Welcome back, everybody. I'm George Staphos with you today on Paper and Packaging. Thrilled to have Ball Corporation back to our conference. Ball, again, was one of the very first companies we've had at a conference way, way back in the 1990s. Honored that CEO Ron Lewis and CFO Dan Rabbitt are here from the company. Ron became Chief Executive Officer of the company in 2025 after joining Ball in 2019. Ron, prior to that, had an extensive career at Coca-Cola. Dan, meantime, joined Ball in 2004 and became Chief Financial Officer in 2025 after a series of senior leadership positions at Ball. Gentlemen, welcome.
Thank you so much.
Great to see you. Starting off most of the presentations, just with a quick take as possible. Our good friend, great friend, Brandon Potthoff, is in the audience as well, so he'll keep you honest. Brandon, how are you? Company guide to 10% earnings growth, free cash flow in excess of $900 million this year. North and Central America is guided to grow at the low end of its 1%-3% growth outlook. Europe at the top end of the range. Just help us understand how things are going so far in the year. No guarantees in life, we understand.
Sure. Thanks, George. Well, first of all, we're executing on our strategy, and our strategy is very simple. Four pillars to our strategy: excellence in execution every day, being close to our customers, managing and continuing to drive, quite frankly, the substrate shift that's happening, cans taking share from other substrates, capitalizing on the complexity that's in the world and in our market, because we have the best network and the most variety of offerings of the cans. What's really exciting for us is focusing on profitable growth. Those four pillars of our strategy will help us deliver profitable growth through the execution of our strategy, what we call our Ball Business System, and that is commercial excellence combined with operational excellence and people right in the middle of that.
That's what's helping us to drive our long-term growth expectations that we have as a company. We delivered, as you said, quite strongly in 2025 and 2026. The year started quite well, kind of on plan. Some things, a little better, some things we had planned for, but are a little softer. I can say, like, you talked about breaking down the various regions. North America, we said, low end of the range. North America, quite frankly, has started positively for us, a little a positive surprise, so that's great. Europe, we expect, high end of the range and with the inorganic acquisitions we made, which closed, right as we announced earnings, early February, earlier this month.
We're excited that it closed earlier than planned. We expect to grow even on towards the outside of our top end of our range there because of the inorganic growth. South America, we had a really good carnival, this which is helpful because the summer overall has been challenged there. We will deliver on our intention, which is towards the low end of the range on volume, but certainly achieving the 2x operating leverage that we've committed to there.
Got it. If we can talk maybe peer a little bit into, you know, eight weeks isn't necessarily or, you know, something to take to the bank. You're gonna work on it every day and every week of the year. What's, what's driven the slightly better sell through on beverage cans so far in North America?
I think certainly North America, the year finished really strong. The pipelines getting refilled has helped. I think that certainly helps. Quite frankly, we've talked a little bit about summer in some other previous calls. We're already making labels for World Cup. We're already making labels for America's 250th anniversary. I think people are really excited about that, and there's some opportunity there. You know, we love all of our customers, and we love them to help them win with the can, and they're winning with the can. I think that's really helping. I think they, our customers, are using the can as a means of supporting their revenue growth management strategies. It's a great way to offer value to consumers, which I think they're very focused on: "How do we offer value to consumers?"
We've come out of a really high inflationary pressure environment where, now they can use the can as a means of driving, you know, brand health.
Yeah. Dan, what's that mean to you in terms of how you run the business if it's starting at least in line, maybe a tick better, especially in North America, anything that you need to do in terms of procurement, working capital management, and the like, anything out of the ordinary there?
As we think about those areas that you said, really it's all. The year is opening up really in line with what we thought. Those plans have really been put in place as we come into the year.
Very good. Ron, a question for you. Just came up as we were talking now, as I was listening to you talking about trying to manage the pack mix shift over time to cans. You, at one point in time, were at one of the customers. At the end of the day, whatever the customer wants is what ultimately the customer should get. How do you manage that now? Obviously, you know, cans are what you sell, but your customers buy others. How do you manage that transition without-- While at the same time managing the good relationship that you should have with any given customer?
