We're looking forward to having you meet the management team, spending time with us at lunch. Please forgive us if we don't stay longer than that. We've got 1,000 days left to go deliver this, and we're going to have to get to work. We have plans in place. We're ready to go. With that, I thank you for the time and attention, and I'm really pleased to introduce the next speaker, Dave Jarzynka.
Thanks, Steve. Good morning, welcome again. My name's Dave Jarzynka. I'm President of the Semiconductor Solutions business. I appreciate you taking the time to learn more about how Brooks Semiconductor continues to outpace the industry in what we do. You've heard the industry is down 20%. During this pause, Brooks has managed to grow the top line by 5%. More importantly, we've managed to grow 3x as fast in the bottom line. We have a unique semiconductor model. We have a really strong team that I'm really proud of, you'll meet many of them here today. We are extremely focused. We're close to our customers, we have a lot of work to do. We're not satisfied. We take a step back, we continue to transform ourselves in everything that we do. We're pretty humble about it.
I'd like to start by walking through the business today and why it gives us confidence for the future. The foundation of this business model is our diversity. We didn't get here by accident. We made some mistakes. We got here by being close to our customers in the markets and understanding which segments that we wanted to be in, understanding what product portfolios we wanted to invest in. You'll see that we have two pieces of our business that are intentionally growth engines for us. One is Contamination Control. We refer to it as CCS. The other is the automation space, which comprises our systems and robots. The fuel behind this, Steve mentioned it, is our design -in win momentum. We've had a total of 130. What I've listed here is 80 that are incremental share gains.
The balance is we're winning against ourselves, which is good and healthy, because every time that happens, you got to keep the business. The second piece is the incremental growth. For us, design -in win is the equivalent of market share. We got confidence because we win those 18, 24 months ahead of revenue, and we're designed in. The last point I'll make is the majority of our business now is in higher value, in systems, and within Contamination Control as compared to components. That's a really important point as we drive forward in our value expansion, margin expansion, and visibility to where the market's going. Let's talk next about what we do. I'm going to simplify it a little bit, at least for me. All right. This is a wafer. What is a wafer? This can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million dollars.
Basically, they make computer devices, semiconductors on this wafer. This wafer is going through hundreds of steps through the fab. To put it in perspective, your human hair is 8,000 nm, okay. It's pretty thin. The structures on here are 7 nm , 5 nm, reaching atomic scales. Imagine that you need to do this processing on this wafer 100 steps, and they're very valuable, and maybe you're outputting 30,000, 100,000 of these. It matters who's handling it. You care about that, right. A lot of money. They rely on Brooks. Every single fab has Brooks Automation, vacuum automation in it. Our job is to move this within the tool from point A to point B. Here's the great news. I want you to do it more precisely. I want you to do it smarter, sometimes faster, and our new products deliver on that promise. Okay.
This is a big part of our business. I'll move next to what these go inside of. Thousands of these moving through a factory, very, very valuable. Now you got to put them in something to move them from the factory. There's 100 tools, and what they put them in is a carrier. Some people call them a FOUP. For today, I'm going to use wafer carrier. It's a lot simpler. 25 of these wafers will go in this box. Value's gone up tremendously. Hundreds of steps. There's metals and gases and all kinds of stuff in processing. This environment is capturing all that stuff. It gets dirty. The next time they want to go run a wafer lot, which they do, there's thousands of these moving through our fab. It's all automated. There's a door on here. The environment, it's contaminated.
What they need to do is they need to bring this back to purity. What we do is we deliver a guarantee that this will be pure again. We remove the water, the particles, the chemicals, all those things that are changing throughout the fab, and we make a promise to the fab that when you get this, you're pure again. What does that do for them? Yield goes up. Real money, real cash. An exciting thing about it is the more times they do this, they're discovering that the yield is getting better. It started within foundry and logic, and I'm happy to report the memory guys are seeing the same effect, and even certain wafer manufacturers are benefiting from it. This is a wafer carrier. In addition to wafers, I'll talk a little bit about a reticle.
Before I get into reticle storage, I want to explain what this is and how it relates to carrier clean. Think of this as a piece of film, a really expensive piece of film, sometimes $1 million or more. What's on here is tiny device circuitry for this thing called a lithography tool. Lithography tools are pretty expensive. The newest ones, maybe 150. It's the name of the wavelength of light. I won't get into it, EUV is the bleeding edge lithography tool that creates light. You shine light through a piece of film. That image is projected onto the wafer, and that's how circuitry is built up. This is extremely important. Think about the capital investment. If this thing has a problem and they're running all day on those wafers, they're losing a lot of money. You got to trust somebody, right?
First point of trust. You got to trust somebody, right? First point of trust. This goes in a carrier as well. Got to be clean. We're the only company in the world that cleans EUV pods on the leading lithography. Everybody doing EUV is using a Brooks' pod cleaner. If you're ramping EUV, you're ramping with Brooks. Secondly, these are reused. Because they're so expensive, they don't ship them maybe. They're using just in the factory. You got to store these. You got to trust somebody if you're going to store these, because it's not just about storage. The environment needs to be extremely clean, the handling extremely clean. In some instances, you need to clean them. They're worth a lot of money. The market relies on Brooks to store these.
Remember, EUV, the newest technology, is at the beginning stages. As they ramp capacity, they need more storage. Contamination Control, carrier clean and reticles, leading technology nodes must have capability, and we have the capability, and they trust us, and we'll grow with them. The third element, advanced packaging. I'll give you a little more color on what this is. Thanks, Larry. Appreciate it. In advanced packaging, we look at the market, and we had all this capability, but the problem statement was. I see that I even broke it's so thin. These wafers are very difficult. I know some other automation sets that may do this. We don't do this on our automation set, but that just shows, it's tough. These aren't these thick things. The reason is, when you make devices, you don't need all that silicon.
You just made them rigid to make the devices. When you go to package them, that real estate is important. You thin it out, and you may even bond them together. We targeted the market of going after this because it's complex and it's difficult, and we had the capability. We're the leader in handling these difficult substrates. Sometimes it's so thin, this is like a trampoline. See this? They got to put it on a metal frame, it's so thin. Remember, afterwards, I don't know if you can see the lines on this, they're going through, and they used to dice these with a saw to separate the dies. Remember this, new applications, they're not dicing anymore. They're using a process called etch. Guess who has a strong vacuum play on that process? We like advanced packaging, and it connects together.
I'm going to get caught up on my clicks here, and I'm going to talk about the last piece, which is extremely important as well. We have over 50,000 components in the field. We have hundreds of vacuum tools and now hundreds of Contamination Control tools. We've been busy retooling our service value proposition. The foundation has been repair. The capability is moving fast beyond repair to install base management. Our customers want more productivity. We're providing upgrades. Our customers will want preventive maintenance. Our new products are getting smarter, and our system tools, like Contamination Control, are now maturing in the install base. We've installed a lot of tools. We have hundreds of these tools in the market today, and they're now reaching service level stage. In the early innings of potential growth. That's what we do. Remember, we're really focused.
If we can't talk about how we enable our customers' process advantage, we don't do it. We don't want to be a commodity player in the segment. Let's talk about how we did since last year, because that's extremely important today. Despite our success, we reevaluate ourselves all the time on progress and what we need to go do. Number one, Contamination Control business has captured the majority of share in the EUV rollout of pod clean and reticle storage. We talked last year about, I think, memory is starting to adopt carrier clean. We had two really big major targets last year, we won them. Early innings of growth. Reticle storage, we ended up buying a company to move into this space. We've doubled the customer base in a short period of time. Vacuum automation continues to be healthy. Why? Big guys still selectively outsource.
They need a partner. They want to outsource more. Secondly, there's a segment of the equipment market that is smaller. The industry tends to call them Tier 2. Well, some of these Tier 2s have been in business for about 10 years now in Korea and now emerging China, and they're building their business, and they're taking share. They rely on not just a component. Many times they rely on a complete vacuum system from Brooks. We're extremely close to these customers. We don't do everything for them because sometimes they're just a price play. We're penetrated where there's the most value and the most growth and differentiation. Last point, advanced packaging. We now have 14 application wins. 14 of the process steps in advanced packaging, we're all over. Two important ones. One I mentioned.
The industry has used, believe it or not, saws, sophisticated saws, to break the die apart. There are a lot of applications today where they're using a process called etch. Etch requires a vacuum environment. A vacuum environment requires vacuum automation. We are extremely close to this market. It's early innings growth. They're using our solutions. We're pretty excited about it. Secondly, when these wafers are thin, you got a device on a wafer. Then sometimes you have the interconnect on a separate. They got to bond these together. They got to connect them together. Right? We're getting more designs within the bonding companies. That'll be a growth market as these packages get more sophisticated.
Our design-in win momentum, our closest to customers, gives us confidence that we're going to continue to have a track record of top-line growth, margin expansion, but more importantly, continuously bringing more to the bottom line. You look at our CAGR for operating income, 4x or 5x greater than top line. That's just a lot of hard work proactively of getting better in what we do. I mentioned, it feels pretty good right now because we're outpacing the market. If you were in a conference room with Brooks, it's not what you would hear. You'd hear, "How are we going to transform ourselves next?" Actually, you'd hear from me because I grew up in Boston. We're never going to be Digital Equipment, ever. I watched the QE2 pull in, and I lived what happened two years later. We rethink everything in a positive way, in control.
We're not out of control. We rethink how to do it better, because we have talented people that have been there a long time, and we're close to customers. We're going to transform ourselves again. We're doing it right now. All right. Let me talk a little bit more what's unique about our business model. Three things: segments, the right product, and the right customers. We've put a lot of energy into segments, and we're not one to create a lot of PowerPoints on what segments can do. We're very fortunate to be very close to a lot of the fabs and customers that allowed us to get an understanding of some trends and segments. Why is it important? When we decide where to put our money, like anybody, we want high return, but we ground that into, let's go deep in this segment for the right reasons.
We've picked some of those right segments. We continue to look around for new emerging branches. We're very fortunate that the segments we picked are still in early innings of growth. Secondly, the right mix. The right mix to us is the solutions that create the most value within the segments that we play in. We put a lot of energy. We've talked about our engineering team. Our marketing teams are very embedded. We are very local. 15 years ago, we invested in the regions of where semiconductor companies are. Many of our regions not only have service personnel, they have engineers, they have application folks, of course, salespeople. Our country leaders, most of them came from the equipment industry that have a lot of experience on consultative selling. We feel good about our mix. It continues to evolve in the different segments.
The third piece, the right customers. We don't go after everybody. We want to play with the leaders. Leaders does not mean just the big companies in our space. We pay a lot of attention to those companies that we feel have the capability, the talent, and because of our fab relationships with the device manufacturers, we get an understanding of companies that have credibility, and we invest in them early and often. What is it doing in the segments? More than 65% of our revenue today is in our growth segments of vacuum automation, Contamination Control, and advanced packaging. We're not done. You'll see those are going to continue to grow. I'll also point out, within the stable leadership category, I mentioned to you global service in the early innings of transformation.
Secondly, 200 mm starts to fuel some of our older products that are in the stable category. Third, China has a thirst for some of these products. We're not satisfied with stable, and I'm not saying these are going to break out to the huge high growth segments, but we're very optimistic about where those products go as well and as we retool them. Little bit more on the portfolio. Again, the majority of our value is in systems and in Contamination Control. Our robots and our components are extremely valuable. The amount of content that we bring at the system level and the Contamination Control level is much, much greater. That gives us a lot more confidence of where we're going. It allows us to be diverse and have a technology play and a market play despite pauses in the industry.
Let me go a little deeper into the products. What you're seeing on the slide is in 28 nm. Again, the size of the feature, that's nanometers. If you're 10 nm or below, you're at leading edge. 28 nm is five years ago. Okay? Five years ago, Brooks was a leader in the market. Great position. Every time a fab invested, we'd get content in vacuum robots, we'd get content in vacuum systems, and we just started to invest in packaging. Really positive. Well, today, we get 5x more content dollar value than we did five years ago. That's a really important piece. Let me break it down for you. Advanced packaging continues to grow. We continue to take share in vacuum robotics. Our Tier 2 bets with leading customers are starting to grow. We have more content. Fabs are adopting our carrier cleaning.
