Good morning, everyone. Again, thank you for a very fun evening last night for those of you here in the room, and for those of you joining on the webcast, welcome. Last night, I talked about a bunch of different things, and you all have the slide deck now. I'm not going to go through the first 12 pages, but just for the benefit of the people that weren't here tonight, I just want to talk very briefly about what we discussed. We talked a lot about culture, we talked a lot about history, we talked a lot of our people. We talked about Ball being 138 years young, and for its first 100 years, being owned and operated by a family.
Really what inspired that was about the values that we have and hold dear to our company, whether it's about uncompromising integrity, about being close to the customer, behaving like owners, which is a critical part of who we are, the attention to detail or about being innovative in all that we do. We also talked about our Drive for 10 journey, which began in 2010, about broadening our geographic reach and focusing on new customers and new products and new markets. We talked about sustainability, which we're going to talk a lot more about today. We also talked about the progress we've made here at Ball Corporation since 2010, and we talked about the goals that we had set out for ourselves at that time in terms of doubling the amount of EVA dollars 10 years hence, by 2020.
We also talked about a goal of having $10 per share of earnings before the split. Now, I remind everyone that we split our stock twice since then. I also pointed out that through the second quarter, on an LTM basis of 2018, since 2010, that our revenues have gone up by approximately 50%, and our EBIT has gone up by 75%. I talked about the headwinds that we've experienced over that journey, because nothing ever goes from the lower left to the upper right exactly how you think about it. We talked about the China pricing, some of the things in the food can business, and why we ultimately got out of the food can business. It's all good. The thing I want to leave with you before I kind of jump into this is that we really only have just begun.
I think what we're going to try to do today is peel away the onion a little bit more based on the discussion last night. Excuse me. I'm going to give an overall arching view of each of our three businesses and why we truly believe that we have a once in a lifetime opportunity in front of us in each and every one of those businesses. Dan Fisher, our Chief Operating Officer of Global Beverage, is going to come up and talk, and he's going to peel away the onion even a little bit more from what I'm talking about. Rob Strain is going to get up, talk a little bit more context and perspective about aerospace. Scott Morrison will get up and give a financial perspective of this.
We'll then take a break, then we'll come back we're going to have a one-hour Q&A session with the various presidents of our regional businesses. That's the agenda for today. What I'll ask everyone to do on the webcast is we're going to move ahead. Here's the forward-looking statement. I'm obviously not going to read it's in your materials. I'm going to quickly hop ahead to page 13, the pages prior to that is what I effectively just covered and what we talked a little bit about last night. Oops, excuse me. On page 16, talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity. That truly is what gets us excited, I'll go into the beverage can.
We've made some great progress over the last couple of years as part of the Rexam acquisition against our integration plans, whether it be sourcing, whether it be G&A and the move to GBS. I know we'll talk a little bit about that. We talked a lot about our footprint last night and even today, you all are well familiar with it. Just last week, a bunch of us were in Spain officially starting up our new plant there. Two-line plant. Everything looks terrific there. We also, at the same time this summer, started up four lines in our Goodyear, Arizona plant, touch wood, everything's going very well there. We're in the process of taking down the three plants that we talked about.
A lot moving in terms of footprint, it's all good, it was part of our deliver plan starting upon the close back in June 2016. Let me talk about now, more importantly, where we're going taking our franchise, otherwise known as our beverage can business, our aerosol business, as well as our aerospace business, taking it out for a spin. I'll go into the beverage side of the business. Let me just start by saying plastic is polluting our planet, there's no other way to say it. It's as simple as that. Our world has shifted to a much more sustainable world focused on this whole sustainability issue, we're on the right side of this equation. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to take advantage of it, when the can wins, we win.
I will point out, last night, I didn't go into great detail, we've been in 46 different businesses over the lifetime. We're in three now, by definition, we're out of 43 of them. Three different times in our history, we've been in the plastic business, we got out last time in 2011 we saw the tsunami of plastic polluting our world. We knew at that time it was uneconomic to recycle plastic, that issue still holds today. I want to point out that many people don't know this, 75% of all aluminum ever produced in the history of mankind is still in use today. While 90% of plastics has never been recycled just once. Think of that. You think about how the plastic is polluting our world. That's obviously the reason why.
There's 8 billion tons of virgin plastic produced in the history of mankind, and only 9%, as I mentioned, has only been recycled. 12% has been incinerated, and 79% is being thrown in our landfill or otherwise thrown at the side of the road or in our oceans. I'm not making this up at all. We are truly drowning in plastic. Last year, around the world, 480 billion units of plastic packaging for the beverage side was sold globally. Some scientists believe that by the year 2050, there'll be more tons of plastic in our ocean than aquatic life. Think about that. More tons of plastic in our oceans than aquatic life. If you don't believe me, we're here in Colorado, but if you don't believe me, go to any beach on any ocean anywhere and look down.
When you see where the water comes up to the sand, you'll see plastic shards down there at your feet. They weren't dropped there. They came from somewhere, and they've been washed up from our oceans. If that's what's on the shore, just imagine what's in the water and what's in the aquatic life. You want to talk about sustainable. Is that? I doubt that. On the other hand, as I mentioned, cans are infinitely recyclable. Most people don't realize this, but when cans are recycled, there's no loss of yield of the aluminum. That's why 75% of aluminum is still in use today. What little plastic is recycled is actually not recycled, most of it is downcycled, it breaks down as time goes on.
It goes from a plastic bottle, goes in the fibers that makes carpets and clothing and other things like that. Ultimately, it loses its ability to be recycled. The other thing that most people don't realize is, while other substrates talk about recycling, what they're really talking about is collection. As I mentioned, when you have 79% of all plastic bottles being thrown either in the landfill or in our oceans, they're not being recycled. Yes, they're being collected, 45% around the world, but they're not being recycled. I think the world is quickly catching on to this phenomenon. You have to ask yourself why. 1% of all collected waste stream is aluminum, but yet it's 17% of the value. Why is that? It's real simple. It's economics. There's an economic case for recycling aluminum.
At current rates, just to give you context, at current rates, you can buy a ton of recycled aluminum for approximately $1,300. I haven't checked in the last week or so, but it's usually in and around that. Whereas plastic is probably between $100 and $200 per ton, and glass sometimes has negative value. In fact, here in the U.S., approximately one-third of all the municipal reclamation centers don't even accept glass anymore. When you talk about living in a sustainable world, I ask you a real simple question: What is sustainable? Cans are the most sustainable package in the world. Back in 2010, when we started on this Drive for 10 journey, we always focused from a sustainability perspective on what we internally at Ball called the Big Six. I have it up there now. We've made very good progress on it. Started with safety.
We've had a 41% improvement in our safety record off already world-class levels since 2010. We've done a truly awesome job, and we still have a ways to go because our goal is to have zero accidents in our facilities. Our electricity and natural gas is down 9% and 19%, respectively, water down 11%, and our new plant in Spain, we're hoping to get an 80% reduction in the water that we use. It's truly phenomenal. From a waste perspective, we're recycling more and reusing more, but we also are sending more to landfill as well. We have some work to do there. Overall, I think a very good job on that, and the progress is terrific. Today, sustainability is far more than that. The Big Six is just a precondition, a license to operate, if you will, in today's environment.
I know Dan Fisher, after me, is going to get up and come and talk a bit about the ton of the work that we've done, led by him as well as Kathleen Petrie, who heads up our sustainability efforts, to truly develop a strategy around how to commercialize the sustainability agenda and how to do well by doing good. Let me tell you why, because I think it's real important. Let me just begin by saying, as I mentioned, we're in a different place around the world. When an NGO called eight, 10 years ago, we would hide, we would demure. We would avoid the contact with them because there was really no upside engaging in the conversation because honestly, we truly didn't have our sustainability act together, at least an act that was not ready for the outside scrutiny. This time it's different.
This past March, we were the lead sponsor in the World Ocean Summit hosted by The Economist down in Mexico. It was quite an eye-opener for all of us. During that time, we had a series of half-hour meetings with a bunch of NGOs, world-class NGOs, Tier 1 NGOs. At the meetings, the meetings generally went like this. For the first couple of minutes, they'd ask us about our greenhouse gas strategy. Check. We were able to talk about exactly what we're doing, not only as Ball Corporation, but also as an industry to try and push recycling. We talk about a couple of minutes talking and answering questions about our BPA-NI strategy.
As many of you know, we've been on this migration, and within the next couple of years, largely due to shortness of supply of the material, we'll be fully out of BPA materials. The next 25 minutes or so were spent on discussions about how we, with these NGOs, could partner with them to eliminate plastic. It was truly an eye-opener for all of us. We recognize that we can't position the can. Ball Corporation cannot position the can as the most sustainable package by ourselves. We need partners, and that's a big eye-opener for us in trying to engage the world and using the army of armies, as we like to call it, to really bring this issue about sustainability to the forefront. How do we address this to make this successful? In the past, we talked to our customers.
Makes a lot of sense. They're not the only ones with skin in the game. It's a whole different new supply chain. We've got customers, we've got consumers, we've got retailers, we've got NGOs, we've got governments. For years, we've been doing this in every region. We've been engaging with them, but not at the level we need to. If you want to be brutally honest with ourselves, we're hard-pressed to think of a proactive win we've had across the entire supply chain. We've been a little bit more reactive in the past. Our industry has been a little bit more reactive in the past. Keep your head down and plow ahead. I think what you're hearing from us is we've woken up that as an industry leader, you have to take this responsibility very seriously.
We are going to be engaging with the whole supply chain beyond just our customers. Yes, we are going to be talking to our customers about how to utilize a wide variety of can formats to help them position their brands and make it more profitable for them. I'll go into that a little bit later on, because we indeed are on the right side of the debate here, and they can get on the right side of the debate. It's also with consumers by leveraging the vast and free social media that we have to take advantage of the younger generations who fundamentally get this. They grew up on Red Bull. They grew up on craft beer, and increasingly, they're growing up on sparkling water.
They understand the difference between a number 1 bottle, a number 2 bottle, a number 3 bottle, and a number 7 bottle, far greater than certainly our generation does. We are going to be taking this out because they ultimately are the can's greatest advocate, and that's what we're seeing right now. We're going to be focused on the retailers to clear all the plastic from our aisles because that's what their consumers want these days, and we're starting to see that happen in the U.K., and we've had discussions elsewhere around the world about how to make plastic-free zones in many of these retailers in which our products are sold at. Also, as I mentioned before, with the NGOs to build a marching friends of friends, if you want to call it that, army to work with the retailers through legislative and non-legislative means.
Not only the retailers, also working with our customers and our consumers and also the governments. Lastly, speaking of governments and working with the legislators to rethink conventional wisdom. I recognize what I'm about to say is a bit provocative, we have to be provocative. Should we have deposits when the playing field is level? I know given the economics of what I talked about, scrap value, retailers would love to have their hands on used aluminum as opposed to used plastic or used glass. Should there be a producer responsibility tax where each substrate should stand on its own based on its own economics?
I'll take my chances with the can in this environment because the economics of recycling favor the can, but we have to do it right, so we're being very methodical about trying to figure out what to do as we go forward there. As I mentioned, it all starts with the consumer. We got some third parties to help us look at some Google searches on plastic awareness, both in the U.K. as well as here in the U.S. Look at these charts and look what happened late last year. There's a huge spike in awareness, a 5 to 6x increase in the awareness of how plastic is bad and how it's creating a health concern for the world in which we live. At the same time, the question is, how do we take advantage of it?
You also see relative to aluminum, there wasn't much movement there. People are very much focused on the problems of plastic, they haven't quite recognized the advantages, we have a solution to the plastic problem. It's called aluminum. We're putting a lot of work into there. As I mentioned, Dan's going to talk a little bit more about that. Now, to be fair, we, Ball Corporation, and the can in particular are not perfect either. In fact, recycling, we would be in trouble. There's huge amounts of energy required to make aluminum, and that's why hydro and other forms of cheap electricity are so important from the smelting process. That's why you find a lot of smelters in Iceland and Canada and Brazil and the Tennessee Valley and Saudi Arabia and Russia, because that's where cheap electricity and cheap energy come from.
We do have a good story from an aluminum perspective. More than 75% of all aluminum, as I mentioned, is currently recycled right now. It's just not a great story. What we've been focusing on is how to accelerate our efforts about recycling, whether it's the things we're doing with the various associations, whether it's working with Every Can Counts in Europe, with The Recycling Partnership here in the United States, the Recicleiros Waste Picker program in South America, or a myriad of other initiatives and programs in each and every region. The question is not how good the recycling is right now. How do you get it globally to 80%, 85%, and 90%? Given the economic sustainability of the can, if we can get the recycling rates even higher, it's going to just further distance the can relative to plastic and glass.
At the same time, we also can't ignore the economics of our customer. 20 years ago, the can was pedestrian and plastic was cool. If you all remember that back in the '80s when plastic was first really rolling out, it was the it package. It was reclosable. Honestly, it was also the most profitable for our customers. To highlight this, a few weeks ago, I went on walmart.com and I looked at the price points. On the website, now, just to give you context, I went on and said, "What could I buy as a consumer if I bought it online and then went to Walmart to pick it up?" I looked at six different products, a standard 12-ounce can in multi-packs, 7.5-ounce can in multi-packs, the sleek 12-ounce can in multi-packs. I looked at 16-ounce sold in cans.
