Well, good morning, and sorry for a couple minute delay here. I'm Lindon Robertson, the CFO for Azenta Life Sciences. We were held briefly hostage in the elevator situation here. I have the pleasure of having with me Vandana Sriram, our Senior Vice President of Finance for the company. She's joined us about a year and a half ago almost, and so I'm gonna share the presentation with her today. We have an exciting story, I believe, and I'm couldn't be more thrilled that you're all participating with us here in the room and in the broadcast. Of course, first we'll make observations of the safe harbor statement. We'll say some things, obviously, that we're not gonna be obligated to update that are forward-looking.
Similarly, we'll use some non-GAAP measures to bring more meaning and impacts to you on our performance. I would ask that you do pay attention to our GAAP measurements in other places as well. You know, the story of Azenta is actually one of transformation, it, we're in a unique situation where we're a new company, but with a 10-year history, and that's kinda unique in itself. We launched through a separation this past year. In February, we culminated the sale of our semiconductor legacy business, and we've been Azenta a little over a year now in the branding of the company. You can see in the life sciences business that we now have, we've had a handsome growth rate, a track record of over the recent years.
This has been a decade in making, I'll give a little more color on that. We have a broad portfolio. Big picture last year, you could see this 36% and 64% split of products and services, really handsome. We're gonna give you a little more outline on that. More importantly, last year if you heard our year-end, which was at September 30th, we reported on results of about 17% organic ex-COVID measured growth rate. It was 8% reported, but when you take the organic measure and remove the COVID impacts year-over-year, about 17% growth. We're global, and we have an unbelievable balance sheet. Have $1.4 billion still available for investment. This is after you account for the payments that you will see.
When we ultimately do report our December quarter, you'll see the payment for an acquisition that we announced that was closed in October, and you'll also see the payout for accelerated share repurchase that we announced at the end of our last quarter. With that said, you'll see approximately $1.4 billion available for investment in our cash. With that, the history that I just talked about on the decade, if you went back to the 2011 time period, we started by capitalizing on some capabilities we had in semiconductor manufacturing around automation and cryogenic expertise. We used that cryogenics at that time for cryo pumps to create a vacuum space.
Quickly saw the opportunity to make some vast improvements in what was available in life sciences for automated storage in deep cryogenic temperatures. If you move forward across that timeline, by the time you get to 2016, we were then into a transformative opportunity to turn that into a services business. We acquired and started expanding a business to store samples on our premises for customers. You saw Azenta be a leader in really thought leadership, innovative leadership in ultra-cold automated storage for the likes of pharma, biotech, academics, government, population studies, bio, biorepositories. At the same time, become a partner to customers in servicing and storing millions of samples on behalf of customers globally, and the largest operation being in Indianapolis. With that capability, it was already established in Europe and some in Asia as well.
As you move across the second half of this, toward the $500 million plus reported revenue of last year, we picked up the genomic analysis business in 2018 in our 2019 fiscal year. In 2019 fiscal year, that genomic analysis was a nice extension to the products that the cold chain business was tremendous. Because we were handling millions of samples on behalf of customers in storage and in handling and in information, we also found it a nice fit to pick up one of the really premier standalone companies in genomic analysis in GENEWIZ. That was, again, an expansion of market addressability as well as growth capabilities of our company and enhancing our total offerings.
You have a business that, up through that time period now is captured and characterized by cold storage on the premises of customers, cold storage in the ecosystem of samples outside on our premises, not on the capital bill of the customer, and then also genomic analysis outsourcing, as well as genomic synthesis I should say. In most, in the recent year, and you don't see this in the revenue yet on this chart, is the acquisition of B Medical, which further extends the cold chain, and we'll talk about that as well. To give you just a little more color on the capabilities, and this is really characterized in the challenge that a customer faces in the life of research as it relates to the need for samples.
Think about when anytime you start a research project, you're going to base these now today in the interrogation of samples. The first challenge is to source the sample. We can help customers do that as well. We have procurement services to help finding hard to identify or to locate samples. We also do the formatting, broad part of our business is helping in the consumables and instrumentation of formatting, in the storage of samples, individual samples, as well as the trays, boxes, et cetera.
That centerpiece right there, the storage and the automation of logistics really talks to the point that we have ultracold automated storage to think of this as large freezer capability that can handle 1 million-plus, sometimes, several million samples, with robotic automation, placing and retrieving those samples in and out, one at a time, at a high, high throughput, capable for servicing efficiencies in the most demanding pharma and biotech industry, and also providing the key integrity that the most advanced science requires. The next bubble here is an analysis. Nobody has the sample for the sample's sake. They have it for the information that that sample can produce, the research. So, you're going to do testing, sometimes genetic analysis, genomic analysis, I should say, and analytical services.