Whole new business segment for us. We're in the early innings of EUV pod clean for more content as well as reticle storage. While this is happening, keep in mind, as we shift to more value, our gross margin has gone from 34%- 41% as product value and as discipline and focus on what we do and how do we do it better as we move forward. Remember, on the new technology nodes, we've won a lot of the share. We know what it looks like, and we're really confident moving forward that the benefit of more content is extremely attractive for the business model. We can't do much without customers. We're unique. Our customers are the equipment makers, but they're also the people that make the devices. Why is that important?
Number one, when we sell some products directly to the device makers, they're buying them because they have a huge high-value problem in technology. They're pulling them through. Number two, we develop an extremely trusted relationship, and we get insight into the high-value problems for the future, and it fuels our equipment roadmap. We love the equipment suppliers. They're great customers, and they continue to grow. Our job is when they need to solve a problem, we already have it. When we do that, we help enable a customer's process advantage, and that's what unique. Today, 30% of our business is in the device manufacturer. You'll see that continue to grow. Why we're confident about the future and where this goes. Talk a little bit about the market. We can see the opportunity in the market doubling 2022. I'm sure many of you have heard of 5G.
This is going to be big. This is the next internet. Why? 5G high-speed wireless allows ubiquitous. You won't even have to think about transferring video, data. It allows mobile activity of transfer. When you do that, first thing, to roll out 5G, you need a lot of infrastructure because it's more point-to-point, so you need more silicon. Phones, they need more RF analog components. We love that. Great 200 mm play. Data centers need to re-architect themselves. Okay, all the servers. In the new connected world, there's going to be tremendous business opportunity for companies to create new businesses around 5G. The data centers need to be ready. They need more high-end processing power. They need more memory. They need overall more capability. That's just very early innings. I'll give you an example. Many years ago, what fueled leading-edge technology nodes was this thing.
There's a processor in here, and on the new node, they probably had two customers that they were really working with. Right? Making a big bet on the new technology. Today, they have 40. Why? All these applications need leading-edge silicon, high technology, high performance. It gives us confidence in the growth. Autonomous vehicles, I think you're familiar with that, high-end processing. IoT drives sensors everywhere. Blockchain, which was known for cryptocurrency, will move into other segments because it provides better security. At the end of the day, higher computing, more programmable gate arrays, more 200 mm devices, more advanced memories all drive silicon, and it fuels our vacuum automation, our advanced packaging, our contamination carrier control, and reticle storage. Really good fundamentals of fueling the need for silicon in the marketplace. Our three growth segments, Contamination Control, vacuum automation, and advanced packaging.
65% of our growth with TAM expansion. Within Contamination Control, our business is growing about 19%. We're really confident it's going to go beyond that. More importantly, the opportunity is doubling. Why? The device manufacturer started with, "I need this in the foundry. I need it in logic." The memory guys are coming on board. "I need it." The leading-edge technology nodes, I'll show you a chart, they need more cleaning steps. I need more advanced reticle storage. In addition to cleaning, we now inspect carriers. We have sophisticated vision systems that look at over 30 parameters. What our job is while we have carriers and while we have wafers, what can we do to add value while we have it? Spends a lot of time with us. We rolled out inspection technologies that help solve problems.
In addition, the wafer manufacturers have now started to use some of our technology. What's really exciting, it's almost like they want to clean and put a stamp that this was verified to be in specification as we move forward. We're real confident in this growth engine. The fundamentals are strong. As you see technology investments, you'll see Contamination Control with it, and you'll see Brooks grow. Little bit of a case study. The first graph that you're looking at is a foundry, and in 2014, for every 5,000 to 6,000 wafer starts, they needed a FOUP clean, a carrier clean. Okay? Every 5,000 or 6,000 wafer starts. Typical new fab investment does about 30,000 wafers a month. Today, for every 1,000 wafer starts, they need a carrier clean. They need a lot more carrier cleans. They need a lot more Brooks content. It's an important dynamic.
Foundry is the first place that that's going. Memory's in the early innings, but we're real confident in what we've seen. They start to use these equipment. They see the yield impact, and as they move forward, they grow the installed base of carriers. Second important note, you can see the customer growth doubling. We have the right footprint. Brooks did not have to invest in new sales teams. We've had it for years. We have a lot of consultative people in the company that come from the equipment industry, and we take advantage of that. When it comes to customer acquisition, it's about the right time and the right value. We have the access, and we're also a trusted partner to many of these companies. Vacuum automation, it's a pretty large business, growing at a good clip at 15%.
You've seen a piece of that, especially in our vacuum robot area, go down a little bit this year, just due to the memory pause. Memory pause looks like it's just starting to show early signs that are encouraging based on some of those fundamentals. What's happening here is the large OEMs continue to outsource. I want to spend a little bit more time on the Tier 2s. These are companies where people usually came from the fab, and some of them may have came from equipment companies. The model really started in Korea, where the government would fund, "Hey, I want a local supplier of equipment." Back then, they just couldn't really do much beyond process development, so we made a very early investment. Early. Today in Korea, I've got factory, sales, applications, engineering, turnkey.
We made a bet on some of these folks, and they use our technology. Well, as their process got better, the device manufacturers say, "Hey, if you're good, I'll buy more from you." Their share is growing, hence our business grows. We did the same thing in China very early on. We've invested in the same way, and our China business is growing very healthy. I want to point out, we do not go- to- market in China saying, "Go get all the share." We focus on the value areas that have legs, that have differentiation. We're confident that our growth will continue. We also see this market growing as well. When you look at all the outsourcing trends and the Tier 2 trends, it'll be different, I think, than just general etch and deposition.
As etch and deposition has a good outlook, we think the Tier 2s are going to gain a little bit more. We also know the Tier 1s are going to outsource. Certainly emerging markets in China are becoming very real. Some of those equipment providers in China are becoming very real. That'll be beneficial to the total market opportunity. Advanced packaging we talked a lot about. Why is it expanding? Why do we see the opportunity almost doubling? Let's just start with as you need higher compute power, you need fancier packages, more complicated packages. As you need lower power, you need thinner devices. As 5G rolls out, some of the packaging strategies get even more complex.
As they try to put more density, packaging gets more difficult, to the point where the market has shifted from just packaging companies to where the major device manufacturers are now vertical, investing in packaging technologies. We're a trusted partner to many of them, and our business is growing both with the device manufacturers and with the equipment makers. Where do we go? We have high confidence we'll continue at a growth rate of 8%- 12%. I think we've got a proven track record of doing that. We'll bring more than 2x of that to the bottom line because of our value and our organization and our people and how we focus. Number one, our operations is a combination of internal and partnerships. In the early days, we went through the outsource, internal.
The secret sauce for us is sometimes you do it yourselves and sometimes you rely on a partner and really understand what those dynamics are. We do that, I think, extremely well in our operation. Our ability to develop and roll out new products extremely fast with high quality scales quite a bit. We're not putting in new buildings all over the place. We have the ability to ramp multiple shifts and get a lot of leverage off of our factories, and we are not close to capacity. There's one company in the last ramp in 2017 and 2018 that didn't spend a lot of time on phone calls with equipment manufacturers wondering where the product is. In fact, we made both shipments. Think about that value we created with the customer. When the customer had a high ramp, we didn't have delivery issues.
That's all the learnings and all the transformation that we've done year-over-year. Secondly, engineering. I can't say enough. Number one, we have discipline. We prioritize, we understand. They're not always fun meetings, but I think the team is very objective and very grounded about what's important and how we do it. When we commit, we commit, and we execute. We got a good track record of getting high return on investments. When we make some mistakes, we adjust really early and often, and adjust. We'll continue to do that. We'll continue to invest in R&D. I want to point out, with our operating income performance, R&D's gone up. R&D has not gone down. We continue to invest in R&D, and we'll continue to do that. I can't say enough about our regional teams.
We have very strong teams close to our customers that understand the business very well. They're trusted, it scales quite a bit. We can continue to put more in them across the board. We don't need specialized teams for every single product line. Our teams are very capable of understanding where the value is from a component point of view, from a system point of view, from a Contamination Control point of view. It scales. In summary, we got a unique business model, not by accident, by design. We're not satisfied with our model. We're going to continue to optimize it and transform it's a great starting point. Took a long time to get here. We're confident in our continued growth. We've got a lot of design-in wins in the bank. We're close to our customers. We're operationally capable, we're ready to go.
We can see it. We've got strong platforms in the marketplace today. We've invested. We haven't got wins and stopped investing. We continue to introduce new products in the market that are smarter, more intelligent, more value-based across the board. We've got a strong track record of margin expansion. This is just what we do. I can't say enough. Margin expansion is not a task force for us. It's what we do. It's what we do. We stare at that gross margin line and say, "That's what value is right there. Are we delivering it or not?" We also look at that line and say, "Are we operationally capable of what we're doing? How can we improve?" It's a continuous effort. It's built into the business model. It's built into the DNA, and we'll continue to expand it.
When we do those things really well, we drop a lot to the bottom line. You can expect that the majority of incremental revenue should drop 37+ points to the bottom line. We've done that for a few years. We'll continue to do it in what we do. It's not by accident. At the same time, we're pretty diligent on it. We're hiring. We always hire. We always look for better people, but we make sure it's right around value creation in what we do. We feel pretty good. I should say more than pretty good, confident of where 2022 is going. The industry is showing the signs for more investment. Our share momentum is strong. Our gross margin track record is on track, and we'll deliver more to the bottom line as we go forward. In summary, we've got a different kind of semi business.
We're not done. We've transformed into growth segments. We consistently outperform semi. We've got confidence that we'll continue to do that. The last point, when we look at our models, we talk to our customers, and we understand our markets from a bottoms-up point of view, not a tops-down point of view. We see the growth coming for 2022. We do this bottoms up. We're close to our customers. We know where the fab investments are. We know what they're going to invest in. We're familiar with the high-value problems and the technology, and we're very focused on our operating model and what we can deliver. Thanks for the time. I really appreciate it, and now I think we'll pause for some Q&A.
Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig, just if I can put a couple of rules out.
We'll focus most of it either on my remarks or Dave's from a semi standpoint. We'll have a chance on life sciences a little bit later for everybody.
If you could just mention your name and the company you're with as well.
Okay.
Thank you. Craig Ellis, B. Riley Securities. Steve, I just wanted to go back to your comments on the transformation. As we look ahead through the 2022 target period, what's different in the way you work with your executive team and your general manager team, managing the transition now versus, say, five to seven years ago when the company was much smaller, the portfolio much different. What are your strengths, and are there any gaps that you feel like you need to close to execute on the target model?
Thanks, Craig. I think from the standpoint of the executive team, we've grown together a lot. I think the capability we have in the organization, Dave and his team, he continues to build out the same capability. I think all of us were huddled around the opportunities together in the earliest days of semi and as we evolved life s ciences. We have 1,800 employees in life sciences now, completely capable to carry on. We spend time as an executive leadership team on what the next vectors are for growth. From an operating standpoint, I think we're incredibly capable in Semi, incredibly capable in the life sciences space. Our conversations as a team now really are on strategic vectors for the company. In terms of gaps, there are no gaps that we're focused on in particular.
There are always adjustments we're going to make to the business, but in terms of fundamental capability, we think we're really well- positioned against the opportunities in front of us.
Thanks for that. I'll ask a follow-up to David. David, as Steve presented the business and as you highlighted with part of your comments, there are 130 design-in wins that the business has enjoyed over the last year. The question is, can you provide some geographic or end-use color on those wins? As we think about the business and the financial targets below the revenue line, how do we think about the margin mix dynamics and some of the things that need to happen so you hit those great gross margin operating margin targets that you set forth? Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, good question, Craig. Thank you. First, when it comes to the wins, there's a mix regionally. Contamination Control, the majority of those are very Asia-centric. That'd be really important. Anywhere where there's new investments in big technology fabs, you can pretty much see Contamination Control generating a lot of design-in wins. I mentioned a little bit that they're shifting from pure foundry logic also into memory and wafer manufacturers. You can think of that as incremental business for us as we go forward, Contamination Control. For vacuum automation, we generate a lot of wins with the Tier 1s. The outsourcing trend is very strong. We don't go after everything. It's important to note, we're not going after 100% share. We're picking the wins where we have value, and it's pretty significant.