I also looked at the retail price per ounce for each container and indexed it to the standard 12-ounce can. I also looked at PET, and I looked at the single-serve PET, the 20-ounce PET, and I looked at another format, which I'll show in a second. What you see here is plastic, the single-serve PET bottle is 3X the retail price per ounce than a standard 12-ounce can. My point in saying that is we can talk all we want about the environmental sustainable attributes of the can, but when you have a 3X profit differential relative to plastic, that's a tough pill to swallow for our customers.
What we've tried to do is over the past couple of years, using our specialty capabilities, and I know Dan's going to talk more about this, we've helped our customers increase their revenue per ounce anywhere from 225%-300% by using different formats and different channels, and be able to reposition their products relative to the standard 12-ounce can. We've been able to improve it anywhere from 225%-300% relative to the standard can. Pretty good, huh? Yes, not good enough. When looking at PET, we've made up a meaningful ground, but still have more work to do. In order for our customers to embrace the conversion from PET and glass, we have to think about how to close the profitability gap for them between cans and PET. You heard of, over the last year, talk about profit pools of our customer.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Customers want to do good, we have to give them the economic reasons to embrace this tide. Otherwise, as I mentioned before, we're going to be beating our heads up against the wall. We need to continue to focus on leveraging our specialty portfolio to create greater profit pools for our customers through cans. If we're successful, we've engaged some outside help to help us think through and to mention the size of the prize, if you will, of this. The numbers I'm about to show you are representative of each and every region in which Ball Corporation operates today. It's not Africa, it's not parts of Southeast Asia where we currently don't operate.
What we looked at is for every one percentage point increase in the share of cans relative to plastic and other substrates, there is a 23 billion can opportunity. That sounds huge, I recognize that, we're not going to capture all of it. I'm talking about one percentage point change. I'm talking about going from 50%-51%. That's the size of the prize. It's huge. Just to walk you through some numbers, on the soft drink side, there is a 5 billion incremental can opportunity just in carbonated soft drink. It's broken out approximately 1.1 billion of that opportunity for every one percentage point increase in North America. Why? 57% of all CSD in the United States currently is sold in PET. There's another 1.1 billion can opportunity because 83% of all CSD in Europe today is packed in PET.
There's a half a billion in China. The CSD market is not nearly as big. There's $400 million opportunity in Southeast Asia, $900 million can opportunity in EMEA. Again, remember, that's just a one percentage point shift. I'm not talking 10 percentage point shift, one percentage point shift. In beer, there's a $6 billion incremental can opportunity for every one percentage point share shift to cans. Over $700 million in North America seems a little bit low. Why? The can is currently winning. Over the past decade, we've gone from 50% of all beer packaged in cans to 57%, 58%. We're winning right now, and we still have a long way to go. In Europe, one and a half billion can opportunity because 63% of all beer is packaged in glass and another 15%, largely driven by Eastern Europe, 15% of beer is packaged in plastic.
In total, 78% of all beer in Europe is currently not in a can. In South America, there's a $600 million opportunity because 71% of all beer is in glass. In China, a $2.3 billion can opportunity because 79% is still in glass. Southeast Asia, $300 million can opportunity because 77% is in glass. In EMEA, where beer consumption is low, there's even a $500 million can opportunity because only 5% of the beer packaged in EMEA is in cans. Now, the real opportunity is a $13.2 billion incremental can opportunity in still products. Again, remember, that's just a one percentage point shift. $2.4 billion in North America because 92% of all still products, when I say still, I'm talking water, teas, juices, et cetera. 92% in North America are currently packaged in PET or cartons. There's a $2.8 billion opportunity in Europe. Why?
Just 1% of still products in Europe are packaged in cans. Just 1% right now. There's a $1 billion can opportunity in South America because only 1% is packaged in cans. $1.2 billion in Southeast Asia, $3.4 billion in China, 7% in China is packaged in cans. Think about tea. Tea is a very big part of it. It's a huge opportunity. In EMEA, $2.3 billion can opportunity for still products because only 2% of all still products in EMEA are packaged in cans. Now, how do we compete at the price points with PET and still water where bottles are literally the consistency of Saran Wrap at times? Let me tell you, we're not going to shift at all, I'm just talking a one percentage point change.
The addressable opportunity probably is not nearly as big as this, I know Dan Fisher is going to go into practically how we're attacking this and what is the short-term opportunity. Again, I mentioned to you, when you think about the opportunity that we have, this is just a one percentage point shift, there's over 24 billion cans in the regions we currently operate today. That's the opportunity for us. Is it going to happen overnight? No. The question is, how do we get two, four, six percentage point shift going? Because that number will multiply accordingly, and that's the opportunity for us. Let me just quickly summarize the beverage can. Our world has shifted to a much more sustainably focused world, we're on the right side of this argument.
We do have a once in a lifetime opportunity to take advantage of it. When the can wins, given our size and scale, Ball Corporation wins. Now, from a footprint perspective and how specialty plays in with this, we have more than twice the size of our nearest competition in general. While that's great, it's our footprint that differentiates us. I could go around the world, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in South America, whether it's in the United States. When you think about let's just focus here in the United States, we make over 32 different can sizes in the United States alone. We can make them from California, we can make them in Arizona, we can make them in Texas and here in Colorado. We can make them in the Midwest. We can make them in the Southeast.
We can make them in Florida. We can make them in the Mid-Atlantic, and we can make them in New England. Our nearest competitor can only do it in two or three different areas, and almost all of those are east of the Mississippi. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to leverage the footprint we have. Thirdly, and I think Dan will talk a little bit about this more from a commercial perspective. Our contracts in this industry, generally speaking, were designed in the 1980s, and we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to change that. Historically, what has happened when we've renegotiated with our customers, we've more or less changed some numbers in the contract, but rolled over. When you think about the 1980s, when we sold very few specialty containers and the retail world was quite different.
It made a lot of sense to have the contracts back then, and it made it because we were able to accept orders from our customers with, for example, 72-hour turnaround time. Well, today, our customers change their orders one and a half times in 24 hours before they're shipped. As I said, when you're making 32 different sizes and the proliferation of labels that you're seeing, we're operating in an environment from the 1980s. When we talk about commercial, I know a lot of people talk about what's the value over volume and all things, but it's about the efficiency of that. What we've been embarking on for the last two plus years is looking and whiteboarding what we need to do from a commercial perspective to make our business much more flexible. If our customers want to buy cans with 72-hour call-offs, terrific.
We're more than happy to do that. If they want to do it with 36 hours, terrific. We'll do that too. There's a different price for that. If you want to do it in 12 hours, terrific. There's costs associated with that that we need to recover. That's part and parcel of what we're doing from a commercial perspective to try and get value for what we deliver to our customers. Lastly, I want to just show this as a good example, because we're going to continue to push this sustainability agenda and the differentiation and the specialty agenda to make sure the can is front and center with our customers because it's going to help them improve their profitability.
Just to give an example of that, here in North America, we looked and year-to-date, 56% of all new beverage SKUs on the retail shelf today are in cans. In 2015, that was 35%. That is a huge change. This is a good proof point of what we've been trying to do by leveraging our specialty to get it front and center with our customers to allow them to reposition the profit pools for themselves. The question is: How do we accelerate this? Dan's going to talk a little bit more about this because it really does get into this 2019, and more importantly, and beyond. Yes, it's about sustainability, but it's also about footprint. When you think about it, think footprint, think sustainability, think specialty, and think about improving the economics for both our customers and for the can.
In closing, the Ball is in our court. Our Drive for Ten journey has been about a greater sense of urgency and about being proactive. We've got the footprint now. We've got the specialty capability. We have the leadership and the ability to bend the demand curve for aluminum relative to other substrates. We have the chance to use all three of these tools to transform our commercial strategy. That is what is beyond these tools, sustainability, specialty, redesigning the profit pools for our customers. That's how we're going to generate EVA dollars as we go forward. What I'd like to do now is quickly transition to our global aerosol business and talk a little bit about the opportunity in there. When we think about our aerosol business, let me point out a couple of things.
I mentioned last night that we divested the tinplate business in North America. It was a difficult thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. Particularly on the food can side of the business, it was a structurally declining business. There was a void of leadership in the industry. As number 3 and a number 4 industry, it was very difficult for us to provide that leadership. In fact, it was a good lesson for us about talking about being market leaders and what you should do and what you should not do, and we've taken that very seriously on the beverage can side. The industry does need some restructuring, and we were just not in a position to do it, and we couldn't do it on our own. Why do I mention this?
I mention this because the aerosol business, particularly the aluminum aerosol business, is very different than that. It's growing. It's fragmented, and it has a global customer base that's yearning for leadership, and they need a go-to partner. We have that opportunity to create in the aerosol business largely what we've done in the beverage can business. Instead of Coke and ABI and Pepsi and Heineken and Molson Coors, think Procter & Gamble and Unilever and L'Oréal and Beiersdorf. We're the only supplier on two continents. We have the opportunity to create a supplier that can be anything, anytime, anywhere to this global and regional customer base. Now, I will tell you, it's not a particularly large business right now. It's a little under $400 million in revenue, but it's a terrific business, and the management team that is there is doing a great job.
I'm going to very quickly walk you through the opportunities that we see in that business. First, let me go through the growth of it. First, it's a growth market with demand growing 6% on a global basis over the past couple of years. India, which we opened a new greenfield plant in 2015 and subsequently have added more capacity there, continues to grow very quickly and is only going to accelerate as the middle class continues to rise and the large multinationals begin to enter that in a big way, and we're starting to see that right now. South America, particularly Brazil, is another strong market where not only increased use of aerosol packaging is occurring, but the migration from Argentina to Brazil filling is occurring due to the growth in Brazil as well as Argentina's economic woes.
Other regions, including North America, are exhibiting good growth due to a low share of aluminum aerosol packaging. While Europe, a bit more of a mature market, still has pockets of growth that we're seeing. However, one of the key opportunities related to all this is further consolidation. This is just a quick snapshot of where we are positioned and where many of our other competitors are positioned. What you will see there is this industry is fragmented with no global competitors. In fact, other than Exal, which operates in North and South America, there are no competitors that can be that one-stop shop to the multinationals. There's no competitors other than Ball that operate on more than two continents.
We operate in three, in fact, North America, Europe, and India, there's a great opportunity to become that one-stop shop and further distance ourselves from the competition due to our capabilities and global reach. We have greenfield opportunities, as I mentioned, in certain of these regions, particularly South America. We have further consolidation in other regions, particularly in Europe. What's most exciting about that is the customer base. Unlike the beverage industry, there are global customers with truly global brands that are marketed globally as well. So when Unilever or Beiersdorf rolls out a new product, they're not just doing it regionally, they're doing it truly globally. Currently, if they were to roll out, for example, a new body spray, just imagine how complicated their supply chains are. They need an innovation partner to help develop the new package.
They need to either contract with multiple suppliers on each geographic continent in multiple regions or consider filling the product and shipping it globally. In any event, it really is a nightmare, our experience with many of these customers has proven to us that we indeed can create this one-stop shop where we can be their innovation partner and then roll it out on a truly global basis. They have shown an ability and willingness to pay for the innovation, the quality, the service, and most importantly, is the consistency that they can get on a global basis. This is not just in theory. This is reality, and it's our reality. Due to the creativity of our people and customer focus, we're already recognized as the innovation partner to many of our customers. You saw the display we had last night.
We've won numerous awards over the last 12 months, the Can of the Year, the Aerosol Package of the Year, and other awards that highlight that, number one, it is valued by our customers. Number two, we can create more stickiness with our customers through innovation. Number three, we have the geographic growth opportunities if we can further scale this business out. At the same time, we also have sustainability on our side. Similar to the beverage can part of the business, we have a huge opportunity to create incremental demand through leveraging our sustainable position in the aluminum aerosol can. What you see behind me is a good example of this. This is the global deodorant market. It's a big segment, but certainly not all that we do. In fact, it's well less than half of what we do in the markets that we serve.
What you can see is the aluminum aerosol can is underrepresented relative to the roll-on deodorants and other forms of packaging. Not to mention, the aluminum aerosol can is a premium part of this category where our customers enjoy much higher margins due to the shelf space of the package. A one percentage point increase in the regions we currently operate from other forms of packaging to aluminum aerosol represent 80 million cans. In the beverage world, certainly, that doesn't sound like a lot. Let me point out that that is, number one, two full lines, number two, that would be 10% of our global output currently. That's just a one percentage point change. There's huge opportunity for us on the aluminum aerosol as well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As I summarized on the beverage can side, it's the same message.
The ball is in our court. Drive for 10 is about being proactive with a much greater sense of urgency, now is our time, now is our moment. Last but not least, I want to go through our aerospace business. It's our little gem, as many of you saw here in the room last night when we went up to Boulder, it's perhaps the single greatest opportunity for growth on a percentage basis across our portfolio. Our aerospace folks have done a great job positioning this business over the past decade or so. Most people don't appreciate this, but throughout the 1990s, we were primarily known as a ragtag group of NASA engineers, we did exquisite things for NASA. Basically, to the other parts of the government, we were just selling components. We were what was known as a Tier 3 supplier.
Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we started moving up that food chain, we went from a Tier 3 supplier to a Tier 2 supplier. We were selling not only components, but we started selling sensors. What has happened since then is we've actually been moving up into the Tier 1. The difference between the three is that Tier 1 is really, you are the mission partner. You are in charge of the whole mission. Tier 2, you're providing sensors or satellite buses, as they're known. Tier 3, you're selling components to it. We've been able to move from Tier 3 to Tier 2 to Tier 1. The reason for, Dave Kaufman mentioned it last night, but for the benefit of everyone, it was really about 10 years ago that something fundamentally changed, profoundly changed.
Coming out of the financial crisis and faced with government budgets that were flat at best, the world, in terms of its needs around intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, was booming. We were in several different wars. The technology was changing very quickly. The government woke up and realized that the way that it had worked for 40 years, building exquisite systems for very high prices through the traditional industrial complex, so think the primes, it was no longer sustainable. The leaders of the government began to change their thinking. They solicited outside and more diverse thoughts and ideas, and they invited us to the table. We took advantage. Having a seat at the table and not being tethered to the past, we were asked to join design teams that were never thought imaginable.
We won a number of study contracts back then, which were a bit like strategic planning consultants winning work, that they actually get to help plan the future. We had a seat at the table. It was really a lot of fun because the government was listening to what we had to recommend. You fast-forward eight years later, and we've been the great recipient, candidly, of this change of thought. We've been growing not only on the sensor side, this is Tier 2, but also on the mission side, this Tier 1. In today's world of highly resilient, distributed systems that are cost-effective, we are perfectly placed to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Let me give you some examples of exactly what I'm talking about and how it's played out.
This is a chart of our backlog, which means contracted wins that have been funded. It's won and funded, contracted backlog. Also something that we don't talk a lot or at least historically had not talked a lot about, which is won not booked. What that means is we've won a variety of contracts, but due to the government funding mechanisms, they haven't officially been funded. We've won the contract, but we haven't booked it in the funded backlog because, as we describe it's not money good. When you look over the past, 80%-90% of the won not booked ultimately gets funded. Not all of this will get funded, but we have high confidence that what we've been doing has been working, and a lot of it has to do with these study contracts.
When you go from the study contract, and then you get a seat at the table, and then you can help design the future, and then you win that, and then ultimately it gets funded, that's what we're talking about here. I want you to take a look. Back in 2011, our won not booked began to decline as the government took a fresh look at what they did. The budgets were relatively flat, and a lot of the problems insourced a lot of the Tier 2 work that we had been doing. You can see our won not booked in 2011, 2010, begin to decline a little bit. That typically translates a year to two years later into the funded backlog side of it.
You can see it right there, that 18 months to 24 months later, we started to see a decline in our funded backlog. A few years later, our won not booked began to pick up. Follow that out to one or two years later on the funded backlog time, it's the same story. The slope of the line is about the same. Look at what happened over the past year. Yes, our backlog is at record highs, but that's not the interesting thing. What's more interesting is our won not booked has spiked meaningfully. Why? It's those study contracts that we've won over the last eight years or so. Those are the acorns that are turning into the oaks, and they're not just components, they're not just sensors, they're full missions.
Now, granted, some of these are not going to move forward, but if we're so excited about where our backlog is right now, let's dream and look ahead of what might be happening over the next couple of years. I don't want to be a prognosticator and do it, but you can see the slope of the line and you can see the won not booked. This is why we're so excited about aerospace prospects and why I said it probably has the single greatest percentage increase opportunity ahead of itself of all of the businesses in our portfolio. What do we need to do to enable that? We need to execute. We need to grow the development of our people. As we mentioned last night, over the past 18 months, we've hired over 1,200 people in this business.
That represents approximately 40% of the people working at Ball Aerospace today. Imagine the hiring process of that. Imagine the onboarding process, how to get them computers and phones and cubicles, not to mention how to get the right skilled staff on the right programs. I give our aerospace folks a tremendous amount of credit for stepping up to this insurmountable task. At the same time, we've only just begun. How do you integrate them? How do you instill the values of Ball while allowing the diversity of creativity and thought? That's one of the things that keeps me up at night. This is where all of us, old and new, at Ball Corporation need to act as one and look to building the best people and culture.
We have a variety of programs within our aerospace business to make sure that the 60% of the people that have been around for a long time are the greatest advocates and the greatest mentors for those 40% of the people that are coming on board. We also need to scale our facilities for tomorrow, our manufacturing areas, our engineering areas, our support areas. This is the primary reason why our corporate folks actually moved out of our corporate headquarters to free up space and room for our aerospace people. I often joke with Rob Strain each day, I want to look out in the parking lot and see a bunch of trailers pull up that are going to be mobile offices. While that's a joke, it really isn't. That's how quickly we're growing.
We're spending over $100 million on our facility expansion in aerospace, and we need to make sure that that's on time and on budget, and so far so good. Thirdly, we need to leverage our technology. It's what's gotten us to the table and where we are right now. At the same time, all eyes are on us, and we recognize that. Our customers, our competitors, our teaming partners. With these great wins come great responsibility, and we need to execute. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to prove to these customers that we have the capability and know-how, and we can do it, and rest assured, we are on it, and we are going to execute on this technology. At the same time, we're not taking our foot off the gas.
We're still winning those study contracts, for they are the backlog six or eight years from now. While the success we're experiencing is terrific and tremendous, we've got to live in the moment, execute today, and at the same time, plan for tomorrow. Let me just quickly wrap up. The last couple of years, when you take a step back, they've been both extremely rewarding and at the same time challenging. Challenging from the perspective that when we embarked upon our Drive for 10 journey, there were many who thought that the best days of Ball Corporation were behind us, that our aerospace business was too small to be a mission partner, that our aerosol business could not grow, and that the benefits of the Rexam acquisition were candidly unrealistic.
That we couldn't generate the cost synergies that we said we could, and that our customers had too much power. That the effects of truly creating a market leader with real organic growth would be watered down, and that our vision of leveraging our footprint, our size, our sustainability attributes, and our people to position the can as the most sustainable package in the supply chain were simply unrealistic. You know what I say? Watch what we do, not what we say. We believe in ourselves. We believe in our culture. We believe that we've done it before, and we believe we're going to do it again. We're going to let others think it's unachievable. We're going to let others question our passion and our work ethic and our team and our character.
We're going to show others that with our humility, with our grit, with our perseverance, that we can make these dreams come true. There's an old saying that I've always held dear, that when your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near. While we're very mindful of our past and we're very respectful of our past, and in some ways, a reflection of our past, our dreams of being the most sustainable beverage can in the whole supply chain, of being the go-to partner with our aerospace customers, and of being anything for anyone at any time in our aerosol business, those things are in our control. There's a lot of people think that our best days are behind us, and we'll let them.
I can tell you at Ball Corporation, we don't think that way, and we're not going to think that way because we have a once in a lifetime opportunity in each of our businesses, and that is the basis of 2019 and beyond. With that, I'll turn it over to Dan and Rob and Scott to begin to peel away the onion just a little bit more and show you why we have conviction around the and beyond. Dan?
Thank you, John. Thank all of you for being here coming to Denver, Colorado for our biennial Investor Day. I know our folks out in Golden are really excited to have all of you come by this afternoon. I think one consistent theme you'll find when talking to any of the Ball employees that the most energy we ever get is when we get to go out to the shop floor and work with our folks and see all the incredible empathy and energy and excitement they have for doing some really Herculean things on a daily basis. Today, my goal is to help you understand how Ball is playing offense in the global beverage can industry and leveraging our global scale following the June 2016 Rexam acquisition.
On a side note, if you ask my college basketball coach, he will tell you I'm uniquely positioned to talk about offense, but am not the person you want talking about defense whatsoever. Don't have much of an appetite for that. The opportunities for growth are numerous, as John pointed out. Let's dig in. Slide 43 represents a high-level summary of our global beverage can business at the end of 2017. As John pointed out, and we've talked numerous times on calls, we can truly serve our customers anywhere, anytime with any size, shape of aluminum beverage container to help them grow their profit pools. Scale matters. It does in the biggest markets for sure, and in 2016, we broadened that global scale.
When we embarked on the journey to acquire Rexam, John had the vision and the team's support to get through the complicated Rexam regulatory process, lay out a three-and-a-half year synergy capture plan, integrate a very large and complex global business, and optimize our plant network to ensure significant EVA returns for our shareholders. Throughout the balance of my presentation, I'll paint a picture of how we capitalize on our pillars for growth beyond 2019. Back in December 2016, I was new in my role and had the pleasure of meeting most of you for my very first Investor Day. I think I was in the role for 48 hours. I was new in my role, and all of you were full of questions about what initiatives Ball would undertake to achieve the aggressive synergy case that we had laid out.
This slide is the exact slide I spoke to back in December 2016 to help all of you understand the areas we would leverage to extract cost savings, value, and position our global business for long-term growth. In the spirit of time, I'll touch on and highlight the operations and footprint sections and speak to commercial in a few coming slides. For those of you who attended the product showcase last night and learned about lightweighting, and specifically the STARcan, Ball is moving to a global sub-9.5 gram can. You saw the time lapse of the Goodyear, Arizona facility and how we were able to install and start up four beverage can lines in one year. You saw how we can use technology for training and executing line simulations to ramp up new specialty lines quicker than ever before.
By using that simulation software, we can deploy capital with the most efficient view. When it comes to optimizing our plant network or footprint, though very difficult, supply-demand for standard containers, both across the U.S. and our Europe network, is in much better shape than at the time of the acquisition. Reidsville, North Carolina, Recklinghausen, Germany, both closed in mid-2017, and the Birmingham, Longview, and Chatsworth plants have now all ceased production in the U.S. per the schedule laid out last year. One note to help reframe some of our comments in a little bit more detail. If I look at the U.S. in particular from a footprint standpoint, we removed eight lines. We added back in five lines. Of the eight lines, four were 12-ounce lines. Of the five added, 1.5 were 12-ounce lines.
It's a net reduction of roughly 1.5 to 2 billion units. My good friend, Carlos Medeiros, the President of North America, and his teams have been challenged to increase efficiencies and reduce spoilage in an attempt to gain back that volume to secure contracts going forward. In South America, we have completed the closure of our Cuiabá facility and look forward to completing construction of our new Paraguay plant in late 2019, which will complement our Southern Cone plant network and serve contracted customer growth. At the time we laid out our value capture initiatives, many people outside of the walls of Ball said it was too aggressive. One thing our investors should always remember, our teams are owners, too.
All the way down to the plant floor, we're aligned, and we appreciate the sacrifice our colleagues have made to execute and position us for future growth by focusing on supply-demand, embracing new technologies, and embracing challenging projects to bring product innovation and capabilities to our customers and growing beverage categories. John referenced last night the global beverage can business is well-positioned through the medium and long term to grow at a 2%-3% clip. This identifies a number of the volume projections that we see that we've experienced here recently and we believe will continue. In short, the beverage can business is alive and well, and we're going to talk about how we're uniquely positioned to capture and win in these markets. When we look at slide 47, I've summarized how we are uniquely positioned to grow.
Whether it's our well-capitalized and flexible specialty footprint that we've continued to invest in, we indicated that at the outset of the Rexam acquisition, our improved supply-demand balance, commercial opportunities that are continuing to present themselves in the term of long-term contracts that'll continue to open up over the next two to three years. New category growth, we'll go into that in more detail. Sustainability has been a really dramatic shift. I think is most recently in the CCE public release, they talked about how there's been a big transition. John referenced we were over in Europe last week. Conversation with some of our bigger customers last year were all predicated on the elimination of sugar and the avoidance of sugar taxes.
It has absolutely moved in a very steep way, in a very sharp way, in a very dramatic way toward how they prevent the onslaught of the negative press associated with plastic contamination. All of these levers, including supply chain investments to help us manage the increased complexity that faces us as we shift into providing what our customers want, when they want, where they want it, are all going to be catalysts for us moving forward. When you look at our specialty portfolio here on slide 48, this highlights two things. Number one, this is a sample of the over 30 can sizes that we manufacture in our European business. I know John's already highlighted that we're north of 32 can sizes now in the U.S.
That system of product offerings has allowed us to, on a pro forma basis from 2015, if you look at a pro forma Rexam acquisition, we've grown our specialty container volumes by 40%. We have also got a product portfolio now that has specialty at 40%. That 40% number is a big deal since we've embarked on this journey. A couple of examples, I highlighted one already relative to Goodyear, but Cabanillas and Goodyear were also significant investments that were contemplated as we went through the due diligence process of the acquisition. These two facilities combined are $350 million worth of capital investments. I know Scott's highlighted them previously and will probably talk about them again. We believe that we've got outsized returns above our cost to capital, and we've provided a much more flexible footprint from a specialty container perspective.
We're also preparing, not highlighted on this slide, but we're also preparing, obviously, for the construction and startup of our new plant in Paraguay, which will come online at the end of 2019. In addition, specialty can line conversions are occurring at multiple plants as I speak. A big thank you to all of our teams. Their execution has been phenomenal. Another side benefit of our ownership culture at Ball. Why would we invest? We continue to capitalize on commercial opportunities and position ourselves to be the supplier of choice to our customers. Our customers also have a mandate to grow, and they need partners like Ball that can embrace the complexity necessary to win for years to come. With complexity comes opportunity. We're actively in the process of garnering this value.