That business is very promising in terms of the growth rates. It's got a long-term track record. We believe the industry's been growing in the past, in the mid- teens, and that we've had a really strong track record of exceeding that growth rate in that particular area of our business over the long term. The final point, as I said, it's not for the sample's sake, but for the data and the information. Now, data and information in our context for our customer's problem, it really comes in two factors. One is, where is that sample? Where has it been? What temperature has it been? We can help provide that tracking capability in our informatics.
Particularly if you're in our sample repository solution, it's high value for us to be able to give you an inventory report, whether it's on your broad inventory or perhaps you're looking for that age category of females between the age of 30 and 40 that had certain diseases in research. In your specific library samples that we're storing, we can help you map those samples that would satisfy that. You confirm you want them retrieved. We retrieve them, and uniquely, we can provide those to you within a day to your lab. Most cases, people request it a week in advance or two weeks in advance, but or 72 hours. If needed, we can get to you in your lab overnight.
This information is critical in the speed, and if you think if you add all of this up, think that information, access to the samples, back to the automation, ability to source, this is an enabling factor to accelerate research and breakthroughs for our customers. If you think about what drives this space, the value propositions in the industry are quite strong. People have, certainly have questions about the macros across the global economies, but I don't think people have much question on the strength of research and the compelling nature that research has in the area of life sciences over the long term. The high demand for quality sample collection continues to increase.
If you think about the dynamics underneath this equation, one is the increasing demand for that automated workflow to be enhanced both for throughput as well as the integrity of those samples. Secondly, the high demand increase for R&D increase. In other words, the increased amount of research itself. You multiply those two, we estimate that over a five-year period, you'd see about a doubling of the outsource requirements for storage of samples. We map nicely to that environment. We're situated both in the automation of the equipment we provide. We use the automation in our sample repository solutions nowadays, and we are a key partner to the largest as well as the smallest, but certainly are capable of servicing the largest of pharma and biotech.
In the cell and gene therapy space, it's a high-demand environment for the highest integrity of samples. You would store these samples at -190°C . You're looking at genomics capabilities. When I say -190°C , it's 190°C below zero on the Celsius scale, true cryogenic temperatures. You're also looking at genomics capabilities to advance this. We've seen the market expand to more than 2,000 active trials here, and this space continues to accelerate, we believe. In the cold chain solutions, it's an end-to-end challenge. If you just focus on the storage, you're gonna miss it. If you just focus on the formatting of the sample, you're gonna miss it.
What you need is integrity from the beginning to end, and we have facilitated an end-to-end solution that allows a customer to enhance every step and to move much faster as a result of that. Certainly as a company, the global footprint, there's nobody that focuses with a broad portfolio that we have like we do, but equally, we can service each corner of the globe, and so we don't have just touch point relationships with customers in the locations they are, we have global enterprise partnership with our customers. So we're a true facilitator at our customer enterprise level. I highlighted cell and gene therapy space being an increasingly sensitive space. This is a focus of a lot of life science companies and a lot of breakthroughs.
This is exciting space that we think continues to change lives that we'll see, our children will see. I would highlight that in the research stages here, the critical value proposition that we, that we map to, is a really nice secular growth advantage that we have. Reliable sample management is increasingly important. The thoroughness and the clarity of the read of the sample is enhanced by some of the proprietary capabilities we've developed through our genomic analysis business, most notably the reproducible AAV ITR capabilities. This allows very challenging gene structures that often are not clearly read because they have overlapping gene structures, and so it's almost like doing handwriting on top of each other. Very difficult to decipher.
We have the proprietary capabilities to separate that and get it right the first time. Again, you can see how that would accelerate a researcher instead of having to try that read and analysis multiple times. Finally, in a recent acquisition we made last year, we acquired a controlled rate thawing device company, Barkey, out of Germany. They were already qualified through FDA approvals and documented in the procedures of many companies in the cell and gene therapy space. It was a nice addition to our cell and gene therapy addressable opportunities.
Not only does it help provide the customer relationships that they already service, but it introduces those relationships as well to our automated cryo storage capabilities. We're seeing nice traction at the customers in terms of cross-selling opportunities going forward. The testaments from our customer list is really strong. If this is just a few. We literally service a few thousand customers. But you can see some of the largest names in pharma biotech customers in the both key research hospitals as well as academic and governments all around the world. Notably, scientists truly depend on Azenta. As you can see, more than 30 of the Nobel laureates have documented their use of Azenta, thousands of citations in scientific journals.