Our new MagnaTran LEAP product provides a lot of intelligence and a lot of value. We're seeing a lot of momentum on that. In the local markets of Korea and China, they're retooling architectures because they have an opportunity to gain more business. When they do that, we're gaining share in those segments as they move forward. It requires us to put engineering investment into some of our vacuum automation platforms and help them win across the board. The last point of your question on margin expansion, again, a lot of these wins are in systems where we have higher value. That helps fuel our margin expansion. It's a key ingredient of what we do. As we win more business, we're really confident that our margin will continue to expand as we grow the business.
We're not making any sacrifices on top line and taking less margin. We're very selective on it.
Steve, we have a question here from Patrick.
Thank you very much. Patrick Ho from Stifel. Maybe first for Steve, in terms of the big picture on the semiconductor side, given your experience and your relationships with your top-Tier customers, how do you characterize maybe some of the early on design activity you do with these customers that, one, gets you these design-in wins, as well as helping you on the margin side? I have a follow-up question for Dave.
Patrick, if I understand the question, the issue about the connection with the customers, I'll put it into perspective for people who maybe aren't as familiar as you are either. In a large company like Applied Materials, they have dozens of vacuum platforms where they put their own vacuum robot in, or they put our vacuum robot in. As we continue to get design-in wins, we continue to add capability, we build robots that are maybe more capable, more sophisticated than the ones that they have. As we build trust with one platform, we start to win the next one and the next one. I think the penetration that we've exhibited into the captive market with emergent capability is extraordinary.
When we watch the business evolve over the past five years, we continue to see increases in market share and tool performance from those large equipment makers.
Yeah, I apologize if I wasn't clear. Do they bring you earlier on now than they have in the past, and that helps you get those design-in wins versus your competitors?
Sorry, yes, it's a simpler question. Because we're designed in and because we're in R&D and in pilot, we know the next issues that they have. Absolutely, the teams work closely. We share problems that are two generations ahead. I think we're as early as we have been in the process, and I think it's one of the contributors to Dave's extraordinary design-in win, because we're literally in the company. Our engineers have badges, and they participate actively with the engineering teams from those equipment makers.
Great. Dave, as a follow-up, it was really interesting to hear about the service business evolving to more of an installed base management business, and you talked about things like preventive maintenance. Are those what the customers are looking for, or have you offered it up because those are obviously higher margin opportunities and a way to, I guess, make it even stickier for Brooks, both on the solutions as well as the services side?
Yeah. It's a really good question because not every device manufacturer wants to spend money proactively, right? What we've brought in a lot of our products and a lot of our upgrade products is more intelligence and knowledge together to make that decision on when is the right time to pull a product from a piece of equipment, take the line down, and upgrade it. That's an important point because they're running process, and they tend not to just say, "Yeah, I'll trust you. I'll pull it." That's downtime. We put a lot of energy, it's why it's still early innings, a lot of energy into the tools and the capability to extract that knowledge and get more confidence when the right time to do maintenance is.
We've got some good examples of that today, and we're learning a lot through those, I would say, partnerships of when the right time to do that is. Our new product suites across the board come with a lot more of that intelligence and capability to help that out. Most of it is based off of hardcore data and I would say trial and error when partnership of when the right time to do things is, and some of these device manufacturers start to develop confidence and trust in that and what they do. Certainly on the Contamination Control side of the business, the opportunity is there's not a lot of knowledge in fab about these tools and these processes, right?
We provide even more value there, where some of the other equipment they've been using, that types of equipment for multiple years, that the fab may have more experience. In these new areas, they're relying on us a lot more to bring it over, help them out.
Steve, I think we'll do one more question.
Sure.
Oh, hi. Jeff Nevins, Silvercrest. David, you'd mentioned something about the memory market is just starting to adopt some of your capabilities and is sort of an emerging area. I think that's what you said. Correct me if I'm wrong. Given memory's been such a big part of WFE going through 2018, why have you not been a part of that trend historically, and how do you think memory can be as a percentage of the mix going forward? How big?
Two things. Us not being part of WFE in memory, I want to level set just a little bit. Our vacuum automation is very much ingrained into memory spend. We do a lot of business in memory. Secondly, our reticle storage business is very ingrained in memory. Now, third, there's a piece of advanced packaging in memory when it comes to stacking certain things. Contamination Control, we've done a lot of testing with memory folks on when is the right time. Now remember, they tend to lag behind leading-edge technology nodes on what process they're using. Okay? Their process node is not as challenging. They may be different, like stacking 3D NAND. What we've done is kind of shown them a way on what the technology can do, and we're at a point now where they're seeing the benefit.
It's a very early adopter mindset. We've had to do a lot of consultative work with them. Now there's a point where some major companies are saying, "Okay, we're going to ingrain this into our process flow in our next factory." That's why I say early innings. If you look at the curve, I don't expect it to be adoption rates like Foundry, because they had bigger problems, and they invested much faster. I do see a nice steady investment in this technology for memory over time. We're in a really good position. Hopefully that helps.
Okay, just to follow up, given the political rhetoric across China, Korea, what sort of pushback or shrapnel have you sort of seen in those areas selling to those Tier 2 vendors, which has been a good part of your growth, I think, over the last 12 months?
Sure. Certainly, it's something we pay attention to. In Korea, it's gone the other way. There's some tensions with certain suppliers with Korean companies, we don't see those tensions. More importantly, the timing's right. We're introducing new products at the right time. We have the right value positions, and those dynamics just help us a little bit more. It's not the key decision. I'm not seeing anybody make decisions on equipment or associated around that just based on the politics of it. More importantly, we're bringing the right products to market, and they want to move to us. That's probably the biggest driver. Secondly, in China, remember, we focus on really highly valued spots. We've got a lot of stick on where we're going. These fabs cannot just switch and change their mind, as there's a lot of capability there.
We have very trusted relationships. We're there all the time. We are not pulling out of China, by the way. We'll invest more in China. We still see it as a significant opportunity for spend and in the right areas, right? We're not going to do products where somebody else could replace you in the short term. Our products provide a process advantage in the fabs right now. They have a difficult time ramping. They're doing a good job, but they need good stuff to get to that level. They prioritize that good stuff. Maybe on the other side, where it's not creating enough value, we don't typically see that. Maybe they change those, just a mindset, but we're not seeing that at all in our category. We pay attention to it. It is complicated. We spend a lot of time there.
We have people that are very active and very close to our customers. We don't ignore that dynamic. I want to make sure that's really important. We're not saying that's not going to have an effect. It's the reverse. We're getting closer and doing more things. You'll see us even make more investments there, because that's where our customers want us to be, even more and more local as they go forward. Yep.
Can we go to a break?
I think, if we have time, there's Amanda and Craig now.
Yeah. Craig, we'll ask it now. If you can hold it, we'll be glad to answer it a little bit later.
Oh, as long as you ask it now.
All right, let's go ahead. This will be the last one, then we'll take a break after.
Did you still have one, Amanda?
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Thanks for taking the question. David, I wanted to follow up on the target model. I believe the target model implies that there will be around a 700 basis point premium to industry growth over the target model period, which would be significantly above where the business was positioned the last time the company did an Analyst Day. The question is, how much of that increased growth versus industry is from where the business is positioned now with the products that you have versus some of the lower growth that may have exited the business when you spun out cryo? Thank you for taking the follow-up.
Sure. The majority of the model, the first thing that we do is we look at our design -in wins and market share position going forward. We have a pretty good idea of spend. We don't make assumptions. We'll talk to our customers on where they're going and where they're expected to invest on capital. The bottoms-up piece gives us a strong foundation of where it lands, and then we'll do sensitivity analysis and just industry in general of where capital intensity goes outside of that. We're not on the higher-end spectrum. We expect the industry to be healthy for sure. The key is, it's the bottoms-up level foundation of when we extrapolate our share gains, design-in wins, where does that put us compared to the previous years? That's the key thing that gives us confidence in the model across the board.
Craig, I'll put a little bit more on top. On the growth rate of the business, the portfolio that Dave has today provides more growth opportunity, faster growth than when we had cryo in the mix. The cryogenic business was a good grower with semi, but 2/3 of every cryo pump went into semiconductor, and those into two applications, to PVD and to Ion Implant. The growth prospects there were exactly with the cycle of the semiconductor. Dave has some counter secular growth drivers that allow his current growth rate to be higher than if we also had, on a percentage basis, if we continued to hold the semi-cryo business.
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate the time.
Okay. I think what we'll do is there'll be another opportunity to ask questions at the end of the final session. I know, Amanda, you wanted to have a question. We'll have time to get to that. There'll be some time also to meet with management. We'll take a break now for about 10 minutes or so, and then we'll get back started about 20 after 11, okay?
Thank you.
Thank you.
If everyone can grab their seats. I hope everybody had a chance to grab a cup of coffee, get a drink. We're going to start up now. For those, I hope everyone outside can hear me. We're going to kick off the second part of our day. I'm going to introduce Steve Schwartz again.
Thank you, Mark. I realize I'm just waiting for my team to sit. Let's go ahead and start. As you're aware, there are a number of changes going on in and around the sample management space. We're in the middle of a pretty significant move to reinstill the growth rate that we'd established in prior years. We're making some changes during this time. I'll be the General Manager of the business unit. I'm actually the first general manager of the business unit. This is a business that I'm quite familiar with. Lindon and I are going to be spending a lot more time in and around the business, and I'm looking forward to continuing to work with the leadership team as we get some small adjustments to the business to get back on track. Fundamentally, we have an incredibly strong market opportunity in sample management.
We have a product portfolio that we're confident meets the requirements and the needs of customers. It'll enable us to continue to grow. Very simply, over the recent quarters, particularly in 2019, the organic growth rate has slowed to about 7%. Below where we were a couple of years ago when we did about five consecutive quarters of 20% growth. Getting this business back on track is what we're all focused about. We see unbelievable opportunity. As I mentioned, the product portfolio is certainly capable. As we get toward the end of the conversation, we'll give you a look at what the next three years look like. We're really confident in the growth opportunities that remain in this business.
I'll spend some time today to give you a little bit more granularity so you can understand the current situation, and why the next steps we believe are really remedies for the current situation that we have. Let me start with just a snapshot of the business, though. To put everything in perspective, we have a $200 million sample management business made up of three segments that provide really good growth opportunities for us. Stores and the services that go along with that installed base, consumables and instruments. Now 44% of the business, which is the outsourced sample management, a tremendous opportunity. We'll talk about that specifically, but that for us is an incredibly attractive business, and one for which we think has tremendous continued growth potential. It's a global business, and we have 1,500 customers. An incredibly strong and vibrant customer base.
In the product portfolio, we have a number of capabilities that we provide for pharma for biotech, healthcare, clinical, academic, and government, and now in particular, the advent of the cell and gene therapy capabilities. We've expanded the product offerings and the portfolio capability to be able to serve that. In addition to the three major segments that we showed, we also have ancillary laboratory services, and we're beginning to have some genomics capability independent from GENEWIZ. We'll compound this with GENEWIZ, but we have genomics capability associated with adding value to the samples that are under our care. At this point, I want to make sure to spend just a moment. We're going to give you some more granularity into the sample management business. We're going to answer some questions about part of the reason why we slowed down and also some of the remedies we have going forward.
I'll do that at the beginning by showing you major segment by major segment, the trend over the past several years, and it'll lead to some of the issues that have caused the slowing of the business. I start with systems and service, and this is a business that's historically been a little bit lumpy for us in that the systems are a little bit irregular in pattern, and we've developed a new capability, but we continue to see lumpiness in this business. Overall, over the years, steady growth in the storage business for the company. We look at consumables and instruments. We have a steady grower in consumables and instruments. This is the formatting of the devices, the capping and decapping, and literally the management of the materials in the consumable devices.
In the storage business, you could see a slowing from 2018 to 2019, but still steady growth in the outsourced sample managed storage and a doubling of the business from 2016 to 2019. There's still tremendous promise here, but there's a dynamic that's going on, and I'll explain to you in a moment about the slowing in the storage portion of the business, but with all the potential to continue rapid and accelerated growth. From a laboratory services standpoint, the genomics on top of some of the sample management activity we have. Again, this is different from the business that we have with GENEWIZ that Amy will talk about. This is what's inherent in the sample management business for some lab services and things that we do through our alliance at Rutgers University. A steady grower here, but also slowing in the 2018 to 2019 timeframe.