We negotiate with our customers in private, not on investor webcast. No, with 15%-20% of our commercial contract volumes being negotiated by the end of 2019, the opportunity is now, and we have the product portfolio and global footprint required by our customers. It's a good place to be. This is a snapshot of our North America business and how we're evaluating and looking at that over the next 3 years. This is something that we do in each of our regions as we build up our strat plan 3-year cycle. North America, we believe, is expected to grow just ahead of 1.5% between now and 2021, largely due to new categories in the can being the package of choice for new product introductions. John's mentioned this earlier with the SKU proliferation and new labels coming online at a higher clip than they have historically.
Sustainability, we're in the early innings of that. A lot of that upside is not necessarily built in here. But if you were to walk through this, I'm sorry, I can't step away from the microphone. But we very much understand that the U.S. domestic beer market is declining. What is not underlying there is what products and what brands are growing and/or decreasing. So there's another set of information that we've invested heavily in from a marketing and a business development standpoint that goes into our evaluation of who are going to be the winning customers and who we win with. There's a lot when you see the Mexican domestic beers, we continue to see outsized growth there. FABs are where your spiked seltzers are in domestic U.S. Craft continues to be a great growth story for the can. Down the line, we're very bullish on wine.
I'll talk to that here in a second. Then you shift over into CSD, there'll be a continued decline in certain categories within both the large CSD providers. But they're also winning in sparkling waters, in teas, in juices, and I think the substrate penetration that is available to us from a plastic-to-can substrate shift could move these numbers north. I just wanted to give you an indication in how we look at things and how we prioritize our resources and why we're excited. Even in markets where we think domestic beer and CSD are challenges, we still think there's macro growth there. And as a market leader, it's incumbent on us to make sure that these categories and these new products have a home, and we can facilitate that growth. The story of wine is quite exciting.
Since the last time we were together a couple of years ago, there's a time sequence up here. Wine in cans is happening in the U.S. Referenced PET not being accepted in MRFs across the U.S. Glass is having a challenge as well. Some of the big wine consortiums are all looking for a home for price points of certain wine. They're looking at the can. They understand the sustainability attributes of the can. And we have made filling investments that will be coming online in North America. And we've cultivated through a lot of the business development folks that some of you saw last night, great relationships in the early stages out on the West Coast. We've invested in our Fairfield facility to make sure we have the appropriate can sizes to make sure that we're in line for the legislation in and around alcohol.
The sequence here, if you look back in 2002, was essentially Coppola was the customer. Our most recent IRI data shows that there's over 68, almost 69 brands now, new customers. We have a really good head start. A lot of the innovation required in and around this is very different than other categories. You need food scientists. You need a sophisticated technology center and lab. All of these wines require a different coating and a different interface with the metal. They're all living, breathing organisms. You have to make the appropriate investments. You have to work with a supply base that you can have an effective job from a leverage standpoint to pull them into these innovation pipelines and customer discussions. I was asked what I thought the size and scale of this opportunity was. I said it's pretty early to call.
I would reference similar patterns to craft beer, if it's half the size, I think we'll really like that five years from now. We've seen this opportunity, we've been engaged in this opportunity, and I think with some of the investments and some of the capabilities we put in place, we should start to see those benefits here in the not-too-distant future. I could talk about LaCroix and water and countless others, but I think that one's the newest and one of the most aggressive opportunities that we've been pursuing, and it's probably not highlighted in a lot of your thought process. Again, John's talked about the sustainability message, it's interesting in talking with a number of you last night, it's still a challenge. I was talking to Scott.
There's just so much misinformation out there about what plastic really is and what you can do with it, I think John dispelled some of those rumors in a pretty dramatic and compelling way. There's an education process, whether it's social media, advertising, I've gotten a lot of really good recommendations from all of you here, but it's definitely going to take a layering effect. It's going to take NGOs that want to partner with us that value one-way packaging. It's going to take retailers that we can help to convince that putting cans in plastic-free aisles is a way for you to margin up your business. Profit pools to our customers. We've got a pretty good idea on how to innovate and how to talk to them about that.
There's countless layers that have to be involved in this because candidly, the misinformation is so real and so evident that we need an army of folks to kind of overcome that, we are clearly focused on making that happen and engaging with people in a way to make sure that message gets out. The pockets of opportunity, the real tangible markets, we are not going after this. John is very passionate about this subject and can evoke a lot of emotions. The $24 billion, I have to tell, might not show up in the budget next year, but I think there's some markets where we can go after in pretty short order. Our colleagues in Europe kind of been on the front lines in the U.K., we've done a lot of work to kind of right-size or size the opportunity.
When you talk about the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, obviously the U.K., and Spain, the substrate penetration in and around CSD and other, that's really where the sweet spot is for us to move cans into. Those would be the markets that we target. The reason why we would target those markets is all in and around what John highlighted relative to social media and what we can glean from the sentiment scores that are out there. We understand who is serious about talking about plastic as a polluter in the environment. Then you have to look at per capita GDP and things of this nature to know who may be willing to pay for this transition and who may be willing to demand that transition.
We've built our case and our target based off those countries, largely based on where the activity is on social media in and around this topic. We've achieved some significant short-term wins in and around places that two years ago I would have said would have been far more challenging than they are today. Our colleagues in Europe and U.K. have really benefited. You continue to see this customer can of water in the U.K. They've done a wonderful job facilitating this. This is a can of water that I believe, Colin, is filled in Austria, and they're growing by leaps and bounds. You will see them in Tesco value meals, where they've transitioned out plastic bottles in lieu of this can. It's happening, and it's happening real-time. Our Ball still water business is up nearly 20% in Europe year to date.
We have far more opportunities than I would have anticipated even a year ago. Kudos to the team for a lot of the progress they're making there. This slide, I think you could find from probably any major consulting firm talking about 4.0 digital manufacturing. I think you saw Ball takes a very pragmatic approach to this in the areas, whether it's working on automation or how to get better use by using data and sensors, getting better use out of our wear parts and our tooling to extract better efficiencies, and maybe even more important when you saw the 3D training. In some parts of the world, the domestic U.S., look, it's a tight labor market, and we pay people very well, take great care of them. Right now, it's not that exciting of an opportunity for folks to step into.
We don't have 10 years to get people to work on the front end of a line and the back end of a line and understand the cadence of all. We have to use technology to get folks engaged very quickly to show that this business is actually a little sexier than other people would think. That's principally how we're using automation and technology is to bring on and maybe even mix our skill into higher engineering class of laborers so they can use these tools, and they can automate these lines. We can right-size our productivity efforts in terms of labor, and we can benefit from the technology.
As we look out in terms of the earnings profile and how this lends itself to what Scott's going to talk about and what John's already highlighted, new categories, new category introductions, us taking a leadership position in those as we have, price, mix, global versus regional customers. We have globally over 1,000 customers. It's exponential compared to what our other competitors have. We pride ourselves in embracing complexity and working with folks in getting into every market, every channel possible. We see real value in that, and we will continue to pursue that because where there's complexity, there's opportunity. Geographic growth, there are still places that we're not at in the same level that I think even some of our competitors are at.
Last week, John indicated we're in some spots with great opportunity set into Moscow and Spain last week, but great sustainability paths for the can to continue to win. We have great people, great infrastructure, great footprint. There are pockets even within our existing infrastructure. Argentina, I know a lot of folks have talked to Pires about that over the last 24 hours. Great opportunity set in front of us. Plant efficiencies. I marvel at the way our plants continue to drive and gain output despite the complexities that are thrown at them. In our European business and our North America business this year, we will do 90,000-plus label changes. That's probably up 40% from four years ago. We will eclipse 100,000 probably in the next 18 months.
Our efficiencies are going up, and that takes commitment, and that takes process change, and that takes thought, and that takes capability, and that takes a culture that we've built and we lean on heavily. I think as both Scott and John have also talked about, we've launched our Global Business Services initiatives. There's been a lot of structure and thought that have gone in behind that. I think Scott will touch on that a little bit more, but we'll continue to rightsize the organization to make sure the folks that are working on strategic initiatives are working on strategic initiatives, and the folks that need to be working on managing KPIs and driving efficiencies and back office functions are doing that full time. We've already begun to execute on these opportunities.
I'm excited to see the sustainability surge, continued growth in specialty, and how well-capitalized and positioned we are for these opportunities going forward. Ball is proud to be the industry leader for beverage cans. It comes with great responsibility, and humility is an important part of our culture. Will everything break our way? No. I also know that we will make decisions based on the best economic outcome for our fellow shareholders, and we will have the team and assets to be able to execute and serve our growing customers and categories with the most sustainable package in the world. Thanks, and I'll turn it over to Scott or Rob. Yeah. One of them.
Good morning. First, I'd like to thank those that took the time yesterday to go up to our Boulder, Colorado operations. Our team got a real kick out of being able to show off some of the stuff they're involved in, and your interest and questions keeps them motivated. John talked a bit about where we've been and a little bit about where we're going. I will try to dig a little deeper into that. There we go. This year, the first half of the year, we've had pretty close to $50 million worth of operating profit, 554 of sales, which represents a 12% growth year-over-year. John told what is, for us, a kind of remarkable story on the backlog of the winning new business portion of our business.
Just a couple of years ago, we had backlog of $600 million and now at 1.8, almost 1.9, and hope to win some other programs here in the next few weeks, actually, that could take it even beyond that. John talked a bit also about the hiring pace that we've been on. We've hired over 700 new people this year. That's been the fastest pace of hiring in our company's 62 years of existence. I have to tell you, I spent a lot of time with a lot of the new employees. We keep raising the bar. It's incredible to me the capability of some of the folks that we've brought on. It also has given us an opportunity to, in a very material way, address our diversity of our staff. Over 40% of the new hires this year are women and minorities, well above our industry's averages.
A question could be, how have we done this? We've done this a number of ways. One, we've leveraged the expertise across our entire company, not even just Ball Aerospace, but across the entire corporation. The investment we've made is building strong relationships with our customers well earlier than we ever had before. The other thing we touched a little bit yesterday is we made a major investment in people, time, energy in our D.C. office. Almost all of our customers are D.C.-based, and we've had to ramp up, over the last several years, our presence there to make sure people know our story. Most importantly, what we've had to do is we've had to deliver on our commitments and execute on the programs we currently have. There is no better way to win new work is to execute well on the work that you have.
The other thing is, it's been talked about over and over, and you'll hear it from me as well, because I believe, strongly, that it's a discriminator in our industry and with our customers, and that is we have to have and continue to have a culture of transparency, integrity, innovation, humility, and collaboration. Without that, we'll just be one of those other guys, and we really, really don't want to do that. We use that in how we behave with our customers, how we behave amongst ourselves, and we use it as a criteria as we hire people. Do they pass that test? We've been about staffing up to take on the work we've already captured. As I said, we've hired 700 so far. We'll hire another 200 to 300 yet this year, and the talent is absolutely terrific. All right. Okay.
I don't know if I'm battery challenged. Thanks. Okay. A number of people have asked me questions on how do we contract with the government. First of all, if you go for the far right, we are a government contractor, 98%. We service the civil market, the DOD market, and the intel market. In the civil, that includes NASA and NOAA, USGS. In the DOD, that includes Navy and Air Force, Army, the others. There's an intel community, which I won't go into, but is a big part of our business. This changes from time to time, but our current mix, most of our contracts are contracted either on a fixed-price basis for products to be delivered or on a cost-plus basis. Typically, if there's a great deal of development or new technology, they tend to go to cost-plus.
Those bring a little bit less profitability, but they have very, very low levels of risk. We at Ball Aerospace have done extremely well in doing fixed-price contracting, that will change over time as the mix of our contracts or where we are in our contracts change. You can also see the mix. Right now, and this is a material change over the last five years, we are highly defense and intel oriented right now, but it goes back and forth depending on where the government budgets are in that regard. Next chart. Thank you. On the innovation front, those of you who had a chance to get up to Boulder yesterday, one, again, thank you. Two, you got a chance to look and see firsthand and talk to some of our staff about some of the exciting technologies we're working on.
Innovation is the key for us, there's no way around that. We recently won a quite large contract for us with NASA, which will build on our many, many year history of working on their most important missions. The newest of their important astrophysics missions is a program called WFIRST. That is a space-based observatory designed to answer essential questions in the area of dark energy, exoplanet, and infrared astrophysics. It is the new, over the next five or eight years, will be the new research areas of the scientific community, not in America, but worldwide. It builds on a long history of other great astrophysics missions, the last of which was the Hubble Space Telescope, which continues to fly today and has six of the six instruments flying today are provided by Ball Aerospace. Next chart, please.
John talked a little bit last night and again today about our view of being a mission partner, which is terribly important to us. We don't use the term mission prime. We use mission partner, which represents a mindset that we approach our customers with, and that is to be part of their mission, part of their success. It also broadens our role on these missions. As John said, a number of years ago, we were a sleepy little provider of really good little instruments. We've grown from that to spacecraft, to integration, to testing, to launch. We also do launch, now bringing the data down to the ground to the scientist or war fighters, whatever the case.