In other words, you'd love to get them all, you know, push for 100% cans in the mix, but they're not necessarily gonna wanna go there, and you got to manage that balance and at the same time, maintain constructive relationships.
Yeah. We are passionate advocates for the can. We understand that consumers are going to drink what they're gonna drink out of whatever packages, and we understand that our customers are gonna buy various other substrates. Our job is to just to make sure that we offer the right to win trust of our customers, offer them the right quality, offer them the right service. offer them good, you know, a good price. If we win their trust that way, they'll continue to convert to cans, and it's happening. They're building can filling lines. Not only are they doing that, there's a real strength in the co-packing market, contract manufacturing. There's a real demand pull for cans. We don't have to push it. It's naturally happening.
Very fair point. Actually, a very interesting point. What about the co-pack opportunity there or trends that you're seeing there? We don't normally talk about them.
I would just say, there's, of course, we're a scale business, and we sell to really important, large-scale customers, but there's always somebody coming along, somebody always trying to disrupt. Maybe I would pick on the probiotic sodas, prebiotic sodas, poppi, OLIPOP, et cetera. That's a whole new category that's never existed until a few years ago. They have to start somewhere, so they're gonna start with a co-packer or a contract manufacturer. We have good relationships with all of those contract manufacturers. We know where they're installing new assets, and we work closely with not only them, but the people that help them build their brands. We hope they grow into a large customer one day, or, they may get acquired by one of our large customers.
Do you have minimum purchase thresholds with these types of customers or not much?
We have a minimum order quantity. That's, you know, basically a truckload. W e also have a very good distributor model, as do the can industry does. If you w anna buy a can, you can buy a can, but it would largely probably be through one of our distributor partners.
Understood. Any questions from the audience as we're starting with Ball Corporation? Ron and Dan here. Switch gears a little bit here. You know, what changes have you tried to bring to Ball, which was, you know, was in a good place, and has been a good place for 125 years, right?
Yeah.
More than.
Yeah.
Okay.
145.
145.
Yeah.
Okay. What change have you brought in terms of operations day-to-day, incentive plans? Tell us about, you know, how the Ball world has looked maybe a little bit differently since November.
I'll talk for a moment, and then I'd like for you to add some things on the incentive, et cetera.
Sure.
Where I spend my time. For most of my time, I spend with our customers. The very top of the house from our customer perspective, I spend time with them because if you wanna hear how you're doing and where you can improve, that's a great place to go. Very much with our customers.
You have to be comfortable to do it, too.
Yes. Yeah, but I fly to go see them, purposefully. Second place I spend a lot of my time is with our people. We are a manufacturing company. We have 67 plants around the world, and how they perform is how we perform, and they work extremely hard for us. The overwhelming majority of our people come to work on shift every day, and they need to know that their management team works as hard as they do, so we go see them. I've met every single one of our plant managers, all 67 of them, in the first six, seven weeks of this year. Been out to see them in their locations. We go to their plants. We took our entire management team at 5:30 A.M., like, we're in the plant, that's when shift handover happens. I'm in plants on Monday and Tuesday next week.
Dan and Brandon are in plants on Monday as well. They need to see us. They need to know how hard we work for them. The third place where I'm spending my time is, quite frankly, with you and all of the people you represent. Our owners matter. We need to deliver results, and then we need to make sure that we're telling the story around how we're delivering those results. That's sort of where I'm spending my time. It's hard work, but it's teamwork, it's high touch, it's low egos and high collaboration, and we're all in this together.
Yeah. I'm gonna migrate this a little bit more to the financial metrics, the incentives which was part of the question. Ron and I really were-- We both came into this job really saying, "Embrace this culture. This culture is what makes us great." One of the key components of that culture is we had a high financial acumen because of something called EVA, economic value added, and it is, something that is still at the core of what we do. When we make big decisions, we run them through, "Are we going to make more EVA dollars at the end of the day?" One of the downfalls of EVA was it is a kinda complex financial concept, and then how do we use that to connect with the people at the lowest level of the organization?