It's really important to know we have a growing business. It's just not growing at the same rate that it was. The portfolio is solid and resilient. We have growth opportunities that come from each of the segments in which we participate in sample management, and they're all expanding over time. However, the near-term issue that exists is the organic growth rate slowed to 7% from 2018 to 2019, and we have two major reasons here which are closely interrelated. I'll unpack this further for you so you can understand the implications of four major customers. We have lumpy revenue patterns from the top four customers in the business and very specifically, we have built a sales organization without scalability. We have coverage issues associated with the market opportunity that exists. I'll give you a little more color on that as well.
First, let's take a look in some more detail at the implications of the makeup of this business. Overall growth is slowing. We talk about four major customers which are lumpy, and I show here very specifically significant growth from 2015 to 2016 for these four major customers. Again, 2016 to 2017, flattening out into 2018 and actually a decrease in 2019. Let me put a little framework around this. These are four top customers, three top pharma companies and one large biotech firm, all behaving exactly like we want them to behave. These are top-Tier customers buying products and capabilities from us, but each one with a little bit different profile. One, I'll give you an example. One of these, a large pharmaceutical company to whom they've entrusted one of their large collections to us.
In 2017, they sent us millions of samples, and we took revenue for registration of the samples, and this continued into 2018, where we got a significant revenue pop from the fees that we charged for registration, and then an ongoing steady revenue stream from the monthly charges that we have for managing the customer samples. In addition, as we went through the individual registration of every sample, they had a lot of discards from the collection. These are samples that we're not going to keep, that we don't need. These are ones that we no longer have permission to use or that we no longer need to keep in storage and continue to pay for. Registration fees one year, registration and some discard fees the next year, but an ongoing steady growth of monthly revenue from a large pharma company.
The behavior here is exactly what we want. We had our sample management company, and part of the sample management is storage. Part of it is registration of the samples individually, one by one, so we can track them, and part of it is retrieval. The behaviors from a single customer show an increase in growth and then a decrease. If we look at the sample storage revenue, that's part of the registered samples that we charge for, it's a steady grower. More importantly, although we don't have an opportunity to have another big slug, they're exactly the customers that we want. They get incremental samples, they give them to us, and we'll continue to build the business. Another one here is a large biopharma company.
Started out with three very active, very aggressive clinical trials, all involving sample management and involving analysis capability and some lab work through our alliance at Rutgers University. Of the three clinical trials that started out, one was canceled abruptly, it stopped the lab services business, and one has been postponed. We have one of three active clinical trials. This is a behavior that is not abnormal in the biotech world, but in normal course, in natural behavior, this is one of the things that's impacted us from a management standpoint. Again, it's not a reversal. Customers are not insourcing samples. They continue to outsource. Customers are not doing any more for their own sample collections. As a matter of fact, they continue to outsource more to us. This is normal behavior that we would expect.
The issue is that we have four of these customers that are lumpy and not 14 of these customers which are lumpy. I'll talk about that in just a moment. When we look at the remainder of the business, so these four top customers. By the way, we measure the top four customers by five years cumulative revenue from the customers. In any given year, they may or may not be the top four, but over a five-year period, the revenue from these customers made them of the top four customers. When we look at the 1,500 customers that make up the 80% of the business, it is exactly the pattern that we'd anticipate, exactly the business that we invested in, strong, steady, continued growth in the sample management business.
We think this is an important element for everyone to understand, and it also informs the actions that we've taken and the next steps. Included in a 15% organic growth rate from these 1,500 customers is some of that decrease in the sample storage business we talked about. Some of this lumpiness, even with a decrease in some of the storage business year-on-year from 2018 to 2019, we still have 15% growth from the majority of the number of customers. The approach from this standpoint is how do we add more of these customers, but in particular, how do we get more revenue from 1,500 customers so that they grow the way we have with the other top four? From the standpoint of the current position in the market, we are really confident that the offerings are correct. We continue to grow.
We think to capture 1,500 customers is no small feat. We can't wait to capture the next 1,500. In terms of these large, lumpy customers, indeed, they're able to impact the growth rate of the business. We'll continue to see strong business from them, but maybe at irregular patterns. Our objective is how do we add more of those large customers and penetrate them in a bigger way so they smooth each other out. This is why we're so enthusiastic about this business. 1.8 billion samples. There are 1.8 billion samples in play for sample management. We serve the entire spectrum of life sciences, clinical research, drug discovery. Every part of this market is our available market. We look at TAM and SAM, they're identical. We could serve this market with all the offerings that we have.
To put it in perspective, at a $200 million business, we're about 3% penetrated in a $7 billion market opportunity. We have tremendous upside here, and we're really intent on getting this back on track. Before I talk about specific market capture and how we're going to attack the growth drivers, I think it's important just to pause for a second to talk about market positioning. This is so you can understand the portfolio that we've created and where we drive tremendous value for customers. There are three elements about the current positioning of the product. The first is we've assembled a cold chain and a workflow for sample management that parallels the customer's workflow as they go through the discovery process.
The second is we have an end-to-end solution of all items related to sample management to a unique portfolio of capability that delivers accurately samples with high efficacy, and we control the value of the customer's sample management portfolio. Finally, world-class capability in every element of sample storage. More and more, as samples become more valuable, as samples become more fragile, world-class capability in every element of sample handling is critical. Our workflow, our sample management workflow against the customer's workflow. We're winning more customers because we can address adjacent workflow issues with our sample management solutions. This is particularly important in the clinical research space, where they depend on the knowledge about the sample condition and cold chain of custody all the way through.
It's a tremendous opportunity for us, and it's one of the reasons why we continue to be very successful in our hit rate in and around clinical. We have the most comprehensive one-stop capability for sample management in the space. We have a lot of competitors here. We compete on the storage side with Thermo Fisher Scientific. We compete on the store side with a couple of other players. In the continuum and in the aggregate, we have a lot of competitors in elements, but no one across the entire end-to-end solution for cold chain capability. It's a tremendous competitive advantage for us, and the capabilities that we've assembled here will become more important as we go forward, not less. We also have a cryogenic version of this cold chain now, which is going to be essential for IVF application for cell and gene therapy.
Dropping this capability now below minus 136 degrees Celsius is a product and capability that we have in play today. Finally, we have world-class expertise, world-class auditable capability in every space here. This is essential. If you're going to serve the Tier 1 most demanding customers in the world, nothing short of this will work. A warehouse full of freezers is not a world-class biorepository. It's a place to store samples. For some samples, that's perfectly okay. For people at the forefront of drug discovery, it's completely subpar and unacceptable. The capabilities we have are world-class in every feature, and that's the only way we can win a customer like this, customer lists like this. This is the Tier 1 best of the best-in-class customers. In addition, we have 1,500 customers who depend upon the solutions that we have. Moreover, there are thousands more.
There are thousands more customers who need our capability who may not know that they do. One by one we win. When we talk about these enormous numbers of wins that we have, it's because of the capability we bring to them in and around sample management and the cold chain workflow world-class performance. I'm going to break this down a little bit more for you, and we'll talk about it specifically in terms of actions that are underway. We look at it in terms of markets this time. We start with pharma and biotech, clinical and healthcare, academic and government. I want to talk about the approach and penetration of each market. We're most heavily penetrated, a $200 million business. We're most heavily penetrated in the pharma and biotech space. When I say that, we still have an enormous opportunity left.
In the four lumpy accounts that we talked about, we have the highest penetration there because we have an incredible capability that we bring to them. We need a dozen more of these large companies. We have issue about penetration. We have scalability issues in that we've penetrated some customers with a very capable portfolio, and we've just barely tapped others, but we're tapped out. We have a sales and go-to-market organization that hasn't been able to keep up with the opportunity, but can and ought to. Every single customer in this space ought to take the same level of advantage of the products that we've sold to some customers where we're deeply embedded.
The actions we've taken are we've added account people, very strong salespeople, and moreover, we've restructured inside the company to take some of the burden off of the salespeople so they can be out winning more business, and we can support the customer through the contracts that we've achieved with inside salespeople, inside capability. This is a really important capability, really important concept, and a significant change to the business. When we look at healthcare and clinical, this is even more dramatic from an opportunity standpoint, a $4 billion opportunity. This is the area of fastest customer capture in the company. We're adding customers faster in this space than any other place. The elements of the portfolio serve this market extremely well, but we're $24 million penetrated.
This is a matter of account coverage and not just capturing accounts, but spending enough time with them, bringing the value-added services so that we can increase the revenue from each of those accounts. Finally, in the area of academic and government, this is a little bit different type of animal. We don't have the same ability to make a commercial proposal to a single source how the decisions are made. It's nonetheless a really important market for us, some of the largest and some of the most valuable sample collections, because they've been going on for decades. They exist in the pharma and government space. How do we go capture the means by which we connect is a little bit different.
We have not just a sales team, but a sales and marketing team putting together the kinds of proposals that need to be adjusted for the academic and government space. This one's a little bit longer-term opportunity for us near in the pharma and biotech, healthcare and clinical. Academic and government is trial base and ultimately build out for us, but all are tremendous opportunities. The key growth strategies are really clear for us. Leverage the strong position in pharma and biotech and expand our go-to-market capability. Target to grow in less targeted spaces. Again, this is a sales equation. This is an investment that we're making to make sure that we have adequate and broader coverage. We can handle 10 million more samples in a month, Martin. All right, in two months. We can handle 10 million more samples. We can sell more stores.
We can keep up with the consumables business. It's a matter of bringing the business in. We think the opportunities and portfolios are really clear. Items number one and two are related to sales. Number three is our aggressive capture of opportunities. I'll give examples in each one of these in the subsequent slides. First, the strong position in pharma and biotech. Let me give an example of one of the important product developments that we've created to help the pharmaceutical companies. Historically, pharma company performs a clinical trial, most often these days with a CRO, a contract research organization. The samples will be collected. They'll go to the CRO for near- term, short-term holding until the sample collection is adequate. Then the clinical trial will start after the CRO assembles the entire collection of samples.
The trial is done, and then after the clinical trial, we'll get those storage samples. We'll get them for archive storage. What the pharmaceutical companies have understood very clearly is the CRO is not the perfect place to put the samples once they're collected. What we've done with one major pharmaceutical company is we have more than 100 agreements in place now for the next clinical trials. When the samples are collected from patients, shortly thereafter, they'll go into short-term storage for us before the clinical trial starts. The pharmaceutical company often has to wait 30 or 60 days for the CRO to assemble the sample collection when they're ready to start, and they don't do it with precise accuracy. The amount of time and the accuracy problems that they have with the sample collection, this is what we do for a living.
This is our business. When we take those samples before the clinical trial, with the 24- to- 48-hour notice, we'll have every sample, 100% of them, accurately delivered to the CRO for the start of the trial without a 30-day wait, without a 60-day wait, and without any rework about what samples are appropriate. At the end of the clinical trial, we get those samples back. There's a handling step that adds tremendous value to the pharmaceutical company, a capability that we employ on a regular basis, and we'll begin to track the sample from almost from collection all the way through end of life. This product we call the Sample Hub.
We're just starting to penetrate. Each and every pharmaceutical company will derive benefit from this kind of added capability. On the biotech side, there are a number of small biotech companies who are startups, and they're going to measure samples and test hypotheses and work on drug development. The beauty of this configuration, the beauty of what we bring, is they never have to set up sample infrastructure. We'll help them design the kit for collection. We'll manufacture the kits for them with our consumables. They'll go through the collection process. We'll take the samples. We'll send them to our laboratory, to their laboratory, wherever they want to do the first level of measurements, and we'll ultimately store the samples for them.
They can become a life sciences company focused on the science, and we take care of all the infrastructures that they probably would have had if they would've started 10 years ago. Because we have that as a capability, we're an enormous enabler for them without infrastructure and give them world-class sample management capability. We're seeing more and more of this kind of business come with these startup companies. On the healthcare and clinical side, there are a number of opportunities we have here. Most of this business to date is helping people manage really large collections and disparate collections and distributed collections.
We have an opportunity frequently where we'll go into a site, we'll categorize the samples that they have, their freezer infrastructure, and we'll help to work with them on which samples ought to stay on site, which samples ought to be discarded, which samples should you send off-site for storage. We make them more efficient. We make them more effective. We help them to identify their material. We shorten their cycle for retrieval and understanding what they have. It's a model that we believe we'll be able to add into the academic side with a different kind of economic argument. We have a number of examples of how we continue to grow the business. When I showed this 1,500 customers and the growth that they are delivering, it comes from these kinds of areas. Again, more coverage and something that will benefit the company tremendously.