This has come about, as we've crawled up this food chain, we've had a couple key customers give us opportunities, starting with studies, as John said, onto small missions or demo missions, and now we're into operating or program of record missions. We're off actually to a very good start on that. That opportunity space, looking forward, is really, really good for us, providing we continue to perform. Next slide, please. On the technology side, just to highlight a couple. We have done data analytics for the military and for the intel community for 35 years. We do it well. We have 400 scientists and engineers that do that. Over the last few years, we've taken that group, and teamed it up with some interesting commercial opportunities, and it's an area we think we can grow. That's one area of technology.
Another, which fits neatly in the sustainability category, that is we've developed, for the government, methane monitoring instruments that can measure with very high accuracy, from aircraft or from space, for pipeline operations, for community safety. We've more recently teamed with an organization that takes that to market, and we're kind of excited about where that might go also. A third area to touch on just briefly is in the area of lidar. We have worked in the lidar world with the Air Force and Navy for years and years. That technology is really advancing. There's some very clever work that was done by MIT, that was transferred, and then we recently bought the rights to that technology, that help identify objects from very, very far away with just a few photons and something that could really change the game for us.
After having just this spring acquired that technology, we've already won our first program, that will take advantage of that. Next chart, please. On the people and culture, you've heard that in Boulder yesterday, you heard it last night, you heard it from John and Dan, you'll hear it from me again, and I no doubt you will hear it in Golden this afternoon. As we grow, and as John mentioned, 40% of the people working at Ball Aerospace today didn't work there just two years ago. Maintaining, protecting that culture is terribly important to us. We talk about it all the time, in every communication we have. Our customers value it. We value it. Again, it really embraces integrity, humility, transparency, innovation, and collaboration. It's important to us and whatever size we get to be, it will be through that lens. Last chart, I believe.
John and Scott will also talk a little bit about, we've made some major investments, not only in people, which I've talked about, but we've made major investments. You can see the charts and those that you were on the tour yesterday saw some of that. A new office space, new labs, new test facilities, in order to do the work that we've already captured. This isn't a case of if we build it, they will come. They have come. We need the facilities. Finally, as John said on the once in a lifetime aspect of our business and the other businesses, Ball Aerospace has been around 62 years. Colorado-based. There has never been a moment where the opportunities were as rich as they are today.
My team and myself are very excited about taking on that challenge and seeing where we can take this business over the next five years. Thank you for your attention, and now to Scott.
Good morning. Going with Dan's basketball analogy, I obviously don't possess Dan's height, and apparently, I didn't possess his offensive skills. To go with that, I have virtually no vertical leap. I actually did play college basketball. The way I got to play college basketball was I played tenacious defense, and I have the broken bones and broken teeth to prove it. I scored more than half my points off of free throws and layups. Now you laugh, but to me, that was an easy way to add value to my team. When I think about our free cash flow and returning it to shareholders, I think about it the same way. It seems like an obvious and impactful way to add value to our team, and I'm going to talk about that later. It's great to be here.
It's been nearly two years since we did our last investor day, and the good news is we're on track to achieve many of the near-term goals that we laid out for ourselves. More importantly, the longer-term opportunity, I think, is even bigger. I'm going to review some of our original Drive for 10 goals that John talked about last night that we laid out in 2010. What we've achieved in terms of our goals of growing EBITDA, EVA dollars, free cash flow generation, and returns. We look at those goals, we really have accomplished a lot. But what's more exciting is that the opportunities are in front of us, I think, are even greater. We really do have a once-in-a-lifetime to reshape all the businesses that we're in as we go forward.
Now, operationally things, footprint changes like Reidsville and Recklinghausen and Chatsworth and Longview and Birmingham are always difficult. But the added flexibility that we're building and have built into our system in places like Cabanillas in Spain, Goodyear, Monterrey, Belgrade, San Luis Potosi, Pouso Alegre, Argentina, Chile, Myanmar, India Aerosol, the Aerospace Manufacturing Center, and Paraguay add greater opportunity and flexibility for us going forward. We've invested heavily in our future, and we need to ensure that the returns for all this capital show up. We need to execute on the incredible backlog that we have in aerospace. It's been talked about a couple of times, and not less than three years ago, that backlog stood at just over $600 million, and now is approaching $2 billion.
We need to execute on our commercial strategy of ensuring we get the proper value for what we bring to our customers, and that runs across every business that we operate. We need to transform the way we do work. The world, as people have talked about, is more complex, and oftentimes, we make things even more so, and we need to master this complexity and simplify where possible and not just think business as usual. When we acquired Rexam a couple of years ago, we laid out goals that we wanted to accomplish by the end of 2019. You can see from this slide that we're doing our part in 2018 to essentially achieve these goals. Through tremendous work by all the businesses and support functions, the things we are doing are working. We're growing the earnings, the free cash flow, reducing our debt as planned.
Frankly, I think if we take a look back at from where we were two years ago to where we are today, all the hard work is paying off. The one area that we're easily exceeding is on the capital spending front. This isn't all bad because I think the things that we've spent money on, we're going to like a heck of a lot as we go into the future and really create the next leg of growth for our company. Now, when we started Drive for 10 back in 2010, we laid out a few financial goals, as John mentioned, like doubling our EBITDA over 10 years. We knew if we focused on what was important and gave ourselves flexibility to invest in our businesses or acquire new businesses, we could get there.
Now, early on, you could see we're relatively flat, as in the first few years, we dealt with currency headwinds, a big change in the market environment in China, and declines in our recently sold steel food container business. All told, those headwinds were over $300 million. Through this period, we focused on improving our businesses that we had and maintained a strong, flexible balance sheet to be able to orchestrate the last big consolidation play in the global beverage can business. That platform, and what we've been able to do in growing our other businesses, has given us a clear path to the goal of doubling our EBITDA and our goal of $2 billion for 2019 is within sight. Probably more importantly than growing EBITDA was our focus on doubling our EVA dollars. Our real value creation comes when we grow EVA dollars.
It's not about getting bigger, it's about EVA, and I'll show you in a slide in a few minutes how this proves out. If you look at the line in this chart, even when our EBITDA from the previous chart was relatively flat, we were able to grow our EVA dollars by focusing on our balance sheet, receivables, payables, inventory, and being prudent with our capital spending. During the period of 2010 to 2015, we grew EVA dollars by 50% without much growth in EBITDA. Now, this chart only goes out to 2020, but I can tell you that even more opportunity to grow EVA dollars is in front of us as we execute on the capital and commercial plans that we have that we're executing. At times, pruning businesses can also improve your EVA dollars.
Recently, we sold into a JV the majority stake of our U.S. Tin Plate food and steel aerosol business. That move will result in a $16 million improvement in our EVA dollars as the tin plate business wasn't earning its targeted returns. Not to mention, it also gives us a lot of cash to be able to buy back additional stock and reduce our debt even faster. The other big financial goal was to double our free cash flow from around half a billion dollars per year, to more than $1 billion. As important as EVA dollars are, free cash flow is a close second. Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business, and it's what allows you to return value to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends, as well as continue to invest in your business and pay for acquisitions.
2016 was an anomaly on the chart, given the timing of the Rexam acquisition and the cash flow effects of that transaction. You can see our goal of doubling our free cash flow is within reach, and we're laser-focused in 2019 to hit that $1 billion-dollar target that we laid out a couple of years ago. Again, this only goes out to 2020, and it's based on last year's strategic plan. I believe the opportunity to continue to grow as we grow our earnings and our CapEx modifies somewhat to grow that even further. How do we do that? It's really things now that are really right in front of us. It's a lot more in our control today than it was two, three, four years ago. It's really about unlocking the potential that we have today.
If you've been around us for a while, you've seen this chart a number of times, and there's many things that have changed at Ball, but this is something that isn't changing. This strategy works. EVA is the primary financial lens that we use and will continue to use. We focus on generating cash in all of our businesses. We then prudently allocate that capital to those investments or acquisitions that will further improve and grow our EBIT, and all these things with an EVA lens focus. This disciplined approach to running our businesses and investing for the future works. All the projects that I'm going to talk about in the next couple of minutes are not about growth for growth's sake, but about improving our returns even further and growing that cash flow pool and those EVA dollars. John showed a version of this slide earlier.
We know when we do these things right, it translates into higher share price. Here's a few examples of large acquisitions or deployment of capital and the resulting change in EVA dollars and the translation to improved stock price. The first example was the Reynolds deal way back in 1998 in U.S. beverage cans. The EVA generated from this transaction over four years was nearly $90 million, and our share price increased two and a half times over that same four-year period. The second example is from the Schmalbach acquisition of European Beverage Cans back in 2002. Over the next four years, we nearly doubled EVA dollars, and our stock price increased over 80%. The 2009 ABI plant acquisition is next. Over the next four-year period, we again nearly doubled EVA dollars.
The stock price increased only about 30%, but remember, this is during the last financial crisis, valuations were a little distorted to the downside. We come to 2016 and Rexam. We've achieved roughly $150 million improvement in EVA, and the stock has moved up only modestly. A couple of things to point out. First, we're only about two years into the post-deal period, and something as complicated as this will take a bit longer, and the previous examples were all after four years. We also issued shares to pay for part of the Rexam deal, which dilutes the existing shares. The next point is we're just at the beginning phases of really the execution of the large capital that we've spent since the acquisition, our footprint changes, and our commercial strategy and transformation work.
When we do this, I have no doubt that this will translate into share price. The other interesting thing that we've combined these acquisitions with taking on financial leverage and then quickly paying down the debt and turning that free cash flow to buying back our shares. This tracks the same transactions from the previous slide plus one additional one. You can see from the red line the increase in leverage to finance the deal, then the quick deleveraging afterwards where we're paying down the debt, and the blue bar on the bottom is our free cash flow. The lighter blue part of the bar is the amount of free cash flow we use to buy back stock, and again, the resulting share price in the green box is at the bottom.
There are a lot of numbers on this chart, the summary is really threefold: make smart acquisitions, generate the hell out of EVA and cash flow, pay down your debt quickly, buy back your stock. This works back in 1998. It's worked in every subsequent transaction, I have no doubt it's going to work again. The other point about this chart is that we're not done yet. The value creation opportunity with the latest acquisition is really still in front of us. You also see that there tends to be a bit of a lag in the stock price reaction to the share buyback activity. We're really just at the beginning stages of starting to return the majority of our cash flow back to share buyback. We really have a lot more to go in the last four months of the year.
I think through the end of the third quarter, we'll have repurchased roughly 12 million shares or about $470 million. We still have a ways to go here in the fourth quarter. We see next year with our leverage being where we want it to be, returning essentially all of those free cash flow dollars back to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buyback. The other part of the value creation opportunity is the capital that we're spending to improve and grow our businesses. You can see the last couple of years as well as this year, we've spent a lot of capital across all the businesses, and much of that capital is really still ramping up, and we've yet to achieve the full financial potential of that spend.
We need to make sure that the execution and maturing of this capital shows up to drive the next leg of our growth and earnings. The spending just since we closed Rexam a couple of years ago, needs to generate an incremental $117 million in net operating profit after tax for all this capital. All these projects play important roles in what's next for us and the value creation opportunity ahead of us, and I'm highly confident in all these projects that we're going to like what we got once these capital plans mature. We talked about the incredible growth in aerospace backlog, and that's one of the areas where we're spending a lot of money. Those of you that were on the tour yesterday saw the big D chamber over here in Westminster. We're adding on to that facility for additional production and test facilities.
As they've won a lot of this new business, the capital in that business seems to come in chunks every five to seven years or so. We got a big phase this year and next year, then I see that moderating back to more of a $50 million to $75 million range. The capital programs are going well, then it's the execution of the contracts, which I'm highly confident we'll deliver on that as well. How all this comes together, this is a busy slide, but it's important. When we invest and grow our business through acquisition or capital, we get returns greater than the cost of capital.
The way to kind of decipher this chart is the bars across the bottom represent the return on capital, with the gray being up to the cost of capital, now around 6%, and the right being the amount of returns in excess of that cost of capital. The numbers at the top are the total returns for each year. Also very important from an EVA perspective is the size of the capital base that we're using. That's the blue bar across the bottom. As an example, in 2004, we had roughly $2.3 billion of capital deployed, earning just over 16%, or roughly $370 million of total return dollars. Go forward a couple of years, in 2006, we had $3.1 billion of capital deployed. A bit more capital, but earning only 11.7%, or $362 million of total return dollars.
Again, not much change in the returns or in the EVA dollar returns that are generated, not much movement in our stock price over that period of time. Roll forward to 2014, when we had a little over $5 billion of capital deployed, earning 13.7%, or nearly $700 million of total return dollars, and the corresponding stock price movement you can see in the green bar. Today, we have over $10 billion of capital at work, earning 11.4%, or $1.14 billion of total return dollars. That's a 63% improvement in total returns. Again, you have to account for the dilution of the shares that we issued for the transaction. As those shares get taken off the market, we're going to see the resulting change in our share price. What do we need to do? We can control what we control.