We have actually found that we're we feel like we're on the path to the best of both worlds. It's still the biggest part of our compensation for the senior executive team. In the short term, really, we need to break it down for people. How do we make our plants more profitable? How do we sell more product? We started to break EVA down some of our short-term plans, let me give you an example. Last year was the first time in my 22-year history at Ball that we actually had an incentive around growing our volumes. Guess what?
Last year was the best organic growth volume year in my 22 years. I think we're seeing that by doing that, we're bringing more volumes in, more profitable growth in, that drives our EVA. At the heart of it is still EVA. We've tried to make it more personal to the people in their respective jobs.
Very good, Dan. How do you know, at that same level for the plant manager, how are you incentivizing you know, return on capital and spread, which ultimately is EVA? Is it, does that person get an EVA target, or they're getting the volume target, and they're also getting a capital target that you've prescribed to them?
I'll start, if you don't mind. They, all of our plants, are incented based on how efficiently they run, and that's the best way. In a high fixed gas cost business, g etting more out of what we've got. Their job is to deliver volume, but to deliver profitable volume, and the way they do that is by getting more cans out the door. That's part of this execution of our strategy. It's the Ball Business System. There's three elements to it. One is Commercial Excellence, one is Operational Excellence, and then there's people and culture right in the middle of that. From an Operational Excellence perspective, we committed in June of 2024 to deliver this $500 million of gross cost savings.
That's part of it. Part of that is, how do you get more cans out the door every day? Really, it's an efficiency metric that we look at for them. Efficiency, spoilage, output, production, that's what's important.
No, I think we've got the plant management team really on a lot of the same incentives that Ron and I, and the executive team are on. Yet they've got the benefit of having things that are more personable, more relatable to the people that work in the plant. There's the only thing I could really overlay on that.
We all get paid on EVA dollars.
Yeah.
Every single person in this company.
No, for sure. You already touched on this to some degree, but, and you talked about on the last earnings call, but the confidence in the 2x operating leverage, you mentioned you're getting it in South America. This year, you'll get close to it, I believe, if not for the startup costs, remind me if I'm wrong? Last year, you got close without the startup costs and supply chain, and this year you expect to get to the 2x on North America. Just give us a bit of color on why you're comfortable on getting there, and how it'll play out across the various regions.
Sure. Well, at the very foundation, this again, is we need to be the best can maker in the world, and that's about operational excellence, what we call Ball Operational Excellence. The way we're confident is that we know that this program delivers standardization to our facilities. Every single plant runs the same way. We look at them and how they operate, their metrics, we look at them the same way. Can they deliver scale, continuous improvement, and can we drive stability into those plants? Those are our three S's as it relates to operational excellence.
That's what give me the confidence. We've been delivering in Europe more than 2x that operating leverage for a couple of years now, and we will do it again this year, even with the inorganic acquisition of the two Benepack plants. We'll grow, you know, on algorithm, in that 4%-6% or 3%-5% range in Europe organically, and then we'll compound that with this inorganic growth. Whatever that growth is, we'll deliver more than 2x. In South America, we've said we'll be on the low end of that range, given what has been a challenging summer, we'll deliver it, and we'll deliver more than the 2x there as well. North America, yes, we have a few things that are happening there that are transitory.
One is starting up a new plant, which we're excited about because it gives us the opportunity to grow, and two is adjusting our network related to all the tariff impacts, producing both cans and ends in the U.S. as opposed to in Mexico. Not for those two things, we would be on algorithm as well from a delivery of the 2x operating leverage. The fact that we are able to do it broadly in our business , it gives us confidence as well.
Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Dan. You know, as we think about it, we haven't finished first quarter 2026, so forgive me for asking you to project out 2027. When we think about it, let's assume we have volume growth in your target ranges. Next year, you don't have the start-up costs. Next year, Benepack is, not that it is a new entity, but it's new within Ball. That'll probably have some operating leverage. Seems likely that, to us, that 2027 might actually see better, not worse, earnings per share growth relative to 2026's growth. If you're at 10% or better this year, certainly, that seems fairly likely in 2027 based on what we can know. Thoughts around that?
Well, I think, I'll give a comment, but I'd like Dan to add some comments, too. Number one, yes, we're excited about 2027. It's very early. We haven't really done a ton of work on 2027 yet. I will say that in 2027, our book of business, we are more or less 90%-ish sold for 2027 versus the capacity we have, which is, I think, quite a strong basis to grow from. Second thing I would say is we should expect to grow operating earnings. The third thing I would say is, you know, our algorithm is to also buy back 4%- 6% of our shares. We bought back significantly more than that in 2025. That helps us in 2026, and this year, you should expect us to be much more close to the that 4%- 6% range. That will drive the EPS growth in 2027. Dan?
Yeah.
What do you wanna say?
I think in isolation, if you look at the two growth events that, George, you referenced, first of all, is the Millersburg plant. In isolation, that comes with volume, and really allows us to better align our network in the U.S., and that means we can be more efficient in production, more efficient in how we're shipping and transporting the cans. Clearly an opportunity. When we look at Benepack, with the market that continues to have just great growth outlook, getting two plants really at nearly half the cost it would take to build them out, and this year we get them up and running under our Ball system. Next year, we get the benefits of.
Those are exciting projects for us, and they do give us a little more breathing room, for one. They allow us to actually to grow. I think we're continuing early days thinking around the algorithm being a good way to look at next year. Believe me, it's early days. We're not really spending a lot of time on 2027 yet, other than seeing what these new projects can do for us.
No, that makes sense, but I think it's constructive, for what it's worth, that, you know, you keep anchoring everything in a good way to the algorithm. When you do that, basically, that it flows downhill, and everyone else thinks about it the same way.
We expect that of ourselves.
You've talked about the fact that because returns had dropped in prior years, there was a fair amount of capacity build that had occurred, that you are, on a going-forward basis, not going to spend more than $600 million on average over a three-year period. First, did I correctly get that?
I think what I would slightly tweak it. We're gonna spend at D&A levels no more than-- This year, quite frankly, our depreciation amortization is $655 million. We've committed to a $600 million budget this year because that's what it rolled up as.
Okay.
Yeah.
Over a three-year period.
Three-year period, it will be at D&A.
At D&A.
Yeah.
Okay.
It may tick up one year, it may tick down one year. We tick down for two years, the last two years, et cetera.
Let's assume, instead of growing 1%-2% in North America, where, you know, 1%-3% is your target range. Let's say the market goes through another period of accelerated growth. Would you be willing to spend over depreciation for how long of a period of time, recognizing that in the past, even though you're benefiting now for some of the investments that you made, you and peers overcapitalized? How are you going to maintain that discipline when that next accelerated move comes, if it comes?
Let's hope it does come.
Okay.
I would say, number one, we learned our lesson. I just can tell you we did. From a management team perspective, the answer is D&A. Period, full stop, end of discussion. From a board perspective, they learned their lesson. We're gonna spend at D&A or less over a three-year period. I think from a governance perspective, we've learned our lesson. The second thing I would say is there was capacity built in North America that was built for the general market, and we were no exception to that. We do not build capacity anywhere in the world without it being tied to a long-term contract that pays for that capacity with very specific strategic aligned customers to us. That's how we're going to manage it, and I can only just commit that to you, and that's what we're committed to to our business and as a team.
Understood. Any questions from the audience? There's a question, kind of back row.
If you can wait for Laura. Thank you, Laura. If you could speak up.
What are the current pain points that you see? IG trajectory and pain points in the specific end markets that you see at this point.
The first part of that question was about leverage? I just wanna make sure I'm understanding the question.