Strategy number three is one that we continue to exploit. The collection is simply overwhelmed customers. We work with two universities today. We have 40 million samples in Indianapolis. We work with two universities today who have more freezer capacity than we do, and they don't know that they do. Helping people to manage these collections, manage these samples, we think will provide tremendous value, will save them cost, and will continue to take advantage of these tens of millions of samples collection that are out of the 1.8 billion samples on Earth. In terms of automation opportunities, we talk about these next-generation technologies that no longer can be elective about whether they want the cold chain of custody in the cryo chain. Cell therapies, IVF applications require the kinds of capabilities that we're putting into the market.
We're working with the early adopters and the leaders in the space. David Gray and his team are beginning to put technical capabilities in place to capture this new opportunity. How do we add up? We'll talk a little bit about the business model very specifically. Fundamental to the outsourced sample storage business is we have tens of millions of samples in storage for which we bill every month. We have a large recurring revenue component of the sample management business. This is incredibly attractive for us. 58% of revenue is an ongoing revenue stream. Majority of it comes from samples that are in storage and likely will stay in storage for quite some time. It's a capability that we continue to build upon. It's not an occasional one. You can see us steadily building this revenue stream as we go forward.
What that gives us is enormous operating leverage in the business. This is historically a low CapEx business. When we start with 58% of revenue as part of an ongoing revenue, recurring revenue stream, and we add additional capability, we're talking about adding sales costs and sales capability into the company. At the same time, we have efficiencies that will allow us to take cost out. With almost no additional cost structure in this business unit, we'll be able to continue to increase revenue and drive $0.40- $0.50 on the dollar over the next three years to operating income. Let me spend a minute here because we talked about the opportunities we have. We talked about the slowing growth rate, which we built into the forecast for 2020. The changes that we've made were going to be effective. They're going to take time.
We forecast for you a 2020 business growth in the sample management space to be 7%. By the time we exit 2020, we go into 2021, we'll be back up in the teens again. We're confident about our ability to execute here. We've lowered the near- term because it's going to take time for the remedies to take effect. The most important part here is that because of the infrastructure in place, even with the growth rates that we show, we get back up to 13% growth in the 2021-2022 timeframe. The impact on operating income is tremendous. Strong leverage, but a really solid business opportunity and a business model. For sample management, at 1.8 billion samples growing 10% per year, we have nothing but market opportunity in front of us.
The portfolios are strong, so we are really confident that the offerings we have serve the market particularly well. We may reconfigure them ever so slightly, but what we have is needed by the market and being utilized by the market. We're going to go get more of it. In time, in 2021 and 2022, actually before the end of 2020, you'll begin to see synergies on the revenue side from the addition of GENEWIZ. We're working specifically in around the clinical space. There are outsourced capabilities that historically we've used third-party suppliers that GENEWIZ can do particularly well. We'll be making that transformation in the business starting before the end of 2020, but we'll begin to get revenue synergies from the GENEWIZ opportunity. From a gross margin standpoint, it's really important. We talk about gross margin in this business.
We've been pegged around 38% for some time now, two or three years, and we haven't made progress here. We have initiatives underway, and one of the things that we'll be spending a lot of time on as a leadership team is how do we get the gross margin up to where this business can easily perform, in the 42%-44% range. This kind of operating leverage takes us up into the teens from an operating income standpoint, and we're tremendously confident about our ability to get there in this relatively short horizon. With that, I want to summarize my comments about sample management. The market opportunity is as big as we thought, bigger than we thought. The growth rate is still strong. We're barely penetrated, but we have a portfolio that serves the market incredibly well. We're making adjustments. We've already made changes to the business unit.
We'll continue to make some more, but the changes are going to take some time. We're incredibly confident about our opportunity to capture what everybody understood already and what we still understand to be a tremendous opportunity. 3% penetration with a singular portfolio that's uniquely ours is nothing but upside, and we've got a team that's going after it with a vengeance. We look forward to keep updating you on this business. We're extremely enthusiastic about our prospects and confident that we have a fix in place. With that, I'm going to happily turn the podium over to Dr. Amy Liao, the Founder and CEO of GENEWIZ. You're going to learn about a new company, new capability, new technology, and prepare to be really interested in a terrific business. Amy.
Hello, everybody. Thank you, Steve, for the introduction. As you already learned, that GENEWIZ is the newest member to Brooks Automation. I understand that most of you probably don't know too much about GENEWIZ yet. The goal of my presentation today is to explain to you who we are, what we do, and how we compete and win. For today's presentation, I will cover GENEWIZ today, our impressive track record, the differentiated business model that enabled our growth so far, and some of the key drivers for our future growth. With the acquisition of GENEWIZ, Brooks adds to its portfolio a very substantial revenue stream and strong capabilities in genomics. For the last 12 months ending June 30th, 2019, we delivered a revenue of $134 million. We have 13 labs across the globe and just a little over 1,400 employees.
Among our employees, close to 900 of us are based in China, a little over 400 are here in the U.S., with the rest located in Europe and Japan. We capture new customer accounts every month, right now we currently serve over 4,000 customers across the globe. We bring to Brooks strong capabilities in sequencing and synthesis. In the last 12 months, the same last 12 months ending June 30th, 2019, 33% of our revenue came from Next-generation sequencing , about 32% from Sanger sequencing , 26% from gene synthesis, with the remaining smaller lines adding up to the last 9%. The values that we provided to our customers makes GENEWIZ a global leader in genomic services. We serve blue-chip pharmaceutical customers, we serve large and small biotechnology companies, we have many leading academic institutions as our customers, too.
Our customers, they choose to use GENEWIZ, use our genomic services because they benefit from the high-quality data that we deliver, because they benefit from the proprietary technologies, processes that we developed, and because they benefit from the highly technical consultations that our team provides, and last but not least, because they benefit from the fast, timely, and cost-effective solutions from GENEWIZ. Some companies, they read genes, other companies write genes. At GENEWIZ, we do both. We provide a full breadth of genomic services for high-impact markets. Our customers use our genomic services for a variety of applications. These applications include basic research, drug development, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, or development of new therapeutic methods and synthetic biology, just to name a few. I was actually asked about this earlier this morning. What are the differences between Sanger sequencing and Next-generation sequencing ?
I'll briefly explain to you with this slide and the next slide. Sanger sequencing is a technology that has been around for over 40 years now. It sequences one single gene at a time. It's still the gold standard for sequencing. Sanger sequencing is very fast, and it's very affordable. For all those reasons, it is used in everyday experiments, and this technology is here to stay. Next-generation sequencing , on the other hand, is relatively new, and it's a lot more powerful. Next-generation sequencing , this technology can sequence an entire genome with just one sequencing run. For this reason and this project, this Next-generation sequencing project usually takes much longer time and costs much more money. People use Next-generation sequencing for more advanced and more complex studies. Our customers, they use both Sanger and Next-generation sequencing at the different steps of their workflow. These two technologies, they complement each other.
They do not replace each other, and they will not replace each other. We have a very large and high-quality customer base. One in three molecular biologists in the U.S., they choose GENEWIZ for their genomic services. GENEWIZ is cited in over 11,000 scientific publications. This large customer base, it provides us plenty of growth opportunities whenever we expand capabilities, whenever we add new services to our portfolio. Our customer base is pretty diverse too. 31% of our revenue came from academic institutions, 55% from pharma and biotech. Among those pharma and the biotech, the top 20 pharma companies, their revenues taking up less than 20% of our total revenue. The miscellaneous other types of entities, they contribute to the last 14% of our revenue. This high diversity really gives us very low concentration risk.
One of our competitive advantages is that we're strategically located in life science hubs. Across the globe, we have 13 laboratory facilities. All 13 labs provide Sanger sequencing services. We have four NGS labs, four gene synthesis labs. All those are major life science hubs, for example, San Francisco, Boston, New York, New Jersey, U.K., near London, Germany, and Suzhou, China. In all of those strategic hubs, we have laboratory operations. This global footprint, the combination of this global footprint with the breadth of our services, together, it is a true unique advantage for GENEWIZ. Our customers, they can come to GENEWIZ for both gene reading and gene writing. Our gene reading includes both Sanger sequencing and Next-generation sequencing . We have 13 labs in five countries of three different continents.
This combination of global footprint and the breadth of our services really makes GENEWIZ the partner of choice to life science communities across the globe. We have a pretty impressive track record, and I'll show you some data in the next slide. We have achieved consistent growth through both market expansion and capability expansion. This slide, we summarized our data for the years from 2010 to 2018. In 2010, the number of labs that we had was six, and it went up to 10 in year 2014. As of now and the last year, in 2018, we have 13 labs. Over the years, we added new service capabilities as well. Back in 2010, most of our revenue came from Sanger sequencing. In 2014, close to 40% of our revenue already came from gene synthesis.
Fast-forward to 2018, the newest addition to our service portfolio, Next-generation sequencing , already grew to be the largest service line among our portfolio. Over these years, through both capability expansion and the market expansion, our revenue grew from less than $20 million in 2010 to more than $120 million in 2018. That's 600% growth in just eight years. Our growth is built upon a strong, differentiated business model. Our differentiations are delivered through our speed, our convenience, and our best-in-class capabilities. I will elaborate each one of this point in the subsequent slide. The unmatched time to results that we provide to our customers adds productivity to our customers and really accelerate their work. We are fast because we do Sanger sequencing same day and overnight.
When our customers go to work in the morning, the data is already there, is already available for them to download to their computers. We're fast because we have lab operations in most of the major life science hubs. This enables the greatest number of customers to easily submit their samples and retrieve their results. We're fast because we structure our workflow in a way that we provide the industry leading speed for both sequencing and synthesis. We provide unmatched convenience to our customers and makes it really easy for them to work with us. The convenience is reflected in the over 2,500 drop boxes that we installed global-wise. Our customers can easily drop off their samples in one of those boxes without having to worry about packaging and shipping. The convenience is reflected in the end-to-end solutions that we provide.
Our customers can come to GENEWIZ for both gene reading and gene writing without having to hand off a project from a vendor to vendor. The convenience is delivered through the online platform that our own IT team built. Our customers can easily place an order, track the order, and retrieve the results through this platform. Because of our best-in-class capabilities, our customers, they can get the results they want. They can get the products they need every time they work with us. Our capabilities in innovative solutions, our capabilities in the technical consultations, and our capabilities in informatics, and our capabilities in operation management, altogether, they make GENEWIZ really the partner of choice to our customers. The values that we provided to our customers enable them to streamline their workflow and increase their spend with GENEWIZ as well.
Here I showed a case study where the customer is a blue-chip pharmaceutical company. When they started working with GENEWIZ years ago, they were just using Sanger sequencing services. They do have many other genomics needs, and they were either doing it themselves or working with other service providers. By working with GENEWIZ, by using our fully integrated genomic solutions, including on top of Sanger sequencing and including gene synthesis, Next-generation sequencing , and p lasmid preparation , the customer was able to enjoy a much faster turnaround time and high- quality output. Their spend went from just a little over a few hundred thousand dollars in 2012 to over $5 million in 2018. This is just one example.
We have many similar cases with our existing customers. This providing multiple services and providing end-to-end solutions will provide us plenty of growth opportunities whenever we capture new customers in the future. Last but not least, with the acquisition of GENEWIZ, we add to Brooks another avenue for strong growth in the future. We can continue to grow because the market, this genomic service market, is big and growing. We can continue to grow by expanding our service capabilities, and we can deliver additional growth by working with sample management, with our sample management colleagues at Brooks and deliver additional synergies. By leveraging a strong brand in a growing market, we can achieve strong growth. The market is growing because there is more research dollars, more budget directed towards genomic studies. The market is growing because people continue to outsource more.
It is already proven that outsourcing of genomic services, people can expect faster turnaround time, more specialized expertise, and more cost-effective solutions. The market is growing because there are more and more adoption of genomics applications, especially adoption of Next-generation sequencing technology. We have a lot to capitalize in the U.S. and in Asia. Our brand is strengthening in Europe too. That will be a leverage for our future growth. By expanding our capabilities, we can achieve strong growth. We'll build more capabilities to capture, to support the increasing demand in cell and gene therapy. We'll build more capabilities to better support precision medicine activities. We'll build more capabilities to facilitate the development of our biologics drugs. By collaborating, by working with our sample management colleagues, we can deliver additional growth. Together, we can add more value to the samples. Together, we can expand cross-sell opportunities.