That's getting the returns on all that capital that we spent over the last couple of years and making sure that the growth in earnings shows up. With our leverage kind of where we want it for a run rate, it's really turning all that cash machine over the next couple of years back to the shareholders in terms of buybacks and dividends. You can see by the end of 2020, essentially, we'll have retired all the shares that we issued for the transaction, and I think we'll like the end result of that. What we need to focus on in the near term, we need to continue to aggressively manage our balance sheet. That's everything from receivables to payables to inventory, whether it's sitting on our floor or in warehouses. It's finance transformation, HR transformation, IT.
This really touches every part of our back office operations. If you use data anywhere in our business, it's going to affect you. Nearly everything we do translates into some kind of financial figure, whether it's spoilage or efficiency or indirect cost, and we need to get much better and much more efficient as to how things are done and how we support the business. This can mean changing things from what we've done in the past, but with a clear line of sight to making us better. Cost savings and capturing further synergy opportunities is something we focus on every day. We're in a penny business, and we don't forget that ever. The commercial strategy. This is about making sure we're getting the right and fair value for what we deliver, and again, this goes across every business that we're in.
We're really just at the beginning of capturing that value. All this translates into a lot of cash flow generation. We think over the past decade, we'll have been able to triple our free cash flow. We used to just show just one stack of cash, but since we tripled, and I like to look at cash, we added a couple more stacks of cash. The equation, John touched upon this last night. I think what's important is we look forward. Everybody's been so focused from when we did the Rexam deal to the end of 2019. We did. We had a three-and-a-half-year game plan of a lot of things that had to occur during that time period.
Frankly, all the things we've been doing in that time period, the real value creation opportunity from a lot of that work will come in 2019 and beyond, 2020 and beyond. That's what I think people really haven't recognized yet. Some people have, but not everybody. How do we get to that 10%-15% over the longer term? It's really the return of that value to shareholders. We're going to buy back 5%-7% of the company every year with our free cash flow. It's maximizing existing operations. It's the footprint things we're doing, the commercial strategy that we're employing. The beverage can is winning around the world, so it's further growth CapEx. The aerosol is winning around the world, so it's growth CapEx to keep up with that growth around the world to again add kind of that 3%-5%.
We think we have, again, back to when we've done different acquisitions over the years, we've de-levered. We're in a great place to be able to invest in our business and return a heck of a lot of value to shareholders. We know that when we do this well with an EVA mindset, when it talks about ownership and culture, with people thinking this is their own money, because it is, we're highly confident that we will continue to have opportunities to exploit and to take advantage, and that the best times aren't behind us. The best times are ahead of us. To look forward, what we do 2019 and beyond, it's really reaping the benefits of all that CapEx. It's executing on the commercial strategies that Dan talked about earlier. It's investing with an EVA mindset, and could be both on acquisitions.
Grow our dilute earnings per share over time, 10%-15%, generate significant free cash flow, and return that cash flow to shareholders. It may not be the most exciting thing, but for me, it is incredibly exciting because I think where we're sitting here today, we have more opportunities in front of us that we can control and direct than really we've ever had. To me, it's a really exciting time, and I think the future is even more exciting. With that, I think we're going to take a break, and we'll take a 15-minute break and then come back and we'll do a Q&A. Thank you very much.
Hello. If everyone could please find their seats, we're going to start our Q&A panel. Thank you.
Okay. Dump another one. One more. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. Ghansham Panjabi at Baird. Thanks again for hosting this. First off, I guess, John, going back to your comments on customers changing complexity, ordering last minute. You're having to be paid accordingly. Can you dig into that trend a little bit? How long has that been occurring? Has it changed as your mix has changed towards specialty versus conventional? Is it more specific to a geography? Is that shift going to continue as grocery, for example, penetrates into e-commerce? Thank you.
Good question. Does this work? Thank you. Good question. It's a little bit of everything you just described. When you think about the first, the retailing side and the movement here in America, but even elsewhere, I'll turn some of this question so if you guys can think about how it affects your region. You think about the Walmart effect, and literally, some of these big box stores are calling up our customers Thursday night saying, "We want to run an end-of-aisle display in Boulder, Colorado starting Friday night." They have to jump through hoops, and we recognize that. It's also the specialty. You close your eyes and go back and think about how 1980 was and the whole supply chain itself. It was much more simplistic. There wasn't nearly as much just in time.
You have this just-in-time movement combined with this added complexity that Dan very eloquently talked about with 90,000 labels and 30-plus different sizes. That just compounds it. Is it going away? No, it's not going away. Maybe I'll turn it over because it varies much by region, but I would say we're dealing with this situation in every region in which we operate. Maybe I'll just start with Ghan and quickly go down the road and talk about it.
Example, China, I think the largest e-commerce market now in the world. Some of our customers are trying to figure out what's the package, because in China, when they buy on e-commerce, the expectation it's going to be cheaper. How do you ensure that you can keep your premiumization and then have a package for e-commerce that's a little bit different to give a price point, but also keep the premiumization? That's forcing us into some different packaging, working with the brands, understanding the profit pools. That's opportunity, and that's what we're doing with innovation.
Well, much like John explained, in our business, it is in the moment, and our customers are being challenged by the retailers because if you think where the power resides right now is at the retail level. In order to keep up with changing consumer demand, they place orders very last minute and expect us to deliver so that they can deliver as well. I think, specifically in the U.K., because of the sugar tax, a lot of our customers had to figure out a new way to avoid paying the tax, and in some instances, it was reformulation, which added to a fair amount of complexity, and others to ensure that sugar remained on the shelf for those who wished to buy it, there was a size change. Again, we're paid for complexity, and I think if we embrace complexity as opposed to avoid, we win.
Yeah. Just add to that. Given all the volatility that's in the EMEA region, the market and the way that the customers were traditionally generating their value is turned upside down, and they're basically looking at, as Colin was saying, they're looking at new ways or how to adapt to that to drive the value. The added complexity that we get in the EMEA region is some of our supply chains on raw materials are very complicated, like we're bringing metal into these countries and coatings. They're looking for those profit pools. The complexity is what's going to really help us as we go forward to look at driving that value, and then we get a share in that value.
It's very similar in South America. The one thing that I think I can add, is we try to use more technology to enhance our productivity at the same time that we are increasing our complexity.
We note here in North America that our customers, through the revenue management, they're trying to maximize their profits. They have clearly realized that there is an appropriate packaging for every drinking occasion. You saw earlier the chart showing the different price per ounce for different packaging. This is the driving for the growing SKUs. We note that there is a double-digit growth in numbers of SKUs here in North America, this is the answer that we help our customers for them to grow, and also that helps us growing our business as well and creating value.
Hi, I'm Stan. I'm the aerosol and slug guy with my beverage brethren here at the table. Our market is beauty and personal care. You can imagine by looking at the table in the back, we have a very complex range of products. At the same time, we're lightweighting and offering a sustainable solution for our customers. It's really about being a strategic partner instead of a transactional supplier. In order to do that, you have to be able to help sell their products. That means innovative products that pop on the shelf. You have to be able to check their sustainability block, and you need to be in the regions of the world where they need you to be. They really only want solutions in the end of the day. Customers are a little bit like electricity.
They find the path of least resistance in a good way. If you can offer solutions for them, I think they naturally want to come to you.
Well.
Thanks. Scott Gaffner from Barclays. When you look at the shift around sustainability and what obviously consumers and brand owners are talking about, that could potentially be a long-term tailwind, can you talk about it by region? I think if you look at the U.S.
Doesn't seem to me, at least, that there's really an environment for increased regulation under the current administration, and that plastics actually perform relatively well under the current standards based on by the EPA. Can you talk about sort of how you see this evolving over time through government regulations? That can really shift the tide on this movement pretty quickly. Thanks.
As you said, it is very difficult to associate a timeline for these events. What we know is that, as we move along with all these initiatives, with the several NGOs, all these activists, these will eventually help changing public opinion, and these will drive law changes. That's the normal flow. On the other hand, as shown also earlier today on the new launches, the IRI is showing that 6% of the new launches are already taking place into cans. The question becomes, why is this happening? Is it already public opinion influence to that? It's very difficult to dissociate, but it's very clear to us that most of the new launches are using cans, and that's positive. Also, it's important to mention that all of our main customers, they're talking about sustainability, so they will also be driving changes.
When we are going to see the tipping point, it's not clear for us. We don't know. We believe that there is a huge potential ahead of us, and we are working with all of our customers to reach this point sooner than later.
Thank you. Anthony Pettinari from Citi. John or Dan, I think we've seen packaging markets where as margins and returns improve, you see new market entrants or maybe some customers trying to do it for themselves. Just wondering, as you talk about being a market leader, how you balance between obviously maximizing your profitability near term, but also kind of partnering with your customers so they don't go in a direction you don't want them to go to.
This really gets to the whole network, complexity is our friend. As I mentioned, the example I gave in the U.S., where we can make all sorts of different specialty sizes from California to New York and everything in between, we could go through Europe and do the exact same thing. We could go through South America and do the exact same thing. We live in a competitive world, we're not going to either shy away from that or have our head in the sand that says that those types of things won't happen. If we're able to supply our customers, I think, as Strain was just saying, what they need when they need it, and you can do it in a way that we're actually helping them create these profit pools and helping them create value.
You're always going to have a one-plant operation that pops up somewhere. It just happens, and you got to deal with it. If we have a whole network approach that we can service our customers better than any individual plant, that's one of the ways. Will we win 100% of the opportunities we're talking about? No, we're not going to win that. We're conscious of that. We also have this mindset, a little bit like we were talking last night, about this close to the customer thing. Our dreams are fueled by the revenues that our customers pay us, and that's not lost on us. We just have to be humble and hungry and go a little bit after a little harder and leverage the network that we have and embracing the complexity that they were just talking about.
That's what's going to win in the marketplace.
Steve Wilson, Lapides Asset Management. I'm curious on a couple of fronts. We've built this mega plant in Arizona, we've closed a bunch of smaller, older facilities scattered around the country. We're doing this at the very time that freight rates are skyrocketing and availability of trucking is becoming more and more challenging. Are we now sort of moving away from or being caught more exposed to that phenomenon as we look for longer travel from these larger plants that obviously at a plant level are more efficient, but now it's going to be that much more expensive to get the cans to the customer?
First, the concept of building these mega plants is fundamentally they replace less efficient plants. Not only that, but also this new plant is capable of producing a lot more specialty cans than the other plants, the plants that were closed. On the freight side, the situation is that some of this freight is passed through our customers, some are not. The answer to that is, we have a much more sophisticated way to manage our logistic operation than we had years ago. That follows the complexity that has grown our business. We also have adjusted our capabilities across our system. It's not only that we built a mega plant, but also when you look at the whole system, our capability of producing specialties in several other lines are very different to what they were years ago.
The intent is to have the right can closer to the customer. Lastly, we also, as Dan mentioned, we have a productivity challenge where as we produce more cans in the right spot, we tend to at least offset some of these logistic costs that it's well known it's growing in the U.S. These are the main roads or the work streams that we are using to face or to fight against this growing cost.
Steve, I might add, though, to answer your question directly, no, the fundamentals of freight is important in our business and will always remain important. In Goodyear, Arizona in particular, it's a great example. Carlos just talked about in Southern California, and actually all of California, we were kind of short certain sizes, so we were actually shipping them even further from Arizona. It should be not lost on anyone that our Goodyear, Arizona plant is about a quarter of a mile off of Route 10, right to L.A. Basin, and it also can touch Texas. We look at this as a system approach. When you look at where that is relative to Longview, Texas, as well as Chatsworth, California, and what we can do in-- let's not forget, we added capacity in Conroe, Texas, as well.
You look at it as almost a spoke-and-hub concept, and you're trying to optimize freight while at the same time recognizing that different cans are going different places. You should not expect that we're close your eyes, and we're always going to build four-line plants because that doesn't make sense. In Goodyear, Arizona, it certainly did, given where the population is, given where our service points are, and given where we took out those two plants.
Yeah. My concern was more that you mapped this all out prior to seeing this huge spike that most people say is not going to just fade away.
The ROI that you expected on all this gets altered.
No, not meaningfully. The other thing people don't talk about, there's really two aspects of freight and logistics. There's first the distance, which you're getting to fuel, really, and the trucker availability. The whole other thing is how many touches you have. I can't tell you how many times, because of this complexity it created, we will make pallets in a plant, we'll have to go to a third-party warehouse and put them closer to the customer. Then they get drawn twice, and you're touching it four times. When you have wage rates in California where they are, that adds up meaningfully. What we're trying to do is as much direct to the customer as possible, and that's what some of these plants, like Goodyear, actually help cure.
George Staphos, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Thanks for the details and the presentation today. John, I had a question for you, piggybacking off of slide 54 and 55, where you're talking about the new opportunities. The first question is, and you've mentioned it, in years past, not everything goes right. When you used to have a business mix that was so concentrated in a few SKUs, there was greater risk in any year that something wouldn't go right, and you've diversified the portfolio rightly. If we think about your business for next year and everything goes more or less as you expect, how much of your revenue or EBITDA, either in North America or globally, however you want to answer, would be driven by craft and non-traditional cans? Would it be 5%, 10%, 20%? I had a follow-on question.