We estimate that one in three molecular biologists have reached out and used Azenta and continue. When you look at just the top company structures, the top company customer opportunities, there's a number, if whether you wanna look at it as top five using our pharma products using clinical samples managed in our repository, or the top pharma relying and trusting us with their samples, or just top 20 of pharma, as you'd measure by R&D, using either our products or our storage off-site. We have quite a presence in the biggest of customer list here, as well as a broad base of thousands of customers.
Really strong testament in terms of credibility and reliance and value add in the customer market. We added to this most recently, at the beginning of October, we closed the acquisition of B Medical Systems. Exciting in terms of how they save lives, exciting to us in the extension of the cold chain. They service markets that almost are a complete complement to what we had serviced. In other words, they're very active in helping and facilitating the vaccines being stored in places, 80% of their revenue happens on the continents of Africa, South America, and Asia.
Most all of these places are underserved in infrastructure, often without the electrical grid, and so they produce very resilient, very durable solutions for storing vaccines -80°C , and in some cases, logistics and distribution of those vaccines helping to facilitate that. This is significant project-oriented. As you can see, in the top right, names of Gavi institutions, but UNICEF, other institutions where the funding is often sourced or facilitated and partnered with countries. While it's a lumpy business, you can see consistent revenue growth.
We split out here in the bars in the middle on the right. We had shared previously what the fiscal year revenue growth rates were, but you can see in splitting out the COVID revenue today, we're showing better than 20% growth rate over the last two years from 2020 to 2021 and 2022. We had shared in our investment of this business, we expect this to be a double-digit grower and over the long term. We think this is a great add, not just an extension of our capabilities, but a tremendous add in our growth capabilities. When you fold that in, and this is an update for our investors in terms of what did 2022 look like on a pro forma basis of this portfolio now with B Medical.
You can see now that our products would reference about 47% services, 53%. I won't go through all slices of this pie, but you can see that B Medical Systems is a nice slice of 17%. Our ultracold systems and services still 13%, and that's that capability with the automation and the cryogenics. Consumables and instruments, that is fundamental. It still included about $20 million+ of COVID related revenue last year. I'll highlight that to you. That was the biggest piece of our COVID related revenue in that slice of the pie. On the services side, certain elements of the genomics is important to us. All of them are. Sample repository solutions I would highlight to you is where the recurring revenue continues.
In other words, samples come into us in our sample biorepositories, and they stay, and we bill it out every month. That's a significant recurring foundation of our revenue base. With that said, I'm gonna turn over to Vandana Sriram, as I said, Senior VP of our finance in the company, and she'll wrap up, and then we'll take some questions.
Great. Thank you, Lindon. I've been with the company for a little over a year now, and it's been truly remarkable having a seat at the transformation of the company. You know, we started with Brooks Automation, and now we're Azenta Life Sciences. It's been fascinating to watch the new energy and, you know, all of the changes in the company that come with having a new brand name. Very excited to be here. Our strategy really rests around four pillars. The first is in extending our leadership in our core markets. We lead in the markets that we participate in, and you will generally see us stay very close to our core of sample management and cold chain capabilities. We invest for both organic growth as well as strategic M&A.
As you'll see, what's unique about our story is, as we've made acquisitions, we've also ensured that they're the right strategic fit for us, they bring capabilities to us, and also help us on the organic growth path as they transition into our portfolio. We very strongly believe in driving margin expansion and operating leverage. A big part of this comes from the organic growth, but we also focus heavily on margin expansion on its own. Finally, we are extremely disciplined about capital deployment. ROIC is the metric we use fundamentally to focus on it. It's in our DNA. It's also in how we reward our teams, and we orient the organization towards it. You'll see the strategy has served us really well as we've grown over the last several years. Oops. Did I press the wrong thing?
The green. Yeah, the green.
There you go.
The green.
The green.
Very good.
The strategy served us really well over the last several years. We clocked in a growth rate of 35% of revenue growth over the last 8 years or so, that's come from both organic and inorganic sources. Some of the inorganic investments were truly transformational. For example, the BioStorage acquisition in 2016 set us up to be leaders in the sample repository space today. Similarly, the GENEWIZ acquisition in 2019 brought us into the genomics space. What's unique over here is you see the bump that comes from the acquisition, you also see that carry forward in the future in organic growth. We've been very successful in our M&A trajectory. Over the last decade or so, we've done over 10 transactions. We've put over $1.4 billion of capital to work.
Just in the last six months, we've spent about $500 million with a couple of very well-placed acquisitions, B Medical and Barkey, that Lindon referred to. We do all of this with a framework of a couple of guiding principles. The first is making sure that the acquisition is a good strategic fit. That could either be in terms of the capabilities it brings, for example, an extension of our cold chain capabilities with B Medical. It could be in the footprint that the acquisition brings, or it could be an adjacency. For example, the informatics business that's really important to how we manage samples in our sample storage business. From a financial perspective, we look at ROIC as our primary filter.
