Good morning, everyone. I'm Robbie Marcus, the MedTech Analyst at JPMorgan. Really happy to have Becton, Dickinson as our next session. Gonna introduce Tom Polen, the CEO, for a little talk, and then we'll do some Q&A afterwards. Tom?
Great. Thank you, Robbie. It's great to be back in person. Thanks to everyone for your interest in BD. Today I'm going to recap FY 2022 and the strong momentum that we've built going into fiscal 2023, as we continue to execute our BD 2025 strategy. I'll emphasize our durable growth as we continue delivering category-leading products and transformative solutions that are at the forefront of modern healthcare. Through our R&D and M&A strategies, we are accelerating our shift into attractive and higher growth end markets, which is increasing our WAMGR and supporting our strong growth profile. What you should take away from my presentation is that BD 2025 has proven to be the right strategy. We're executing very well. Have set the foundation for durable, profitable growth.
I want to remind you very briefly here that I will be making some forward-looking statements, and I encourage all of you to read the disclaimer in today's slides and disclosures in our SEC filings, which are available on the IR website. For 125 years, BD's been driven by our purpose of advancing the world of health. Our solutions are concentrated in discovery and diagnosis and the treatment of disease, whether or not that's from the delivery of medications or interventionally through medical devices. We're an innovative MedTech leader with approximately $19 billion in worldwide sales, and our 77,000 global associates deliver products that are often referred to as the backbone of healthcare. We make over 37 billion devices a year, and we serve patients in more than 190 countries, touching more patients than any other MedTech company in the world.
Our contributions to advancing healthcare are enabled by our customer-focused innovation, our world-class manufacturing capabilities, outstanding quality, and our unmatched global scale. Through our BD 2025 strategy, we're developing bold, innovative solutions that are transforming the future of healthcare. We built our 2025 strategy around three pillars, which are accelerating growth, simplify the company, and empower our associates. For nearly three years, through the execution of BD 2025, we continue to accelerate durable, profitable growth with a focus on multiple attractive end markets, and I couldn't be more proud of our organization for our progress and our momentum. Our FY 2022 performance reflects our strategy in action and the dedication of our global teams who reliably served our customers, controlled costs, and through foresight, focus, and agility, enabled our enhanced and very differentiated performance during a challenging environment.
With base revenue growth of 9%, we exceeded our revenue and earnings guidance and achieved our margin expansion goals. Our strong organic growth reflects consistent growth of our durable core and accelerated investments in higher growth transformative solutions. It also reconfirms that our BD 2025 strategy is balanced, it's robust, it's resilient, even in difficult environments. At Investor Day in 2021, we outlined our plan for sustained shareholder value in five key areas. Execution of all of those five pillars is well underway, and it's on track. Our simplification programs that we've talked about in the past include our simplification of our manufacturing network, our portfolio, and our recently initiated operating model simplification programs. We're creating a more agile and focused organization that's delivering on our margin expansion goals while continuing disciplined capital allocation strategy and ultimately, delivering shareholder value.
Today we're gonna highlight how we're well-positioned to continue to deliver our long-term revenue growth goal of 5.5%+. As we look at FY 2023 and beyond, I've never been more excited about the future of BD. We entered FY 2023 with two proven years of performance and momentum towards achieving our 2025 fiscal targets. This is reflected in the midpoint of our currency neutral FY 2023 guidance of 5.75% base revenue growth and double-digit EPS growth. This growth, in part, is driven by our shift into higher growth end markets through investments we're making both in our organic R&D and in tuck-in M&A, which is systematically increasing our WAMGR across our portfolio.
While we're in our quiet period, we will report our Q1 financial results in early February. I can share that we are confident in our progress towards achieving our FY 2023 guidance. This is true despite the continued macro environment challenges, including those that are happening in China as a result of the most recent COVID restrictions that are impacting all companies. Our portfolio is built upon two axes, our durable core, which represents just under 80% of our revenues today, and it's comprised of products and solutions that, as I mentioned before, have become known as the backbone of healthcare around the world. Today, more than 90% of patients admitted to a hospital are touched by those products. These are essential products like catheters, PICCs, infusion pumps, IV sets, Vacutainer tubes, and hernia mesh.