It's hard to answer that only because we're not done with the integration of Rexam, we still have all these cost savings from the footprint we just talked about. Those are going to be flowing through, and that's separate and apart. Here's what I tell you. Dan had that slide about all the category growth, and that was in North America. We look at it in virtually every facility. I'd go back to there and look, what you see is what I would describe as traditional, the way people think of traditional 12-ounce packages, which is domestic beer and just 12-packs of soda. Those are declining. They are. We're seeing a lot of good growth in all those other categories.
It's a hunter versus gatherer mindset, and we have a hunter's mindset, and that's why the sparkling water, the hard seltzers Dan mentioned, the wine, the coffee that you see here, and certain customers announcing they're going big into that in a packaging format. There's not just one stock answer to it, but I would say the preponderance of growth is coming from things like that.
Okay. I appreciate that. The other question related to it is we look at, again, specifically slide 55, and you have the $120 million-$240 million of, I think, contribution margin was what you were referencing there. Is there a way to quantify how much your capital intensity increases by offering more of these custom size and seeing a proliferation of your business mix? Presumably, EVA is going up, the capital intensity is going down, is there a way that you can quantify that for us so that we can come up with our own EVA calculations? Thanks.
Again, it varies by region, let's start here in North America, we can go into Europe South America. Our big capital throws with this Longview, Texas, or excuse me, the Goodyear, Arizona, as well as what we've done in Conroe, Texas. That largely builds out that flexibility, the capital intensity, now we get to leverage it, to Scott's point, wherever he is. Now we've invested this, now we get to leverage that. In Europe, we just have this new Spain plant coming on. We've been adding, in a very small way, some capability here and there. There could be some more down the road that we're looking at doing. In South America, we've been doing the same thing. In fact, even with Paraguay.
Right now, what's happening is Argentina and Chile have been growing so strong, we've been shipping cans from Brazil down there. The Paraguay frees up, we can create a southern cone system effect around that. The capital intensity for all that ought to be getting better. The other thing is that we talk a lot about internally is that we're talking all about the commercial growth and how we're going to make this stuff. Our operations around the world, they've been doing a tremendous job, we have still so much opportunity. Dan referenced this, so much opportunity that if we could be best in class in every one of our facilities, the free cans coming out of that, just through the efficiency gains and the spoilage gains is huge. Now, do we have natural impediments that won't allow us to do that?
Absolutely, we do. You close your eyes and dream and say, how high? Despite the number of labels going up 40% over the last few years, our efficiency's been able to go up. How much more can we get out of it? Because when you have a system that makes over 100 billion cans and you can get 1% efficiency more out of it, that's a billion more cans. They may not all be in the right spot, but it's a lot of fun to go into our manufacturing plants and you see the folks wearing T-shirts that say 85 and two, which is 85% efficiency, 2% spoilage. They know what their goal is, and they know how it affects EVA also.
Maybe I think the other thing, George, is we're using integrated business planning in our business to be a lot more efficient as to how we look at where line loads are and how we maximize the network. That just rolls opportunity to the bottom line to increase our capacity.
I think you know this, just to reinforce this point on the capital investment going forward in order to attack this growth opportunity, especially in all of our regions, but most appreciably in North America over the last six to seven years. When we go in and convert a line, we've got multiple can sizes on that. There's upside. We are basically forward investing, like in Goodyear, in 12 sleek, in 16 ounce, in 24 ounce. 12 ounce still plays a role, but we are anticipating that that will be less because of the major categories. We've also built in another can size that we believe, and we're making bets on that based on our very good market due diligence, that we'd be able to step into some of that. A lot of the investment is actually just leveraging previous investment.
That's great. Thank you.
All right. Yeah, thanks. Tyler Langton from J.P. Morgan. I think, John, you mentioned it's much improved, can still make a little less profit for your customers than PET, and that's an area you want to address and improve. Could you just talk a little bit about the initiatives that you want to take there to help them with that?
Well, yeah. I could spend hours talking about this, I think at its highest level, what we're really focusing on, and it's different than we've done in the past, is whether it's existing categories or new categories, focusing on the channel that it's going into and focusing on the price point. For example, five years ago, you didn't see, and I know we're spending most of this about North America, I'll turn it over to South America, because people don't realize more than 50% of all cans in South America are specialty. Actually, on the European side, it's as well. Five years ago in North America, you didn't see a 16-ounce can in the single-serve cold vault. We're selling a half a billion cans, I think, these days doing that. They're selling them at $0.99, as I showed you up there. That didn't exist before.
Those are the types of things that in the past we would say, "Well, our customers know a heck of a lot more about marketing than we do." That's right. We, because we get to see across categories, we get to see what's working where and when and how. We can actually now accumulate that and actually go to our customers and say, "Dear beer customer, this may not be relevant to you, but what we've been seeing in the energy space is X, Y, and Z." Hopefully, you're getting these light bulbs turned on in people's minds, and then they start trialing and doing some things. Not all of them are successful. We know that. The more you can bring ideas to it, the more it actually helps our business and actually helps the stickiness with our customers.
I don't know. Pires or Colin, do you want to say anything else about Europe or South America?
Well, I was referencing sugar taxes in the U.K. One of our customers who have a sugar product downsized the package, same price. You can get 250 ml of a full sugar product versus 330 ml of a no sugar product, same price. Guess what? They just margined up. Yes, there's probably a little bit of tax to pay, but overall, selling their same product in a smaller package allowed them to margin up, and it's an example of how we can use that to leverage other opportunities. Water, it's a commodity's commodity. How can you leverage up by creating new space for water in premium packages such as cans? We have to make it about our customers. How can we help them create value through the products we sell them?
In South America, we also can see different things like there is a new market growing a lot is quality beer, is pure malt beer. Also when we have different shapes and covering the cans, it helps a lot the product to be completely differentiated in the supermarket shelves and help the customers to grow their margin. This thing is also related to occasions. Can you imagine to drink a beer in a beach in Rio de Janeiro when the temperature outside is close to 100, and it's a big size or not enough, or too much in terms of volume that the temperature goes so high in the liquid that doesn't allow you to have the flavor of the nice beer. Those occasions help us in the same way that there's this perception from the customers that they need to have a premium product.
Could be in the soft drink side or in the beer side.
Edlain Rodriguez, UBS. This is a question for John. In one of Scott's slides, he talked about bolt-on M&As.
Can you talk about what those opportunities would be? Is it outside of the [inaudible] or is it in aerosol? Where would you see bolt-on opportunities?
Yeah. Well, let me start by saying, hopefully you've got an appreciation that we have more opportunities in the businesses we're currently in than perhaps we have resources. I'm not just talking money, I'm talking people resources, et cetera. I'll focus on those three, but I want to be clear about that point. On the beverage can side, the fact that we had to divest assets in U.S., in Europe, and in Brazil in particular, probably say it's a difficult putt unless other things break to do something in there. You look everywhere else, we could do something in China. I wouldn't expect us to. There's 17 other competitors that aren't publicly traded companies over there, that there's probably consolidation opportunity there. You go into Africa, we're really nowhere there. There's a handful of small operators there.
Some have one plant, some have multiple plants throughout, whether it's all the way from South Africa all the way up the western coast there, and as well as into Kenya and other places like that. Southeast Asia is another place where there are some companies that are vertically integrated. Those give you a flavor of the size and the opportunity on the beverage side. On the aerosol side, we're the largest in Europe, but still, it's a very fragmented industry. I think most of them are family owned and operated, and so there's going to be generation change, and so I think there's consolidation opportunity there. I think down in South America and Asia is in two other places where there's probably opportunity. It gets to a risk-adjusted return, and do you think you can make money doing that?
Argentina, for example, is a very difficult place to be doing business right now. The finance minister resigned a week and a half ago, IMF is bailing them out, so it's tough to do there. Brazil has had a very difficult environment, we've been doing quite successfully there, and so there could be opportunities there. There could also be greenfield opportunities there. All throughout Southeast Asia as well as other places, there's some people, and so we kind of hang around the hoop, but this is why we call them bolt-on because they're not big bet the ranch type of things. Even in the aerosol, or excuse me, the aerospace business, Rob Strain talked about actually, you don't have to have pure M&A. We actually acquired perpetual license for the lidar side.
That was a technology that we saw an opportunity for that we thought we could leverage in a certain end market that the people who own the technology didn't have an interest in it. Those are the types of things when we talk about bolt-on acquisition.
John, I wonder if it's possible for you to give us some sense of sort of timing and cadence on a couple of things. One is the kind of commercial opportunity-
that you've talked about to kind of restructure how contracts are written. The other thing is this movement to shared services where it sounds like you actually increased your cost last year because you were building out some of these regional shared services operations, and some of that ought to fall off next year as you pull the services out of the plants and put them in those locations. Maybe you could just help us with both of those.
Yeah. Let me start with the second question first, which is about shared services. When Ball had embarked upon a journey to move to the shared service concept back in 2000, help me out, 2014, 2013, and we had to put on hold because of the Rexam acquisition at the beginning of 2015. When we restarted it was kind of late 2016 going into 2017. What we did is we actually staffed up. We really haven't gotten as much of the G&A savings as we could have because we built a new shared service office in Belgrade, Serbia, as well as Querétaro, Mexico, and we're actually doing the same thing outside of São Paulo in Brazil.
What you have to do when you're doing these types of things is you got to staff up there, you got to fix your processes and harmonize and standardize your processes, then move them there. We're right in the middle of that game plan. As we go forward, a lot of the activities that we're doing at the plant level, whether it's paying invoices or payroll and other things like that, even accounting, that will diminish over time because now we have these shared services centers stood up. It really wasn't until, keep me honest here, guys, really the end of last year is when we didn't get them staffed up. Even now we're going through in the process of migrating certain of these things. There is opportunity going forward there.
On the commercial side, as we have said, this is a long-term game. What I mean by that is we have, since the close of the acquisition, have spent the last couple of years retraining muscles, is the best way to describe it, from our commercial folks to even our operations folks. We've taken a look. We haven't had any major contracts up for renewal in any major extent. Over the next couple of years, some of our contracts will start rolling off. We spent the last couple of years getting ready. Whiteboarding different what does the perfect contract, getting to the question earlier, given that many of these contracts were designed in the 1980s, what's different today and how does flexibility build in that? We don't want to say no to our customer.
What we want to say, "We're delighted to deliver you cans in 12 hours," and there's a cost to that.
Our current contracts don't allow for that. As these contracts come off, we're going to be looking at those things, and they vary by region and geography. Dan said it, 10%-15% as we go forward of our contracts are going to be rolling over on an annual basis, we really haven't had much over the past couple of years.
Yes, John. I just had a little bit of a smaller issue, but it could be significant. On slide 52, you talked about how wine in cans is taking off, and I just want to clarify. It said a 319% growth, and I assume 14 million cans North America, if I'm reading that right, annualized. That's big. That's double-digit share of the market. Maybe I'm misreading that. If you could clarify that, then maybe secondly, if you could talk a little bit about how this opportunity could unfold. I noticed last night we had red wine in cans, but it would seem like white, where you drink it cold or cool at least, might even be a bigger opportunity, especially in the smaller sizes. Any developments on those fronts?
I'm going to turn it over to our sommelier. Yeah. Those numbers are real. It's been exponential the last 12 months, the number of customers. You've seen product launches for the wine-like products. For instance, a product launch for, I think, one of the Barefoot brand, it's 20 million cans as a product launch, a test market. That's the size and scale of those things when you see it show up in a 7-Eleven, for instance, which I think that was a single serve outlet for that. What the wine industry is doing is there's the wine that you're talking about, red wine in particular, there's wine-like that's not even wine. You can see it in all the other substrates from a retail price point, et cetera.
They're driving trial in the wine-like, and they started there in cans, so they could get a comfort level relative to the product. It's great at picnics, travels well, ready to drink. It's appropriate single serve size, all of those things. What'll eventually happen is you'll see them move into higher price point wine, higher price point bottled wine, and the can is going to play a certain role. Now we've made investments in, as I said, in Sonoma in particular, to fill those higher price point bottle wines that'll move into cans. You'll see those probably in can shapes that look a lot more like a craft beer offering, and the thought process is simply people are willing to pay $2 to $3 a can for that. They can step into this. That gets you to a $13 to $17 per bottle retail price point.
Those brands are going to be the domestication of wine. It's the fact that we didn't talk about this, but there's a huge, one of the biggest wine consortiums. They were facing a choice to build another wine bottle manufacturing facility. California's probably not going to let them do that. There isn't a place to find cullet for the recycled content going into the bottle. All of these wine They're all looking at this, and they've been looking at it for the last several years. At the lower price points, they're in tetra. There's a market, obviously, for the boxed wine. You'll see most of that in restaurants. As you move up the value chain on the price point, then you start stepping into cans.
At some point, we hope that aluminum bottles play a role at higher elevated price points. Right now, it is a big opportunity. It is a big opportunity not only for sustainability purpose, but as John indicated, the Red Bull and the energy drink, craft beer folks are familiar with this, and they want to get out of their houses, and they want to go experience life, and they want to have a ready-to-drink beverage with them. All of those things are playing really well into this space. The competitive advantage I've had, and I've had a number of conversations here, is every single one of these wines is different. It's a living, breathing organism, and you have to have made investments in and around innovation. We have food scientists on board down in our technology center that a lot of you have toured before.