We look at our ROIC to exceed our weighted average cost of capital, generally within a five-year timeframe, but we could go to up to seven years, depending on if we have the right strategic fit. This ROIC focus helps us drive a couple of things. The first is it forces us to look for acquisitions that provide strategic growth beyond just that layer of revenue in the first year, but truly being able to expand growth going forward. The second is it drives us to opportunities that give us the scope for margin expansion and being able to expand on leverage. We're very disciplined in our approach to capital deployment. In terms of the elements of our capital framework, operating CapEx tends to be about 6%-9% of revenues. Most of this goes into our labs for equipment refresh as well as for freezers.
In the past, we've run a little bit higher than that in the last year or so, mainly because we did some significant footprint expansions. We do expect 6%-9% to be a good range of future expectations. Similarly, we invest about 4%-6% of our revenues annually into R&D. We do expect this to continue as well as we add the new acquisitions. In terms of shareholder return, historically, as an automation company, we had declared a regular dividend. We stopped that when we became a pure- play life sciences companies and focused all our attentions on growth. Late last year, we announced an accelerated share repurchase program for $500 million with the authorization to go up to $1.5 billion over time. We do expect to spend about $1 billion in this coming year.
As I said, of that, $500 million is already in play. Lastly, even with these transformative plays of, you know, significant acquisitions as well as the return to shareholders, we do still have about $1.4 billion of cash on our balance sheet. That gives us the ability to support organic investments as needed, but also gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility to support inorganic growth should the right transformative opportunity come along. In summary, we are a truly unique and differentiated end-to-end sample management company. What makes us unique is three things. The first is growth. You saw our growth trajectory over the last several years, we continue to run towards the path of being upward of a $700 million company this year, with further potential for higher growth as well as margin expansion.
The second is our balance sheet. We're in a unique position of being able to return cash to shareholders, at the same time, have the full flexibility to continue to do transformative M&A, go after transformative M&A opportunities. As we buy companies, we don't just add them to our portfolio and manage them as a portfolio. We truly run them through an integration process. We run the Azenta culture through them, we make them part of our overall suite of product offerings. Our team knows how to do this. We've done this before, we have the DNA and the ability to do this again. Lastly, we're global. Even before the acquisition of B Medical Systems, we were in over 100 countries.
B Medical brings with it a distributor network of 150-plus countries, again, largely in emerging markets, so it gives us a whole new footprint there. With that, we're in over 175 countries and have the end-to-end capabilities in cold chain and sample management to support them. In summary, we have a really strong value proposition that rests on both organic and inorganic growth and is backed with a strong balance sheet for investment as well as a team that knows how to execute. Thank you.
Thanks, Vandana. Ryan, I'll take your lead here to facilitate. We're open to questions here in the room for a couple more minutes. I'll repeat the questions if anybody here in the room has one for the audience. I recognize with Vandana helping me, we answered a lot of questions in the presentation. Yes, sir, in the back there.
You indicated that you stopped the dividend program some years ago. With the capital balances you now have, are you considering a dividend program going forward?
I wanna make sure I heard the question right. With the balance sheet going forward, what would we see as future deployment?
For dividends.
For dividends.
For M&A activity?
No, dividends. Dividends. Dividends.
For dividends.
Oh, for dividends. I'm sorry. Dividends has always been a consideration for us. In this recent announcement, and again, I'll underscore this was made at the end of our fiscal year, we made an announcement that we committed to $1 billion of capital return in the form of share repurchase. We did not commit to an ongoing cash dividend. While it's still in the purview of the board to consider that's not in our priority to establish a regular dividend on an ongoing basis in that light. I would see the cash balance that we have today to continue to follow through on the cash, the share repurchase. We described a 1-year timeline for a $1 billion repurchase.
On the balance of the cash to be looking at additional M&A opportunities. I'll emphasize that as we get to the end of that one year of the share repurchase or in the meanwhile, if the board determines, as management determines that the use for the cash is not something that's a need for the company, we strongly believe it belongs to the shareholders, and we'll always revisit the amount and also the manner in which we might return it. At this point, we did not establish an ongoing dividend. Yeah, thank you for the question. Well, if there's nothing else, let me just take a moment to wrap up. I really appreciate everybody's attention with us. We're at that odd time where we're at the end of a quarter.
We stayed away from a commentary on our guidance and on the quarter for obvious reasons. We look forward to giving a report. Generally, we do that in the early days of February on the current fiscal quarter. This being or the one we're about to report, I should say, that being our first fiscal quarter. With that said, we see ourselves as a high-growth company, leverage in our, in the profile of our P&L, and we look forward to demonstrating that to you in the days and the quarters ahead. Thank you very much.