We're the leader in nearly every major category we serve in our durable core with about 85% recurring revenue, which reflects the strength and the quality, reliability of our supply chain, and the continuous innovation that we have in products in that portfolio. This creates a very stable and resilient business that delivers durable and consistent growth. Secondly, we have our transformative solutions, which represent about a little over 20% of our revenues today, which are growing high single digits. These transformative solutions align to irreversible forces that we see reinventing the future of healthcare and are driving a step change in our customers' abilities to improve patient outcomes. We're enabling smart connected care through AI, through informatics and robotic solutions that are transforming fundamental healthcare processes, tools, and treatments. We're focused very particularly in the areas of pharmacy and laboratory automation, medication management, and nursing productivity.
As care increasingly moves to new settings, such as surgery and ambulatory centers, retail clinics, and into the home, we're enabling that shift with solutions that are tailored to improve outcomes, lower costs, and more directly empower patients in these settings. Finally, we're applying our BD advanced device technology, and we're developing new solutions that address chronic disease outcomes, which represent one of the most significant healthcare and financial challenges to face societies in the 21st century. We bring this portfolio strategy to life through very thoughtful and purposeful choices in our investments across R&D, CapEx, and M&A. We invest about 6% of our revenue in R&D, with about 60% of that spend targeted to higher growth transformative solutions.
We deploy about $1 billion a year in CapEx. Most of those investments are focused on strategic value-creating programs that support growth, such as capacity expansion in our durable core or acquiring key technologies that support new product development. Each year, we have the capacity to invest about $2 billion in tuck-in M&A to enhance our growth profile. Our FY 2022 acquisition of Parata Systems is a great example of a recent tuck-in acquisition that moved BD into the fast-growing pharmacy automation market, where we're now a leading player. This balanced approach to investment is enabling continued strong growth in our durable core while increasing the mix towards higher growth transformative solutions markets. As a result of this, in FY 2022, we made terrific progress increasing our WAMGR in both axes of this portfolio.
We are well on track to achieve our increased WAMGR targets of about 8% in transformative solutions and about 4.4% in our durable core, positioning us to drive our target of consistent, durable growth of 5.5%+ through FY 2025. R&D continues to be a key enabler of our growth, and we continue to expect net incremental revenue from new products to more than double by FY 2025. In FY 2022, we made great progress towards that goal, increasing the incremental revenue contribution to about $1.1 billion. Not only have we improved our productivity, but we are also executing very well against key programs that significantly advance our innovation program. Last year, we had 25 new product launches that reinforced many of our leadership positions.
Today, we have what I believe is the strongest pipeline in our company's history, delivering more impactful products for our customers on time and faster than ever before. Our pipeline includes over 100 launches expected by FY 2025 with multiple compelling high-growth opportunities. Of these launches, we expect 25 or more will have the potential to generate over $50 million in fifth year sales incremental. We have another 20 that could deliver an incremental $30 million over the same five-year period post-launch. Next, I'll highlight a few key end markets that are driving our growth and some of the exciting products in our pipeline. Our BD Medical segment is focused on improving medication delivery across a wide range of settings, making it safer, make it simpler, which leads to less labor, and making it smarter, which helps make it more cost-effective.
Some of the key end markets served by Medical are vascular access management, medication management solutions, pharmacy automation, and pharma and biotech drug delivery. One of those higher growth end markets that we're really excited about is pharmacy automation. It's a $1 billion space that's growing about 10% as macro trends across the industry are driving growing demand for automation solutions. These trends include the centralization of pharmacy services in large fulfillment centers and increased clinical demands on pharmacists in hospital and retail settings, in addition to increased wage inflation, labor attrition, and pharmacist burnout.
By automating the more routine work within a pharmacy, such as vial filling or packaging and central fill, and implementing intelligent workflow solutions, we're enabling pharmacists to focus more of their time on patient care, on doing things like wellness checks and medication adherence, rather than sitting in the back counting pills. We've been very pleased with our customer response and the performance of Parata in the short time that we've been together, with growth continuing to meet and exceed our expectations. Within the pharmacy automation pipeline, we're really excited to drive the innovation around our Parata Max 2 automated vial filling solution, which integrates pharmacy automation with our broader connected management portfolio. We're gonna continue our cadence of integrating pharmacy workflows, through software, driving connectivity of our new MedKeeper acquisition, and the product CoreFlex inventory management system with our BD HealthSight Enterprise solution. Moving on to Life Sciences.