Together, we'll increase the convenience to the customers and increase their stickiness with Brooks. One example area where GENEWIZ and sample management can work together and generate growth synergy is in cell and gene therapy. Our sample management capabilities, they have touch points throughout the entire workflow of cell and gene therapy, starting from discovery to preclinical development, all the way to clinical development and end applications. In GENEWIZ, we have capabilities that support the different steps of the entire workflow as well. By working together, we can increase the convenience to the customers and also facilitate the progress of cell and gene therapy. Looking forward, we'll continue to invest, leverage, and expand our profit. Right now, we have a $35 million investment underway in China, and with this investment, we'll consolidate our footprint and streamline our workflow.
We'll continue to invest in R&D and add new high-value services to our portfolio. By leveraging these capabilities, by leveraging this investment, plus leveraging the existing infrastructure that we have in place, we can expand our gross margin. We expect our top-line growth to continue at a 19% rate. With gaining the leverage, we expect our operating income to grow at a much faster rate. Our projection for the future is strong and bullish. We expect our top-line revenue to grow to $240 million in year 2022. With the leverage that we've talked about, we expect our operating margin to grow from 9% in 2018 to 14%-18% in that same year, 2022.
With the growth in the market that we operate in, with the growth in our service capabilities, plus the synergies that we have with sample management, and plus the leverage of the existing infrastructure, existing capabilities, all this together, they will enable both our top-line revenue growth and our bottom-line profit growth. Our revenue, which was stated in the last slide, will grow to $240 million, and our profit margin will expand by close to 5-9 points to 14%-18%. In summary, with the acquisition of GENEWIZ, we add to Brooks another avenue for strong growth. The market that we're in, the genomic service market, is big and growing. GENEWIZ has a strong track record and a differentiated business model. We are part of Brooks, the engine for our growth is stronger than ever.
We are very well-positioned to grow strong, grow fast in the future. Thank you. With this, I'll introduce the CFO of our company, Lindon, and he's between you and lunch.
Very good, Amy. When I sit and I listen to our team present the story in aggregate, I reflect on two things. One, obviously, we're very proud of the business that we have and the strength of each piece. I also have to say, I just really enjoy listening to them tell the story. Just what a great management team that I get to work with. That's the tip of the iceberg. As I said earlier, there's a lot of the extended management team that I hope you'll take some time when we're finished to get to know and have lunch with them and speak with them. I'm going to turn now to what does this all add up to financially?
You heard each of the business leaders talk about a target, and we've been very thoughtful in putting this together to make sure that it's built on track record, actions, capability, and some confidence that we know how to deliver it. We'll talk a bit about performance record. I think it's always important to ground ourselves in what we have accomplished, not to relive it, but to remind ourselves, do we have a track record to deliver and to execute? Second, I'll talk briefly on capital allocation, what we've done in recent years, where we are headed with that, and then the financial targets, of course, what it all adds up to. When you look at a company and try to assess transformation, the very first thing that you look for is, well, just how much change is there? Where is the change?
We look at this report card and we say, "Wow, it's really, in the last five years, double the market that's available for us to serve." It's more than double the revenue of the company based on what's in our portfolio. We have more than doubled the expansion and the diversification of the company. In other words, more than doubled the space that we play in life sciences. You can go all the way through this chart, and obviously every element has a significant change. You're not just looking for change, you're looking for progress, and it's pervasive. Obviously, you get to the bottom and you look at it and you say, "Well, if I went back five years ago, what was the value of the company? Did it produce value?" It's up 5x .
We're really happy to tell you, we have a track record of driving change. As Steve highlighted, it was cash available at that time. It's cash available now. While we used some debt in the past year, we've closed each of the fiscal years and expect to this year without a net debt situation. If you step back and look at just what drove that increase of enterprise value, you could claim it in just a few stages. We stepped into life sciences on the core competencies of automation and cryogenics back in 2011. We invested, and as Steve described, we really do think about this in terms of everything we do, we're creating value. Value creation in what we acquire through a lens of ROIC. Value creation in what we invest in and manage for organic performance and expansion.
Not just what it's going to do for us today, what's it going to do for us next year and the year after in the relationship with this customer front? We invest and we expand. In 2014, we saw an opportunity to pick up this company that Dave Jarzynka talked about. Contamination Control Solutions is a product now that we've really taken to the market, and everybody recognizes it as a Brooks product. Back in 2014, it was a product of a small company in Germany called DMS. They were tiring, and they kept promising there was growth around the corner. We saw it, we read it. Steve and Dave examined it and said, "This is the time. As the industry goes across 28 nm, this is going to accelerate." It positioned us for growth in semiconductor. Not in life sciences, but in semiconductor.
It tuned that portfolio. Later in 2015, the next transformation step was in life sciences, when we saw the opportunity not just to sell infrastructure and the consumables that goes with it, but to head toward the services business, and this is that BioStorage. That recurring revenue nature of the business that's 58% now, really anchored in 2016 fiscal year when we made that acquisition. As Steve highlighted, we've now more than doubled that business since we've acquired it, because we acquire, then we invest, and we grow. About that time, life science analysts started taking notice, and we started picking up coverage. Also, we highlighted in an Investor Day at that time, we're just about to see an inflection point, not just on life sciences, but also on semiconductor. People weren't sure they believed us.
As we moved through toward 2017, it became really clear two things were happening. Life sciences was responding to the fact that we had a holistic portfolio to offer to a customer. You could use us if you wanted your infrastructure. You could use us if you wanted your outsourcing. We could give you the complete cold chain of custody. On semiconductor, it was really compelling. We had an increasing intensity of capital in the industry, and we had positioned our portfolio to take advantage of that complexity of the chip, the increase, not just of the fab lines, but the increase of the complexity. We saw a significant acceleration of value. Three years later, we now are taking advantage of the adjacency space.
In other words, if you would've asked us five years ago or eight years ago, "Are you going to be in gene sequencing?" We would've looked at each other and said, "What are you talking about?" Because we have moved into this space, and this is key in our acquisition path, is that when you acquire and you, not to overstate it, but once you conquer a space, once you're leading a space, now it's opened up a tremendous field of targets. Not only do we see ourselves as opening up our market that's available to us today, but we open up that perspective. We're not going to go out into left field, but we're going to play the center of what we know. The center of what we know is now touching more and more opportunities.
It gives us a path for the future. The enterprise value obviously has responded to that, and I think you can see the strength of the company. I have oversimplified it a bit. I don't want to do that because the management team here would say, "Man, you make it look so easy that we just did all of this in five steps." It was eight years, 19 transactions, almost $1 billion invested. I think 1,000 incoming on John O'Brien's desk and 30 things we went to process on, but 15 acquisitions, some divestitures. All of these things are in that value creation that we talk about. In particular, in my role and as the company has ingrained now with an ROIC focus. Is return on invested capital, are we going to make the hurdle rates that we talk about?
In other words, in semiconductor, we look for something better than our weighted average cost of capital within three years. In life sciences, we look for it within five years, knowing it's more of a strategic window, and that there's something that doesn't show up in the cash equation on my page, but it shows up on the Investors page, and that is a multiple in the stock and the diversification and the stability of the company. Higher growth, higher margin, less cyclicality. We believe that we have accomplished something significant. The track record shows up in life sciences. If you look at the continuation of the buildup of that business, you could look at this and say, "Well, clearly you've grown every year." We like to highlight to you that in each year we've added something in the form of acquisitive growth.
Every year since 2016, we've added something every year in terms of organic growth on what we had had in our hands a year ago. We're very diligent on how we assess this. We count anything acquisitive in the first 12 months. After that, it becomes organic. We have a very consistent track record of this value creation of saying, yes, acquisitions are important for us to continue to build, but then we're going to invest, and we're going to grow, and we're going to grow on that base. I'm really happy to tell you, we haven't had an acquisition that has depleted our value. It continues to increase in value. I just give you this quick snapshot of what we've done recently.
In fact, I started the meeting saying, part of the reason we're here is just because we did a significant acquisition, a significant divestiture. Look at this curve. You had a pretty straight line on Amy Liao's business and GENEWIZ when we looked at it and said, "Wow, this is such consistent growth across time." They've averaged 25% CAGR before we bought them for the previous five years. Sometimes it was in the high teens, sometimes it was in 30s%. It's a very consistent growth across time. Look at the cryo business that we sold, and you can see it's got the cyclical nature exactly the way we described it.
In fact, coincidentally, about the quarter that we closed the cryo sale, this quarter, right before that, we reported the quarter revenue. You can see that the GENEWIZ revenue had just started crossing over what cryo was producing. You might say, "Well, gee, Lindon, that's a little opportunistic. You just took us through an anomaly of two deals that you happen to do." It's not an anomaly. You go back to 2011, remember, we let go of contract manufacturing to step into life sciences. We did that in 2011. In 2014, we let go of an instrumentation business, and we got 3x revenue in a semiconductor space for a flat revenue equation on a product set. We invested it in Contamination Control.
At that time, it was a $30 million business, and today it's at a $100 million run rate, or $119 million on the charts that we saw today. It's not an anomaly. This is what we do. This is a microcosm of this past 12 months, but this is what we've done over the trajectory of the company. Now that we have what we have, what does that look like over time? We pull out the things we sold. We just look at what we own today. This is the trajectory of life sciences. We're in our 17th quarter of consecutive growth without a step backwards. I will acknowledge that our organic growth rate has slowed down recently in sample management. As Steve said, we seek constant and continual growth going forward. We see legs to make that happen. We have lumpiness in certain customers.
We always face that headwind on the large store systems, but we continue to power through that. We add the GENEWIZ with even stronger growth capability. Part of the key to this chart is at the bottom, operating profit has broken over to break even two years ago. This year, we're starting to see the leverage, and we will outline and underscore the model that Steve and Amy both laid out for more profit going forward. Let's take a look at the semiconductor business. Wait a minute, what did you do to the semiconductor? This is what we did to the semiconductor business. This is the portfolio that we hold today, what happened over the last three years. This is the business that you would describe, this is your cyclical business, right?
It's awfully hard to see the cycles inside the last three years, and there's definitely been cycles. I just encourage you to think about that, and we're not here to tell you, I would never tell an investor that the business is not cyclical. We are tied to a cycle. We have muted it by advancing our products into growth advantaged, as I said, not just the expansion of fab lines, but for the complexity. The most common question I've had this year from investors is what is different about Brooks Semiconductor business? How did you do this? Number one. Dave accelerated into secular trends, positioned the portfolio for secular trends. Number two, he's accelerated his investment around engineering for design-in wins, and you've seen those results that he spoke about.
Third, he expanded his customer base, not just around Tier 1 are we growing, which we have over time, but we've expanded into Tier 2 with relationships in Korea and in China and global in support of the Tier 2 space. Then we also added Contamination Control, which sells directly to the fab. Add to that the fact that you heard about the complex wafers at the back end of the line, we're not just in the front end of the line. We now have a much more diverse customer base that is spending through those cycles, it helps mute. I would emphasize one point. It's the acceleration of winning that keeps you moving. It's not just the happenstance of when people buy, it's also the acceleration of winning. Diversification of customer base, increase of winning, and investment for continued growth.
Obviously, the punchline here is again at the bottom of the chart. Look at the operating profit. Continues to ramp. Dave has outlined that he's headed again toward 20%. I'll remind you, before we sold the cryo pump, we were operating at 20%. We started sharing some extra costs because on a smaller pie, it's setting back to that 15%, 16% level. He's improved through this year. We're headed back to 20%, part of that's cost takeout, part of that is efficiency. Most of it is product and customer value that he's delivering. In aggregate, you see a business that has been able to grow 20% pretty consistently over the last three years, operating margins continue to grow on the continuing operations basis. We see the continued leverage. I'm going to get to that in a moment.
It's a profit-growing revenue base that is fueled by demand and a need for Brooks in both spaces. We're not content with where we are. We're proud of where we are, we're not content. We're going to keep going, we're going to keep rolling in both spaces. Let's look at how do you roll forward with a capital allocation model. Over the last five years, we've deployed over $1 billion of cash. If I start at the top of the pie and just work my way around, you can see our very first priority is organic. We're going to invest capital expense, we're going to also invest in R&D.