Generally, the view has been that, we aren't able to reach IG, possibly, maybe not, a goal there, but generally not on the IG level because of the leverage and the kind of buyback that we have seen, the cash flow over there, right? Is there a trajectory in mind or a timeline in mind that you are looking to execute there?
Well, let me at least take the first part of that, and that is, you know, part of the capital discussion that was just occurring here with Ron leading us through, you know, looking at depreciation and amortization, is because we did learn a lot also about what we think the appropriate debt levels are for the company and the need to be returning money to our shareholders continuously. That does play a role. You know, really on the leverage front, historically, in my 22 years, I was always told, you know, 3x is a good number of balance sheet leverage, and we'll flex it up to 4x if we had a strategic acquisition with synergy that we could pay it down. That's all shifted.
I mean, it's shifted for lower today, right? I think, what we learned coming out of COVID with the inflation and the supply chain disruption, really was in that level of and that tariff environment, is probably a little better flexibility by having it lower. We're driving it towards that 2.5x. We finished at the 2.8x this year. I think we guided to 2.7x by the end of this year, and see a path to bringing that down. We think that's very important, so that will be prioritized. We also realize that 10% EPS growth is really nice. It sounds really good in a GDP industry, and the reason why you get those, you have to buy back shares.
We're not gonna buy back $3 billion in shares like we did over the last two years, but it's something more in that 4%-6% of outstanding shares that we're really targeting. The combination of the operating earnings, our EBITDA growth and the combination of the share repurchases is how you get to the 10%. We're very committed to that. That also holds us in check on our capital spend.
Thanks for the question. Ron, I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about Millersburg and the benefits it's gonna bring to Ball's operations in a little bit more detail.
Sure.
And relatedly, when do you think the tariff headwinds normalize relative to the things you're doing operationally? Is it something that's going to continue through the entirety of the year? Are you largely, you know, over the hump by middle of the year? You know, whatever you want to say there. Thank you.
You're welcome. First of all, on Millersburg, that plant will start up in Q3 of this year. We'll have start-up costs as we've said, that's normal. You'd expect that. What do we get from it? What we get is, number one, capacity, much needed. We've said we are largely sold out this year because we don't have, we've lost a pressure relief valve in these plants to the south in Mexico. We're serving our customers with distinction, but we don't have the ability to go create a lot of spot volume. Number one, it gives us capacity.
Number two, it gives us capacity in the right place, in an important part of the world where it's on the fringe of our network, and we need to have capacity in the fringes of our network, in Florida and in the Pacific Northwest. It helps us there, and it helps us not ship cans from out of pattern. At the moment, we are shipping cans out of pattern from the Southwestern U.S. to the Northwestern U.S. We'll achieve some value there. The third thing I would say is, it's not. Let's assume things go really well. That's a place where we can add more capacity. We can add a line there, just like we can add a line in the plant we bought in Winter Haven, Florida. There's the ability to add a line there.
We don't have a lot of open bays to put new lines in, we'll figure it out. Those are some of the things it gives us, we should see the benefit of that beginning in Q4 of this year, certainly from a capacity perspective, you should see value in it in 2027, for sure, Millersburg. Your second part of the question around tariffs and when should we see that start to ease? I would say, you know, I'll talk about lids or ends, for example. The tariff on those came in on August 2nd of last year, it'll take us a good 12 months to get the capacity moved from a certain production location into a certain production location in the U.S. You should expect that tariff, element start to ease in Q4 of 2026, and certainly, all of that headwind is largely gone by 2027.
Thank you. Any questions in the audience for Dan or Ron? Tell us a little bit about how you were able to get the $500 million of targeted cost saves a year earlier than expected. And with that as the backdrop, what's the opportunity to have another, you know, relatively significant number recognizing every day you're trying to drive more and more productivity and more yield, and it's not you get there, and you're done.