Our Life Sciences segment provides solutions from discovery to sample collection and diagnosis. We serve very dynamic end markets like single-cell analysis, clinical microbiology, molecular diagnostics, and point of care. Just to highlight one of those areas, the $3 billion single-cell analysis market is growing about 5.5%. At its core, single-cell analysis is driving a deeper understanding of the human immune system, and it's helping researchers and clinicians unlock its power to fight life-threatening diseases like cancer and infections, including COVID-19. We serve this end market through our biosciences business, which has an integrated solution of cell sorting and analysis instruments, reagents, and informatics to support our customers in academia, biopharma and reference labs, and in hospitals.
Our robust innovation pipeline builds on our established category-leading products in cell sorters, analyzers, reagents, informatics, and creates a unique set of solutions that enable our customers to design, to run, and analyze critical and complex research experiments. We very recently launched the BD ResearchCloud, which is the industry's first cloud-based workflow optimization tool for flow cytometry. We continue to launch new BD Horizon RealBlue and RealYellow reagents that feature next-generation BD dye technology and utilize AI-guided fluorochrome selection to optimize the spectral positioning and performance within research studies. We're extremely excited for the upcoming launch of our FACSDiscover S8 cell sorter with BD CellView technology in the second half of FY 2023. This time last year, this product was featured on the cover of Science Magazine and is the world's first spectral cell sorter that also features high throughput real-time imaging.
We're leveraging decades of leadership experience in cell sorting to bring forth first to world innovations. The FACSDiscover S8 will provide an opportunity for the utility of flow cytometry to expand into entirely new areas beyond immunology. The Discover S8 cell sorter, combined with our reagents and integrated software solutions, enables an entirely new level of biological depth, of speed, of ease of use, and solution integration for our customers. We move over to our interventional segment. There, we're transforming healthcare with solutions for chronic disease management. We serve end markets that dramatically improve people's lives, such as peripheral vascular disease, oncology, incontinence, and advanced tissue repair and reconstruction. Today, I'm gonna focus on the $5 billion peripheral vascular disease market. It's a space that's growing about 6%.
Building on our leadership position in peripheral vascular, where we have a comprehensive set of solutions in arterial, venous, and renal disease, we've recently expanded our portfolio in the rapidly expanding venous disease market. Venous disease is a very significant problem, with roughly 10 million cases a year, and thromboembolic conditions accounting for one in four deaths worldwide. In the second half of last year, FY 2022, we relaunched our Venovo Venous Stent, and we launched it for the first time in China. We also launched the Aspirex thrombectomy device, which was acquired through the Straub acquisition. Last year, we also acquired Venclose and continue to drive market penetration with that platform. This radiofrequency ablation technology is our first offering to address chronic venous insufficiency, which is currently the largest global market in the venous space.
As we look ahead over the longer term, we have exciting organic investments to continue to expand our leadership position in arterial disease. A couple of key examples include our new sirolimus DCB program, where we've continued enrollment in our first-in-human trial, and our new low-profile stent graft, which is tracking to start enrollment in an IDE trial later in the second half of this calendar year. What does all of this add up to? The future has never been brighter for BD. We've demonstrated a powerful combination of innovation and strong execution and have the talent, the vision, and the momentum to continue delivering robust performance. As we move through the back half of BD 2025, you can expect to see continued relentless focus on execution of our strategy. We're well-positioned to drive profitable growth and create long-term value.
Our form is simple, it's reliable, and it's impactful. First, we have consistent, durable growth profile. Our leading solutions deliver an 85% recurring revenue stream. Second, we are enhancing our leadership positions through very purposeful strategic investments in higher growth markets through both R&D and tuck-in M&A, increasing our WAMGR across our portfolio. Third, we're improving our margin profile through growth, through enhancing simplification programs, and ongoing supply chain excellence. Fourth, we have increased capacity to deploy capital and are committed to remaining disciplined in that and maintaining a strong and flexible balance sheet. All of that adds up to a very compelling financial profile with targeted base revenue growth of 5.5%+ and double-digit EPS growth. I'm very proud of our progress and our momentum, and I've never been more excited about the future and about our pipeline.
Our associates are bringing our strategy to life as we operate as a more agile, innovative MedTech leader. Thank you for your continued interest. I look forward to providing our Q1 results on our February 2nd earnings call. I think Chris is gonna join me on stage. We'll look forward to taking questions, Robbie. Thank you. Okay, I'll sit here. Yeah.