In the CapEx, that's one area on this chart I'll highlight for those that are building models to give you a little bit of guidance on this item, is that while we've been about 2%-3% of CapEx to revenue ratio in the past, think of this as 4%-6%. In the higher end for the next couple of years, only because we are replacing a leasing strategy in Suzhou, China with a building strategy. After we get past that, you can think about this going back in the 4%-5% range. The next big piece of the pie is M&A, 62%. Do you expect us to continue that? I think you're seeing that what we're saying today is there's tremendous value in taking our portfolio, deploying the cash we generate, and continue to build capital value around our acquisition strategy.
In all the modeling, you're going to see us in what the leaders of the business have talked about, we're not counting anything to be acquired. We plan to acquire, we can assure you. Of course, we've had a dividend ever since 2011 when we started the path into life sciences, and it served a very good purpose at that time to stabilize people. If people questioned our strategy, now it serves a very good purpose as continuity. We don't have intention to pull this back. It's always in the board's purview to determine our final dividend policy. Right now, our policy is to continue where we are. First, let's invest the cash as long as we have opportunities. The pipeline is rich on the M&A front. Expect this to stay.
What will be our fuel for capital allocation going forward is the balance sheet. We have just reset the balance sheet with the divestiture. If you did the arithmetic, let's look at the bottom bars for a moment. If you did the arithmetic from our Q3 closing to now with the deal closed, we said the net proceeds would be about $550 million, you should get to about an expectation of net cash position, without the net of debt, $165 million. I will update you that because we don't pay taxes immediately on the gain on sale, you'll see us carry about $100 million-$105 million more than that through the end of the year, then as we get into the January, February time, we'll pay the taxes on that gain.
We get the benefit of the cash, but at our disposal is $165 million net cash, net of all debt, and we only have about $50 million of debt currently on the balance sheet. That's netted in that number. In addition, we built the EBITDA, and with a leverage policy on our debt equation, we'll said that we'll always manage it within a 3x . We can go to 4x if we need to and bring it back down as we manage forward. You can expect us to manage around the 3x . In big picture, that's about $400 million more capacity of debt in total. Like I said, I've got $50, but we could afford to take on a total of $400 plus the net cash of $165. Could I do another GENEWIZ- type deal? Yes, we could. Are we looking to?
Yes, we're looking to, but we're not here to tell you that we have one. We're saying that we're working the pipeline to do things transformative, but we'll also be busy because one of the key things that we've built is that capability to see small things and value it, just as Steve outlined and what Dave has exemplified. Let's move on to the financial targets. I understand this is where fingers get busy, pencils get busy. I will tell you that Mark Namaroff's done a nice job summarizing the financial targets. After the meeting's all done, anyone who's interested in a copy of these pages, you can grab one. Of course, everything will be posted on the website. First, what you heard from semiconductor in the 2022 space.
You're going to see about 8%-12% growth in this revenue range from the 2018 base. In that range, we range semiconductor because we never know if the total industry's going to be modestly up or up a lot, or even down. So we always reserve the right to start moving our model each direction, and we'll keep a window on this because semiconductor does carry cycles. We foresee an 8%-12% growth rate over this period of time, and this would be our 2-4 points of premium growth above the WFE projections. We see the margin target expansion. We've been operating at a 41% gross margin in the recent quarters in semiconductor. You could say, "Well, do you only expect to get 2-4 points over the next three years?" That's not as interesting.
We try to be conservative on this. We try to be anchored. If we're at the lower end of the range of so we get a little less utilization at the high end, we shoot for higher than this, but 42%-44% I think is the right guidance for you in our financial model. This is what I'm counting on the EPS model that I'm talking to you about. Very little operating expense required in terms of expansion, as Dave highlighted in the leverage. It drops through to really good operating margins above the 20% by 2022. In life sciences, you would look at this, and you would say, well, from the current projection, we project about $330 million this year. You're about a 16% growth rate over the next three years.
In this case, Steve highlighted to you a slower path this next year and accelerating to 13%, but it's 11% over the three years on sample management. It has just about a 19% growth rate on a pro forma basis. Remember, we didn't own GENEWIZ the entire fiscal year this year, but about 19% on a pro forma basis for the GENEWIZ business, total of about 16% growth. In this case, we'll also pick up some gross margin. I'll highlight to you, fundamentally, we're holding, in this model, GENEWIZ margins approximately flat. When I say flat, I'm pleased to say we've been describing them from 47%-51%. In our model today, we're saying 48%-52%. Think about it as 50% gross margin, plus or minus. We hold it flat over this three-year period in my EPS model.
The improvements coming from faster growth in GENEWIZ with a favorable mix, also the performance improvement that Steve outlined for our sample management business. We think more of that improvement will come in the next 12 months, and then will continue to steady forward. Over the next 12 months, we believe that we'll be able to implement some cost reductions and take out and to accelerate the gross margin in the 2020 model. In total, you're talking about a Brooks business that's grown about 14% between 2019 to 2022. You see operating margins getting to about 19% overall, so knocking at the door of 20% in total. I would emphasize, by the way, on operating margins, this is just a 2022 model, not to tell you what steady state would be when we reach the potential. We believe that life sciences indeed will exceed 20%.
We indeed expect semiconductor continue to leverage as you move past 2022. For 2022, you get to this picture. ROIC, you notice, is up at 13%. I looked for a recent update on our weighted average cost of capital. My bankers tell me we're right between 11% and 12%. This is our objective is to always exceed our weighted average cost to capital. I'm going to give you a little more detail on this in color. 2019 is on this page. This reflects the guidance that we provided in August, it's not a change or an update. It's what we provided in August as we closed the last quarter. It's reflected here in the context of the fiscal year. Now I'm going to give you our preliminary guidance for 2020.
2020 is interesting for us because we're two weeks away from the end of our fiscal year, finishes September 30th. I got to highlight that there's a lot to get done in the last two weeks. There's a skew in semi that produces a lot at the end of this quarter. It feels like I should know exactly that I'm focused on 2020. Right now, we're really focused on executing 2019. As we look into 2020, and we'll learn more over the next six weeks, and we may fine-tune this as we get to the earnings call, we see this growing about 9% ± in the semiconductor space this next year. More specifically, we've described to you strength in Contamination Control in the first half is going to carry the day.
In the second half, we're expecting the industry to come back a little more bullish on Tier 1 and across the industry. In life sciences, you'll see about $60 million of growth. Keep in mind that we lost about half a quarter. We're missing a half a quarter in the current 2019 period because we didn't own GENEWIZ until November 15th. With this, again, you would have about 19% organic growth on GENEWIZ and about 7% growth on sample management. Margin expansion, you could get to the rest of it pretty quickly. You'll see operating margin expansion in 2020. You get to an EPS range that centers around $1.30 ± $0.10. This is our preliminary guidance for 2020. We have some confidence in this. We'll go into our year-end and do our final reviews, lock in our own operating plan.
Since we're knocking at the door at the end of the year, we thought we'd provide that. Of course, what did it add up to when everybody talked to you about 2022? We're now talking about a business that's between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion by 2022. We've got an operating margin there that average out to 18%-20%. That's semi just over 20%, and life science is still pressing for the 20%. We more than tripled the EPS. $2-$2.40 gets us to $2.20 by that time. I think I've convinced you that the margins are pretty achievable. Let me just take one more step at this for you. The revenue growth, we've belabored the revenue growth. You've seen the growth initiatives. It's about 14% from this year.
Look at the gross margin and the operating expense lines for a moment, it's simple arithmetic to get to the operating income. It's really modest margin improvement on the gross margin side, keeping in mind while Dave's demonstrated 7 points over the last four years, I'm only counting on about 3 points over the next three years, less than 3 points. In GENEWIZ, I'm not looking for gross margin improvement. I'm looking for operating margin through leverage of OpEx. In then sample management, we get about 4 points improvement in gross margin. Performance improvement, sample management continued but slower progression in semi with expectations to shoot higher, this is what we have factored in. Operating expense, it affords us about a net of about $20 million a year investment. I will highlight to you, we are taking cost out.
We have our eyes on about $12 million of aggregate cost to carve out, to remove, and that's netted from these investments already. We believe half of that'll be done by the time we get halfway into 2020 and the rest of it by the end of 2020. You could say linearly over the year, but we have steps to get that done. I said we're ROIC-focused. I think it's fair to give you an update on the ROIC. As we progressed, obviously, we were very proud of the last two years. We exceeded our weighted average cost of capital. We continue to increment it. There's not a very efficient way to talk about marginal ROIC, but that's how I think about it, is I'm looking for the next wave of growth. Does it add more value than the last of the base?
We keep lifting the ROIC of the business. When you acquire a business like GENEWIZ and you pay $450 million, you put $450 million of assets on the balance sheet. When you sell a business like cryo that did not have very many assets, you let go of the profit, and it had good ROIC. It just was cyclical, lower growth. We reset. We show about 7% target now with heavier assets. We've got some amortization of intangibles flowing. We see us getting back above our weighted average cost of capital over this horizon. It drives us. The leadership that has spoken to you today has about a third of their long-term incentive plan tied to the ROIC metric for improvement as set by the board each year. This is important to us.
We think it's also given us the right focus and the lens to filter out many of those deals that didn't make sense. We'll move forward on that basis. Growth, operating income, earnings per share more than triple from 2018, about triple from 2019, actually. We see this as reflect back on what we described. Yes, we have transformed. We're not finished. We think there's much more to come. We're very excited about the financial model that this all adds up to. It's very reasonable. Piece by piece, I try to give you an aggregate. I try to give you the pieces so you could see where the track record is, where it's very reasonable going forward. We fully plan to exceed these, but these are the ranges that would get you to the tripling of EPS. This is my summary chart for the day.
For the day, what you've heard is we really are in two strong markets. We keep advancing. We keep progressing in those markets, and as I said, we keep seeing adjacent spaces that we can add some value there. We're in leadership positions in both places. In fact, while you would say we have very low share in sample management, we're the only place that you could come to for a total cold chain of custody solution, and GENEWIZ has the broadest set of offerings to serve on all platforms for both short and long sequencing, as well as synthesis. Semiconductor, you find us in every fab in the world. We're counted and relied upon by almost every fab now for Contamination Control. It's an attractive model. The financial model has brought 5x improvement in the enterprise value. We'll continue to grind away at this.
We work on this. Like I said, we could think of this in stages, but it's many transactions, many investments, but it's inherent in the value creation model that we've talked about. The final step, we focus on the returns. It's an ROIC filter. If it doesn't make that, we set it aside. If it makes it, we make sure that it makes sense for us, that we can collaborate, and we can add incremental value to the business we're acquiring. When it does, we move forward. We invest in it, we grow it. That's the summary. We're so pleased that you spent the time and the attention with us today. I'm going to invite the leadership team up on the stage with me so we can do another healthy round of Q&A. We've got about 15 minutes to wind up here.
We're not going to cut you off after five like we did the morning session. We're going to keep moving forward on the Q&A. All of you can come up, and we'll share in the questions. I'll give the tough ones to Dave and the easy ones to me.
Oh.
Yeah.
As we do this, let's go ahead and start.
I've got the mic here.
Thank you. Patrick Ho from Stifel. Two questions. First, maybe for Steve or Lindon, in terms of the margin improvements that you're looking at for the life sciences business, how much of it do you believe is just from pure revenue growth versus some internal operational improvements you can make? I have a follow-up question.
I'll take a shot at that. Steve and I have really spent a lot of time. I like the way he said it. It was interesting. He said, "Lindon and I are going to spend a lot more time in sample management." Actually, I was thinking, "Well, what did we do this last month?" We spent a lot more time in sample management in recent months. I will tell you that with 7% revenue growth in 2020, we do expect to be executing above 40% in 2020. Half of the gross margin improvement will come in the first year, not just on the backs of revenue growth, but on improvement in execution of the business, and both in the manufacturing as well as enhancement of the value that we're providing. Cost takeout is fundamental. We're very focused on that.
We'll get half the gross margin by 2020, the other half between 2020 and 2022. I'll just highlight that we have brought in some expertise around sample management as well. I'll mention for those in the room, I don't want to single out any management, but Ted Gresik is sitting there at the table with you, Patrick, and he's helping to oversee the store systems nowadays, and is very focused on this with us. We have other experts that have come into parts of sample management under our leadership team as well. A little bit change of management is going to help accelerate. We're very proud of the team that we have, but it's always good to bring in some more execution capability.