Yeah, as you know, George, I had a chance to lead that initiative for us. We, as a company, we're not standardized across the enterprise from a platform perspective. This is Ball Operational Excellence is what we keep talking about because that's what we talk about internally. How we were able to achieve that is by getting to a standard. Every plant, everywhere around the world, does shift handover the same way. Every plant, everywhere in the world manages voluntary turnover the same way. Every plant, everywhere around the world, measures spoilage or losses the same way. That has helped us see where the opportunities are. The trick for us is, how do we keep that up? You should expect us.
We should expect ourselves in a business like we're in, if we're running a very lean operation, to find gross savings in the 1%-2% range of our supply chain costs. Our supply chain costs, you know, let's call it, let's round it to $10 billion. We should expect $100 million-$200 million every single year. Now, are we able to keep that in our pocket? I'll give you an example. We lightweight these packages, and we try to lightweight them every year, and we usually share the value of that after we've paid for the capital with our customers. Some of that we use to compete in the marketplace, and share that with our customers. We hope that half of it sticks to our fingers.
If there's large inflationary cost pressures, maybe only a third of it does. I can just say from-- You mentioned 2022, 2023, we had a business that was selling, roughly the equivalent amount of cans, bottles, and ends in 2022 that we'll sell in 2026. We had to sell our Russia business, we lost it. We're finally back to where we were gonna be, in that year, in 2022 to 2026. We'll make north of $300 million more this year than we did that year. That's proof point, in my mind, that the commercial excellence, as well as our operational excellence agenda, are delivering on the profit per can.
Ron, is it easier to generate those savings when maybe a couple of years ago, the system wasn't quite as full as it is now, and so now that you're relatively tighter, obviously, you're adding Millersburg, some of that productivity benefit might be tougher to get at? No, George, that's exactly the opposite. Because I'm so tight, I can get that much more incremental return from my productivity. How should we think about it if that's a relevant way to look at the dynamic?
I would just say, I'm not sure this is the— I would look at it this way. Because we weren't looking at things in a standard way and we weren't driving to a common platform, there is still low-hanging fruit. There's still low-hanging fruit for us. We will deliver more productivity when you get to a more rational supply-demand balance, and I think we're more or less there. You know, last year we added the can market grew 2% in North America, for example. Well, on a $130 billion-$140 billion can market, that's an entire can plant. The market is rational. There hasn't been a significant amount of investment, but I think we're more or less in balance, and that's when we hit the sweet spot.
Two capacity constraints. I mean, it's actually harder to deliver these productivity gains because you're just working so hard and fast to deliver the cans. We wanna be in this mid-90s% range of utilization.
Switching gears maybe to the volume outlook or drivers. You mentioned that you're making labels now for the World Cup for America250. Would you not have been producing them this early, or is that a pretty good indicator of a little bit of extra demand? Then broadly, what are your customers saying about what the volume uplift could be from these on a combined basis?
For sure, all I would say is we're planning better with our customers. Like, we are very much leaning into them, helping us understand what labels they would like us to make for them. Yes, we would likely be making labels well in advance. I'm excited that we've been making them for several weeks now.
Okay.
Both World Cup and 250, and it's exciting. They have great plans in place. They've let us in on some of them, and we're excited about it. What can we expect? You know, two of our major customers, strategic important customers are the sponsors for the World Cup, but every one of our customers is a sponsor of America's birthday, and they're all leaning into that. Is there upside to it? Yes, it's certainly a positive. As you know, as we've said, our constraint or our issue is: how many cans can we make, and produce, and ship, and sell? That's really our opportunity, is how can we run those plants in the most stable way to get all the cans out that we can? There is certainly upside in North America.
Depending on how the rest of the world goes, like, there should be as I said, on our earnings call, I hope Brazil does really well because when Brazil does really well, they like to celebrate together, and they'll drink a lot of beer, even if it is in the wintertime for them.
Sounds like a good thing to be doing.
It does, yes.
In terms of these events, are your customers, without naming specifics, obviously, you wouldn't be able to, planning any new product introductions? Like, it would seem like it'd be a great opportunity to bring out that next new product, brand, flavor around World Cup and the advertising you'd be doing around, you know, America250?