Over here?
Yeah, sure.
Thanks. Maybe we could kick it off. Becton, Dickinson spans a lot of different markets, a very global company. Would love to hear what you're seeing globally in terms of healthcare trends, return to hospital, patient volumes, and also you do touch in the capital equipment space, so what you're seeing in terms of capital equipment.
Sure, I could start on that. Certainly, we're seeing the continued rebound post-COVID. We've seen that here in the U.S., obviously faster outside of the hospital, slower inside the hospital. We're both continuing progress. On the capital side, we're not seeing any change from a capital demand perspective. I think certainly for us, a lot of our capital are direct solutions to many of the challenges that are putting economic pressure on health systems, right? If you think about laboratory automation, you can run a microbiology lab with 2/3 less staff when you deploy our capital. Think about pharmacy automation, right? It's replacing increasingly expensive labor or difficult-to-find labor. We're seeing tremendous double-digit demand for pharmacy automation.
I think in part, you know, we may be not seeing as seeing those types of impacts maybe others have commented on, just because of the nature of our products and the role that they play in improving outcomes, economic outcomes for our customers. I think in China always amazes me. We certainly saw huge COVID waves still moving through China, but the resiliency of our organization there, you know, we see absentee in our plants go up, wave go through, and then drop right back down, and being able to prevent stock-outs of products. Truly just I can't comment enough on the quality of our China organization and the performance of China.
I think us, like most companies I mentioned, everyone will see some impact of that in the past, we're navigating that very well. Last year, of course, we delivered double-digit growth in China despite the lockdowns in Shanghai, which again, I think reflects the strength of our team there. I don't know, any other comments to add?
I just would remind folks that our portfolio is pretty durable on two fronts. 85% of it's recurring revenue base, so we're not as impacted by these larger capital installs. To Tom's point, our capital that is being acquired, it's directly affecting one of the key opportunities in the market now around labor shortages, cost of labor, those elements. I would also add, I feel like we've kind of moved into this new norm, right? We kind of keep looking back pre-COVID, and I think things are relatively stable is what we're seeing. You're actually more seeing the dynamic of the hospital system, this labor issue, and them reacting to that. Where do they have shortages? The nice thing about the BD portfolio is, you know, we're providing care in the most critical areas, right?
As they're prioritizing patient need, BD is always at the forefront of any procedure being given. We're less exposed to what I would call elective, deferrable type of procedures.
Does that comment hold in China today as well, where there's a really dynamic situation?
I mean, maybe anchoring against what happened last year, just as an optic. I mean, we were a consistent double-digit grower. We were impacted in everyone else in, call it, our fiscal Q3, we still grew. It was close to FDA. In particular, our BDI business posted strong growth in China. We had talked about that. We'll comment on Q1 as we go through this. I think you're gonna see a broad market impact that everyone signaled, but BD does have a durable business, and we still feel good about our total growth rate for the year.
Yeah, we had made a comment in our 2021 Analyst Day presentation that we saw China growing at or near double digits through BD 2025, and there's nothing changed in that.
Great. Becton has actually done a really good job standing out amongst peers over the past year or so through these difficult, you know, cost environments and supply environments. Two-part question here. One, what has enabled you to do that as an organization? Second, is there anything we should be looking out for on that front as it relates to Becton, Dickinson in the coming year?
I can start on that. Again, huge kudos to our team. I think we had the foresight to look around the corner a bit, and very early on in the pandemic, we declared there's gonna be a few things that no one on the planet's going to avoid. That's going to be inflation. No one's gonna avoid supply chain challenges. Under that premise, no one's going to avoid them. We wanna be the best in MedTech in navigating them. We declared that very publicly. We declared it inside, and we set out to do that. We started very early on doing pre-buys of things like computer chips.
It's why we've been able to continue to deliver our instruments, whether or not it's infusion pumps or flow cytometers, et cetera, throughout the last several years. We did pre-buys of things like resins, et cetera, to make sure that we had those materials. We have extremely robust planning process. You know, things like when hurricanes start coming up or when there was the railroad strike, you know, we own our own railroad spurs off of the main railroad. You know, our systems, as soon as we see a risk, we'll start pre-buying and just parking extra railroad cars on our own spurs.