Great. As my follow-up question for Dr. Liao, I found the GENEWIZ presentation extremely informative, and you brought up one of the key areas about synergies with the cell therapy and the gene sequencing on that front. I know it's really early in the stage of the total Brooks company. How do you see potential synergies be in the sample management side, driving the GENEWIZ genomics opportunity?
Is this on?
Yeah.
Yeah. It's still early. We do see we have some visibility to potential opportunities. Even as of now, we see inquiries from customers who have stored samples with sample management, with our both colleagues that have sequencing inquiries as well. Those samples, nowadays, there are more adoption of using sequencing technology, especially Next-generation sequencing technology, to analyze those samples, to get data, to interpret those data for their next- step clinical applications. That's definitely what we think is happening, and we'll see more of those when we combine our sales forces from GENEWIZ and sample management together. In addition to waiting for the opportunities to come to us, we'll actively identify those opportunities. That's revenue synergy.
I think with operation synergy in, we have 13 labs right now, There's intention, there's something in plan for us to build more labs using the footprints that our sample management team has as well. Those are just couple of examples.
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question again. It's Craig Ellis at B. Riley FBR. I wanted to start just by thanking all of you for the information that you presented today. Steve, congratulations on all you've accomplished so far in the transformation. Amy, I wanted to clarify one of the points that you made when you were talking about the growth targets in your business. I think you identified that contribution from the market, capabilities, growth, and synergies would be the three drivers to what looks like about $120 million of incremental sales growth over the target period. Can you do two things relative to those three drivers? One, identify their relative contribution to the $120 million in growth. And two, just help us understand how much visibility you have into each of those.
Good question. Yeah. The growth drivers that I mentioned include, first, the market is growing, the genomics market. When we look at the study that we commissioned, both commissioned ourselves and the studies that are out there that are available, they all point to a very steady growing market. GENEWIZ historically has been delivering a growth that outpaces the market growth. We expect that we will be able to continue to do that. When the market grows, we'll continue to grow. Over the years, we look for capability expansions, too. I identify some areas where genomic services can be mostly utilized, like cell and gene therapy, precision medicine, that uses a lot of sequencing, both Sanger sequencing and Next-generation sequencing . The biologics drugs, they uses a lot of synthesis and sequencing.
The antibody discovery and some of the protein drugs, those are the areas that we see the market that's growing quite a bit. We have all the sequencing, reading, and writing capabilities to support all of those. The reading. We have many cases where the workflow uses sequencing, Sanger sequencing and Next-generation sequencing and gene synthesis, clone gene, oligos, and all of that. The synergies we talked about, that's potential that remains to be tapped into. We built our model based on our historical growth, and we just launched a new lab in Leipzig, Germany. Steve and I were at the grand opening last week. We expect that with that addition, we'll further complete our footprint globally. Europe market is where right now we're underrepresented. We're pretty strong in U.S. We're very strong in China.
There's a lot of potential that we can tap into in Europe. Still following the capability expansion and market expansion and the synergies, I think we have many channels to feed to our future growth.
Thanks for that. The follow-up is for Lindon. Lindon, just clarifying some of the marks around the capital deployment model and specifically M&A. You mentioned, and I may be paraphrasing this wrong, but looking for another GENEWIZ- type deal. One, does that mean that you're really only looking in life sciences? Two, as we think about the deals that the company could do, should we expect that they would be at or above the target model parameters that you gave for margins and operating expense intensity? Is it possible that we would see businesses that you could acquire fit strategically and with your ROI goals and periodically we'd see dips below the trajectory that you'd be on towards that target model? Thank you.
That's a fair question. I just go back to the base of what I described. I'll remind everybody that everything I put into the model, the EPS model, is based on what we own today. The question is, okay, you said you're also going to acquire. We don't factor that into the EPS model, but we expect to acquire. The targets that we look for really are aligned around continuing to strengthen and build out both businesses, but with an emphasis on life sciences because of the trajectory and the lack of cyclicality. We don't shy away from Dave's business at all. As you can see, we've made three acquisitions in the last five years. In terms of size or impact that they may have, my emphasis to you is we have the capacity to do a large deal similar to GENEWIZ.
It's not that we have something to talk about or we couldn't anyway, but it's not something we're telegraphing. We're just saying we have the range, and we continue to play and pick at the small ones because we can and we see tremendous value in doing that. When we see larger ones, we will take that under a lot of study, and we have capability to do it. Most likely it'd be in life sciences as we're looking at those types of deals. Something popped up in semi, it'd be opportunistic, and we would always look at that for the value of the shareholder. The final question was, well, are you saying that all of your acquisitions would meet the models that you've outlined? I can't say that line by line, we look for growth and margin expansion.
I want to highlight something just financially, what happens when you apply an ROIC model the way I've described it? It's inherent in that equation. This is why we like it so much, or that's why I like it. You guys like it, right?
Right
I love it because when you say you've got to hit an ROIC by three or five years, you immediately look at the multiple on the profit equation it's driving today that you're paying for it. If you're paying a higher price, you have to grow faster to add incremental value. If you get it at a fair price or a lower price, you can commit less growth and get that. Depending on what we're buying, it usually is valued based on growth capability and margin expansion, potential and track record. Everything works together systematically. I'm here to tell you, we have walked away from deal. We have gotten deep into process, in a bidding process, and we said, "Okay, this is where we'll stop." Even though we wanted the business, this is where we'll stop because it doesn't make sense anymore.
I think as an investor community, you can rest assured that's the convictions that we have. It's a nice filter. It focuses on these things. I wouldn't commit line by line, but we're always looking for the incremental growth and margin expansion to be there. I'm going to wait for the microphones to determine. Amanda?
Thanks.
I'm sorry.
Amanda Scarnati from Citi. Thanks for taking the question. Just on the turnaround of the sample management business, are there any sort of road signs we should be paying attention to to see when that business is going to turn around? Do you have a timeline in place as to what you would like to see from that business? Are there any near-term costs associated with that that would impact margins?
We put in one year is when you'll begin to see it. Hopefully, we'll make progress before that. Couple of things. No net costs will have to go in. We think we can restructure the costs. We're adding sales capability right now, you won't see from a cost structure standpoint, you won't see it. Account penetration and getting that ramped is going to be important. We treat it as a re-acceleration more than a turnaround because we think the foundation is in place. It's critical to understand the products are really solid. The offerings for customers are great. This is about customer capture. We think the business is set. When we begin to get momentum, we'll keep momentum going. Hard to predict exactly when that is, the initiatives are already underway and we're really confident about it.
By the end of 2020, you ought to see the business pick up. We'll work to do it before that.
On the GENEWIZ business, can you just talk a little bit about the margin profiles between Sanger sequencing, Next-generation sequencing and gene synthesis? I know you mentioned that sort of the mix is going to benefit that business, but how does that overall play into it?
I'll address that. We specifically won't talk about the gross margins between the offerings. It's simplistic. It's because we think there's a competitive nature in. I would just want to emphasize, we're in the service delivery model. I do occasionally get questions from an investor that would say, "Well, gee, this is happening to Illumina" or "What about BGI in China?" They're equipment providers predominantly. We're not competing with them. We actually use their equipment to deliver the service, and we value and price around the service delivery value that we provide to our customers. We win based on excellent service delivery. We win based on the protocols and reagents that Amy and her team had developed that are unique to break through the clarity of the sequencing and the capabilities and the synthesis.
We've decided that we will not talk about the margins of the various offerings as we do not want to have that conversation when we're in the field. I appreciate the question. I will reiterate, we see overall gross margins at about 50%. We described today between 48%-52% as the range. It always takes some investment to make sure you never turn away a customer with capacity. Sometimes it's more or less utilized. It might drop down to the 48% range. Our experience in this first, I guess eight months that we've owned, tells us that that 48%-52% seems pretty confident for us.
Great. Thank you. Andrew D' Silva with B. Riley FBR. My question is related to the sample management side of the business and really what does it take for that segment to move away from working primarily with R&D related products to commercialized offerings, specifically as we start thinking about the allogeneic side of the market evolving over the next couple of years?
Sure. Thanks for the question. We have a strong upside in the R&D side. We're going to work to capture that. 80 billion samples, we have 50 million. We do have an offering for the cell and gene therapy capability. We penetrated IVF clinic, and we're beginning to ramp that business. We have more than 20 of our units going to one of the cell therapy treatment companies to get into their manufacturing flow and ultimately the distribution method. We think the product offerings in place and the promise that we've established capability for is in and around the allogeneic space. If and as allogeneic treatments take off, we think that the needs for that will be already met by the products that we have.
We envision 1,000 treatments in a single system and thousands of systems, if you will, if allogeneic treatments indeed pick up.
Okay. Just to follow up on that side of the business, do you see it moving more towards the outsourced side of things, or do you believe over time it could be more of an infrastructure play and things like your Twin-Bank solution could become more relevant to the broader market?
We do. We think the automated solutions are going to be ever more critical. We have another product line even where we have single sample cryogenic handling. It's a unique one of a kind system. We've installed two in the world, and we think these early penetrations of the means by which those critical cures will be handled is essential. It's a cryogenic solution where samples are stored at -190 degrees Celsius, so below the glass transition temperature. We think this is a really unique capability and we're definitely leading the market, but we think we need to lead the market. As the market evolves, there'll be a solution in place for people to adapt to. The large automated stores for-
Biological samples are ready and in place. As a matter of fact, we've reconfigured that product line to be able to approach more customers for the smaller unit, where they can handle hundreds of thousands of samples. They may not need millions, but hundreds of thousands of samples will enable smaller companies to have automated storage, better protection of samples. That's one of the vectors we have in the sample management space to expand with a smaller automated cold storage.
Great. Thank you very much.
On the back of that question, I said earlier I wouldn't single out management, I just can't resist. David Gray is sitting here. If you just raise your hand, David. David, if you're interested in the cell-based automation, this is his baby around our BioStore III Cryo machine, he's very familiar with those opportunities, what's evolving in that space. I encourage you at lunch, grab him, I'm sure he'll be a popular table.
Jacob Johnson from Stephens. Steve, just to follow up on the re-acceleration of sample management. The sales people you're putting in place, are those investments you've already made or should we see those investments over the next couple of quarters? Are those investments on the system side or the services side or both?
We've added some people already and we've got plans for more. On the sample management side, mostly in the services area. We think that's where the largest leverage opportunity is. We'll need to put more people in, but right now that's the funnel and approach. The other one is to enable people who have really penetrated accounts, done an exceptional job, to go out and sell more. We're putting infrastructure in so there's backup sales support to help us to take the people who are really exceptional at account management and capture and allow them to continue to do more of what they do. Investments in place. In the net, there won't be any net additions to cost to the business unit. We have some efficiencies that we'll take advantage of, but we're already in motion ahead of what the market opportunity will be.
You'll see, we have a handful of really strong account executives. We have another, probably the equivalent amount before year-end.
Well, things have slowed down here, and we ran over the 1:00 P.M. time. I'll hold it. You can just close up.
Sure. We appreciate everybody's time and attention today, and hopefully we got a little bit deeper into the business. You had a chance to hear from the business unit leaders again. Pretty different story, even from one year ago, but I think significant advancements everywhere. We keep talking about execution. We've added GENEWIZ, which is a company that fits exactly into the characteristics of Brooks. We feel really pleased to have the GENEWIZ team with us. By the way, you have Dr. Sarah Eckenrode, Dr. Ginger Zhou with us today. They run the Sanger and the NGS businesses, and I would guess that you'll have a little attention at lunchtime. We have the owners of the business units here who are responsible for driving pretty significant growth. Without question, two strong platforms that look different from what they did before.
They'll look different the next time we get together, but it's all in the spirit of growth, value creation, something that we're fixated on as a company, and we think we're extremely well equipped to deliver. Again, thanks for the time. Thanks for the attention. We look forward to spending more time with you, but again, I thank the management team as well for your help with the preparation. Everybody, thanks for joining us today. We really appreciate your presence. Thanks.
Thank you, everyone. Please, if you could take a few minutes and fill out those surveys on the tables, that would be great for us to learn from what we've done. You can pass them in on your way out. Thank you very much for coming.