I would say, like, maybe not necessarily new products. I mean, what we see is the labels. W e're excited about, like, really personalized in terms of like, this is a collectible. This is something I would like to have, w hether it be a team or, something about, that calls on the heritage of, this country that we live in. That's what I think is pretty exciting for us. People collecting, or, you know, just, that excitement around the can. The other thing I would say is they for sure are-- our customers always promote their products at the time of the year when consumers are out buying. What we've heard from them is a desire, because there is slightly less inflationary cost pressures, is getting back to a more balanced volume, and price mix to drive revenue growth for themselves, and we're there to help them do that.
We're excited about not only the labels on the innovation and the, and the, you know, the collectible aspect of that, to celebrate these two major events, but also how they're choosing to promote their packages and their, and their products in our packages.
Ron, Dan, maybe two last questions, we'll wrap it. One of the other producers of another beverage type, beverage pack type, and we respect them, frequently, we'll talk about the relative premium and the relative gap of glass versus metal. With aluminum going up and other trends that are happening in their supply chain, that premium that glass traditionally has had, narrowing and making glass more competitive. Are you seeing any impact from glass taking share in any of your markets versus cans? Does that concern you? Maybe it hasn't happened, but it's something that your customers say, "Hey, listen, I can get glass or plastic more cheaply these days than aluminum, and what can you do for me?" That's question number one.
Question number two, you mentioned that you are, I think, 90%, again, to the extent that you know, right? No guarantees in life, utilized, sold out through 2027. I don't wanna mischaracterize. Help us understand, you know, if there are any larger than normal contract renewal periods in the next three years, that we should be mindful of, you know, say, in, you know, U.S. or Europe.
I'll start, and Dan, please chip in.
Sure.
I'll say, over the long history, more than a decade, the substrate shift, moving from other substrates into the can, has happened and continues to happen unabated. I mentioned North America, the U.S. specifically. The overall packaged beverage industry was more or less flat last year. The can grew 2%, we grew close to 5%. Am I worried about a substrate shift? No, not out of cans. It's not happening, and there's no facts that would bear that out. Now, we're concerned about the consumer, just like everyone is, and all of our customers are. We wanna help our customers. We don't love the price of metal either, but we help them by bringing to life, like, flexibility.
The multi-pack that we sell, that they sell as a can, is really a great value package for a consumer. It sits in the pantry. The shelf life on a can is 12 months. The shelf life on a plastic bottle is 12 weeks. That matters. The can doesn't break in shipping. The can doesn't degrade in the sunlight, glass does. There's a number of reasons why substrates exist for various occasions, et cetera, et cetera. We choose to support our package, and we love the can industry, and it continues to win. I don't spend any time really worrying about shift out of cans and into other substrates. It just hasn't proven to be true.
The only thing to overlay on that is that, you know, you specifically called out the U.S., but the reason why the growth rate's higher in the other continents is because there is glass conversion actually coming into cans. You know, we can't really tell you what's gonna happen five years from now, but for the next one to two years, we think that's a pretty good tailwind for us that we'll be able to continue to enjoy.
Thanks. On contract renewals?
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Okay.
Nothing extraordinary. I would say, I mentioned we do multiyear contracts. If we're gonna invest capital, it's for a long-term contract that will pay for an investment we're making. With a number of our major customers, we have contracts that extend well out into the next decade.
You might not want to, and we'd understand, but is there a way to frame, "Okay, we have X amount of our volume up for renewal next year at Y in 2028," and so on?
Yeah. I would just very, very roughly, we're certainly, as I said, in this 90% range for 2027. We're north of 50% for 2028. In some parts of the world, we're closer to three quarters sold for 2028. I think we're in pretty good shape.
Okay.
Yeah.
Any last questions for Ball Corporation before we wrap up? If not, please join me in thanking Ron Lewis and Dan Rabbitt and Ball Corporation. Great presentation, everybody.
Yeah.
Thank you. Well, thanks, George.