In an event that something happens on the strike, we can keep running our plants for a month plus 'cause we have our own things just parked, sitting there waiting. These are the types of systems and processes that we've built over the last couple years, which have helped us be robust and continue to deliver strong performance over that period of time. We did have benefits where others couldn't provide. We were able to step in for our customers and be known for reliability of supply. We picked up some business during that process, It, it really comes down to looking around the corner and then executing well against that. Again, as I mentioned, at the heart of the company, we're an innovation and a manufacturing company, I think that strength in manufacturing has served us well in these times.
Yeah. I think it's, you know, two things. We did benefit from the early work that we've done in terms of BD 2025. One, the accelerating growth rate, having strong growth profile gives you flexibility as you think about how to drive growth in a supply-constrained environment, driving mix, creating value for your customers, new product launches. Having an outsized growth profile certainly was helpful. There was a lot of focus on organization. We've been very transparent about, one, our purpose, the organization, rallying against that and our goals as it relates to BD 2025, what do we need to do? Simplify. We had set the path for that ahead of some of these macro dynamics, we took an opportunity to really lean in and accelerate our simplify agenda and actually add to it.
All of those things kind of compounded and created a really healthy dynamic. We went as far to even think about how we measure ourselves internally and shift from just driving top-line growth, but focused on profitable growth. We knew inflation was gonna be a big headwind, and it drives a very different behavior internally when you're talking to your sales team. It's not just about growth and top line. It's actually how we grow. There's a lot of little things that we did. We're gonna continue to be proactive.
I think the one thing that's been unique is we've had a posture of assume the worst, create multiple levers that we have at our disposal, to be able to react to the uncertainty that's happening in the marketplace and have a place to kind of pivot and be able to make trade-offs, within our P&L.
Tom, one of the questions I get from investors a lot is you have three seemingly different businesses at Becton, Dickinson. What ties it all together? What's the core competency that you have? Maybe I'll ask a follow-up on that after.
Sure. They're actually highly related, right? It's actually the healthcare process is BD. We diagnose disease, and then we treat disease. The way you treat disease is you deliver medications, which we have a large that's our Medical segment. And the other way you treat disease is with devices itself, which is our Interventional segment. That's, that's BD in the heart of it. Of course, what we apply across those segments are that manufacturing scale and capabilities to be excellent at producing all three of those segments. You know, we're a large-scale manufacturer, but we're leveraging our capabilities in procurement and logistics, in manufacturing to be excellent and produce very, very high levels of quality. We leverage our global footprint across all three of those, serving over 190 countries around the world.
We leverage expertise in R&D. We have a number of Centers of Excellence, as an example, that all three of those segments tap into. You think about digital and where the world's been going there. Every single one of our eight businesses across the company have active digital AI automation programs underway, and all of them are tapping into the BD Center of Excellence, where we have over 2,500 software engineers and data scientists working across the organization. We have Centers of Excellence in many other areas as well, in instrument design, in reagent design, in animal testing for clinical studies, et cetera, that are leveraged across all of our different businesses. We're seeing...
You know, ultimately, when we go to our customers, we talk to them about our range of solutions. I often talk about our pipeline. I'd say it's pretty even. The reaction when I talk to healthcare system CEOs, there's high interest in what we're doing in diagnostics, let's say, how we're gonna enable blood testing to shift into the home or the retail setting, how we're gonna enable diagnostics to ship into the home. They wanna know how can we help deliver medications in those new care settings? How can we help treat chronic diseases in those care settings? It's the issues, how are we going to diagnose patients better? How are we gonna deliver medications safer and more effective in new settings? How are we gonna help improve the burden of chronic disease in a greater way?
These are the issues that healthcare systems are facing, and this is where BD, you know, is very relevant, today and increasingly so as we look forward.
One area Becton, Dickinson has stood out from competitors, especially over the past year, has been on pricing. You've always been probably the best in the MedTech sector, flattish pricing year-over-year. We've seen that tick up a little bit over the past year. I guess, what's enabling you to be able to take price, and how sustainable is this ability?
You know, our price is the last lever that we look at. You know, we've been very rigorous in terms of driving our own continuous improvement up in our plants as we've seen the increase in inflation that's impacted, you know, most every company around the world. First, we look internal, we say, "How can we offset that?" You know, we've been extremely responsible steward of healthcare. If you think about a syringe, we sold a syringe for 10 cents 40 years ago. You know, up until last year, we still sold a syringe for 10 cents. There's not many products on the planet that you could buy today at the same price that you bought it 40 years ago. I think that's just a representation. The same thing's true for Vacutainer tubes, flush, et cetera.