We have made investments because we've stubbed our toe. It was not a small thing for the wine industry to go from cork to synthetic cork. It's a similar transition into this package in terms of the amount of oxygen, light, all of those things play a role in the formulation. We're working with all these wineries on our internal coat that partners and pairs best. We're working with formulations of these wines. For those of you who met Melanie Viera, I'm completely passionate about this, so I'll shut up in just a second. Melanie Viera, who was talking to a lot of you, she's a head of business development and marketing for Ball. She spent two years in San Francisco living there, developing this relationship.
This is not an insignificant investment that Ball has made, and it's not an insignificant head start that we have in this area. We will, much like the craft beer space, it's a ton of complexity, a lot of customers, a lot of small volumes, but it adds up, and it's great margin. We are going to continue to put our shoulder into this because it's a hell of a great opportunity.
Thanks.
By the way, I apologize. I got my millions and billions mixed up, so I have a 0.15% market.
Yeah.
Still coming from zero in a matter of years.
Just to add on this, and we haven't talked about this, but when we formulated Post Rexam, kind of the global structure, we have consolidated engineering. And we've consolidated innovation. So just last week when we were in Cabanillas, Colin introduced me to the largest wine consortium in Europe. Immediately the conversation was, "I need to come over and learn about cans. I know they're a big deal in Napa. We need to look into it. We're having problems with the formulation and the off notes of the" It's like we have done all those learnings. Come over. We painfully have learned on this. So that gentleman's going to be coming over in the next couple of weeks, and all of Chile. Chile's very interested, and I know a lot of this. We have big customers there that own big vineyards.
So, it's probably not going to be the size and scale as what's going to happen in California here in the short term, but this is a great building block for us in that particular segment. Thanks.
Gabe Hay, Wells Fargo. Thanks for all the transparency, guys. Maybe just a question around thinking about your business differently, and you talked about revisiting kind of just the approach. Is there a cogent sort of investment case around co-locating facilities? I talked to Colin last night about a couple of customers that you guys are co-located with, and sort of just as they rethink efficiencies and their go-to-market strategy and the like.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, I think as we discussed last night, we have several opportunities. I think co-location depends, A, a relationship, a very long-term relationship, and size. Clearly, our Red Bull operations, for example, are through the wall, seamlessly integrated through the filling location. We have some other customers where we have either across the parking lot or through the wall opportunities. It's a relationship thing. We tend to do long-term relationships with those customers. We're well integrated with each other. We understand the needs of each other. A lot of communications comparing maintenance schedules, so when they would take maintenance, we do it with them. It is, partnership's sort of a tired word, but you really need a depth of integration to make stuff like that successful.
Where you do have it, though, it's good stuff because it takes an awful lot of supply chain cost out and definitely adds to both our sustainability credentials as you're not chewing up miles on the road.
Yeah, I'd just add that that's something that we look at all the time, but it's not the only piece of the playbook. To Colin's point, it very much is not only customer by customer, but location by location specific. In our business, to be economic, you have to have scale within a plant. There's a lot of one-line plants out there that are either going to be coming two-line plants, or they're probably going to be going away as various regions improve. If you can't see a line of sight of getting scale within a plant, you're not doing your customer any good or you're not doing yourself any good. The examples Colin just gave, they're multiple lines, and it makes a lot of sense. There's not a lot of filling, our customers' filling locations that have that capability on a global basis.
We look at it all the time.
Hi, Brian Maguire from Goldman Sachs over here. Just a question on aerospace, actually. It seems like the business is in a great spot these days, and the tour yesterday was really helpful in helping understand the transformation it's had over the last 10, even five years, to how it's performing now and the outlook going forward. Just my question's really kind of around, do you think that you get enough credit for it from the investment community as part of a packaging company? Given the growth algorithm and outlook for that business, I think in the past you've talked about it maybe doesn't have enough scale and size today to be its own entity spun out. If it continues to grow, is that something that five or 10 years down the road, do you think could be a possibility to unlock some value?
Assuming you don't think that investors recognize the value today.
Yeah. Well, first and foremost, I haven't met an investor that starts off by saying anything other than effectively, "How are we making money?" They don't care if we make cans. They don't care if we make satellites. They care if we make money, first and foremost, and it's a money maker. Does it get recognized? I think it does. I turn to you in the audience to suggest that. I do know this. The single greatest opportunity Ball Corporation has is to continue to do the things we're doing with aerospace right now. There could be a point in time where it gets to size and scale that is big enough to spin off. It has very low tax basis, and so people always ask, "Well, what's a metal packaging business doing with an aerospace business?" It's a fair question, don't get me wrong.
It has a lot to do with we homegrown that 62 years ago. It's a terrific business, and it probably doesn't make sense just to go and pay a bunch of dollars to the U.S. government. At some point in time, could it be big enough that it could stand on and thrive on its own? Not just stand on its own, but thrive. Yeah, it could, but one of the things that a little hidden synergy, if you want to, Rob and team are bidding on billion-dollar contracts right now, if they were standalone, it would probably limit the opportunity set because the creditworthiness of the parent actually helps out in those situations.
There's once in a blue moon, Rob says, "Hey, you got to come with me, go see this customer just to show that we're all in it together." We're delighted to do that because that's what we can do to help. At some point in time, it could be big enough. I put it this way, we got to execute over the next three, four, or five years on this growth that we see. If that happens, then it's just option value to us.
Maybe a question for Scott or John. Looking at your 2019 goals, I see your EBITDA is going up by $125 million. Your CapEx is coming down by $200+ million. Your free cash flow though is only going up by $200 million. I recognize that there is a plus sign to the $1 billion number, can you help us kind of bridge the EBITDA to free cash flow? Are there other moving parts like working capital?
Yeah, I think it's because largely working capital. Yeah. At some point in time, we've done a very good job of effectively managing our working capital. At some point in time, we don't think it's going to be going to a use, but it's probably not going to continue to be a source in the way it's been before, that's far and away the biggest bridge.
Arun Viswanathan with RBC. Want to ask the big question in the room, I guess, more head on. On pricing, we cover a lot of industries in this room. Why isn't the beverage can more upfront about pricing in the industry, more upfront about pricing? Is there an opportunity that you can go out and, say, raise 5% on price for next year in North America, given that you are consolidated, you've seen freight increases? What's the opportunity in Europe as well? Thank you.
We've spent the last 24 hours talking a lot about how our customers are our partners. There's always opportunity to recover our costs and other things. We are going to negotiate with our customers in private, not public.
Thanks. A couple of quick follow-ups. First one is, I guess you can answer, John or Scott, on the $500 million of CapEx that Scott mentioned for 2019. That number's absent growth CapEx. What's a more normalized CapEx number after 2019? If you're growing at 2%-3% a year, I would assume you'd actually have some growth CapEx built into the model on a go-forward basis.
Well, it actually does include a level of growth CapEx. Our D&A is about $540 million. We think, on a current run rate basis, our true maintenance, that if we pulled the spigot in wanted to maintain state-of-the-art status quo, as we like to talk about, it's probably in the range of $275 million. We're spending, embedded in that, is approximately $200 million of growth CapEx. The single biggest one is probably Paraguay. We have Aerospace. Some of the things, that's all embedded in that $500 million. As we go forward, folks, I'd love to give you a better answer, this is the truth. We're an EVA company. We start with zero each year and say, "What is the opportunities that present itself?" We know we are going to maintain our facility's state-of-the-art status quo, we know we have to spend something.
I'd go back to 2008. Again, we're a different company, but the concept's still the same. Our maintenance CapEx was about, we always thought between $175 million and $200 million there, and if I remember in 2008, we spent $188 million of CapEx because we said, "You know what? We have no idea what this means to us and to the rest of the world. Let's pull it back." We have that opportunity. There's always some level of growth opportunities that are embedded in. As we sit here right now, $500 million is a little bit below D&A. Does it kind of feel right? Yeah. The truth be told is if we see an opportunity, we're going to jump at it, and if we see no opportunity, we'll scale it back.
Great. Just lastly, for the panel, when you look at one of the big opportunities that John mentioned up front, it was moving water out of PET into cans, and just sort of thinking about that a little bit, we've got the Alumi-Tek bottles here on the tables, and it's probably not the right venue for moving a lot of water into cans, but can you talk about some of the innovation in the emerging markets where you've maybe had better gains on recloseability in other products where maybe you can bring that innovation to the U.S. market, and have recloseability on cans for water in the U.S.? Thanks.
Okay. The market for water in Brazil is very small and in reality, what we're trying to achieve is to find the right customer to launch this product in the right channel through the right way. Very recently, we have some measures going to the legal side. In Rio about one month ago, it's forbidden to sell things using plastic straws. It's not only the beaches, but it's in the entire city. McDonald's cannot sell anything using straws in plastics anymore. It's a little bit of a result from the job we are doing together with the NGOs. Some of those NGOs think plastic is not the right thing to be used in some of those places. They're not really looking for the recloseable product right now, but the right moment to be the launch for the water.
I think the key product will be launched in the standard can, just with different shape and size, because they are not looking for the recloseability right now. They are looking much more for the occasion of this consumption. It's not so far from the day that plastic is not allowed to be sold on the beaches. In Brazil, there is the habit to have water bottles on the beaches, and also the tea. There is lots of standard tea being sold on the beaches in the plastic cups. Those are the products that will be probably replaced by water cans. People are not really thinking about recloseability at this moment.
I think maybe to your point, if we recreate the category and size it right, is recloseability important? If you think for a lot of other beverages, Scott, the whole thing is drink it and go to the next one. Why can't we do that with water? I know the paradigm is it's a big bottle and you have a screw cap. Does it have to be that way? That'd be the first question. I think there was a graph showing in the U.K., the growth of water. We have our first water customer in Russia, hard got. This is years of work, now we finally have somebody putting canned water out in the market in Russia. The opportunity set is there.
I think there's a lot of patience, a lot of perseverance, trying to help our customers understand the value proposition to get away from the commodity side of water into the value-added side.
We're just starting in China in the qualification process, private label with recloseability. Small, it'll start with $40 million next year, it'll grow. It'll be the first one. The recloseability feature in China is to create a newness, a wow factor of the entrepreneur wants to say, "Let's bring a package with something new that's not seen in China," will then introduce water in the can as a result of it. That's where we, as a packaging company, are creating the wow effect.
Just to build on Colin's point, the conversations we're having most recently with the really big CPG companies, they're not at all happy with the profit they're making in their water portfolio. This is not going to be a like for like at a price point that the end consumer understands. This will give us the opportunity to put different opportunity sets in front of them. Sparkling water's done really well in sleek cans and other things. I think the opportunity to get away from recloseability, because candidly, all the recloseability products outside of our Cap Can, they have plastic. That's not a good solve. We're not going to solve a plastic problem with plastic. I do think Colin's comment is spot on.
It's changing the size, the dimensionality, and the channels that these go into, just in the domestic U.S., right, when you've got colleges moving very quickly away from plastic or having plastic-free campuses. The conversations, again, we're having with the big CPG companies, it's not about resealability. It's like, what can we get in these channels, and what can we get to reset the value proposition on water? Because water should be making a heck of a lot more money for them. Great question.
We're going to go ahead and take one last question.
Hi. Thanks, Anne. Adam Josephson, KeyBank. Thanks for taking my question. Just two quick questions, one for Dan or John. I think on one of the slides you have North American beverage volume growing, I think, 1.7 over the next three years. What is the comparable number for the past three years, if you have that? Just out of curiosity.
I think the number that's actually shown from the U.S. is kind of flat to down one. We've experienced growth, and we've seen, over the past year, kind of a stabilization. What's really happened, we've talked about this on calls, is probably about 2014, 2015, we saw the folks like ABI and Molson Coors really start to move toward innovation and getting into alternative categories to step into spiked seltzers, et cetera, use their existing capacity in their breweries, and move into that. I think Coke's done a really good job maximizing profit pools. Then sparkling water has outperformed any and all expectations. Those, along with Mexican export, that has moved from a flattish last two to three years into what we believe will be a growth trajectory going forward.
Thanks, Dan. Just one on, I think it was slide 50, the commercial opportunity slide. You have a footnote saying most of the near-term opportunities will be in North America over the next couple of years. That 15%-20% is largely North America. Presumably, you have contracts rolling everywhere, not just in the U.S.
Yeah.
Can you just help me understand why you expect most of that opportunity to be in the U.S. over the next couple of years?
Sure. I think we've said this repeatedly, but maybe it bears reinforcing. The price point for the more commodity containers in North America is at close to the lowest levels anywhere in the world. We like our margins. We'd like to hold onto our margins in other parts of the world. That would be where that dynamic of supply-demand balance and getting paid for the value of the products and making sure that we're getting paid for the complexity that have been thrown into that category specifically. That's where the focus is. As John has indicated, in North America in particular, we have longer contracts than we have in other parts of the world. Those longer contracts will begin to mature and give us an opportunity to start to reset some of the contractual language and manage this complexity and get paid for it.
Well, thank you all. On behalf of everyone here at Ball, first I want to thank Anne, I want to thank Chris, and all. Renee, you're back there. I see you as well. Thank you for putting this all together. We're going to sign off now on the webcast. We appreciate your participation. I know sitting three hours on a webcast is not the easiest thing in the world, but we certainly appreciate it. We're going to sign off on the webcast