We've been extremely fortunate to be able to deliver continuous improvement savings that have offset the impacts of inflation for decades. In, in this environment where inflation, you know, went up at a hyper level for a period of time, we spent quite a bit communicating with our customers how first we offset a significant portion of that, actually a higher portion than we ever have in the history of the company. We did have to pass through a portion of that to our customers so that we can continue to invest as we look forward. It's being transparent. It was being proactive. I think we were the first company out having those discussions and being transparent, again, looking around the corner.
Our intention is certainly there's capabilities that we've built there, but again, we remain strong stewards of healthcare, you know, cost controls and effectiveness as well.
Great.
I would just add, as you have those discussions and engage, of course supporting customers, right. Reliable supply, the investments we're making in inventory, the investments we're making in capacity, and making sure they have a holistic understanding, and we're delivering on their product needs. At the end of the day, if they can't deliver for the patient, that's most important for all of us. It's all part of the equation.
Great. Maybe I'll pause for a second and see if there are any questions in the room. I can't really see, but I'm gonna go with a no.
Bright lights up here.
I feel like I know the answer here, but I'm gonna ask it anyways. Are there any updates you can provide on Alaris timing or expectations or any qualitative color on the type of discussions you're having with the FDA at this point?
You do know the answer already.
Yeah.
That, that is that Alaris remains our number one priority in the company. As we said on the last quarterly call, we are confident that we will get clearance for Alaris and get that back to market. Our number one goal is getting the FDA all the information that they require to give us that clearance. You know, we have our team heads down focused on that each and every day. We continue to have very productive discussions with the FDA, and we'll obviously communicate as soon as we get clearance on that.
I think the other comment that we've made in the past, and I'll just reiterate, is in the spirit of looking around the corner, you know, we have been, over time, procuring raw materials, chips, et cetera, so that when we do get clearance, we'll be in a position to scale up and make those products available to customers at the rate that they wanna see uptake.
Since you took over as CEO, we've seen the pace of tuck-in M&A pick up a lot at Becton, Dickinson. You've done a number of deals since. You know, how do we think about Becton, Dickinson's strategy around M&A, and what are you really trying to do as a company with the M&A portfolio?
You know, you heard us talk about our durable core and our transformative solutions and moving into those higher growth markets that are going to be reshaping healthcare over the next decade plus. That's smart connected care, enabling the shift to new care settings and improving outcomes for patients with chronic disease. While we've invested 60% of our organic R&D in those higher growth transformative solutions, over 90% of our M&A investments, over 95% of our M&A investments have been in those transformative solutions. We're really using that lever to shift our portfolio into those higher growth markets. You saw the WAMGR progression that we've made since 2021 when we put that mark in the sand at our Investor Day.
We're really pleased with the progress that we've been making, that's largely enabled through that M&A strategy, as well as through the organic investments that we're making. We're in a number of very attractive end markets. I highlighted just a few. We see those end markets, big opportunities for new innovation as we look ahead and, you know, we'll develop things internally, but we're certainly going to look for the best technology that's inside or outside of BD and look to bring that forward. I would say that you saw us in the beginning. We've done 19 acquisitions in the last 2.5-three years, quite a bit, as you mentioned. Don't expect that same number of 19 as we go forward. We've articulated that expect more Parata-like acquisitions as we move ahead.
Those first acquisitions are performing well. We're seeing 30, 40 basis points of underlying growth now in the company from those acquisitions having annualized. Now with Parata, that's a $200 million-plus revenue platform that we've bought in a high growth, double-digit market with long-term durable opportunities in front of us. We see other markets like that we're gonna be focused on continuing to drive our tuck-in strategy. Chris, any other comments on that?
Not much to add other than I just think we're in the earlier days of this, right? That organic contribution, call it 20 basis points after the anniversary of the acquisitions, right? We've just recently started anniversarying those, and we're gonna continue with our earnings profile growth and our focus on cash discipline, our net leverage ratio maintaining at 2.5x . We're gonna have increased capacity to continue to drive that lever over time. I think it's one of the things that's maybe underappreciated. We're in early days here, and it'll continue to be something that helps enable. Look at what we did with bringing in Parata, an asset that's over $200 million, growing double digits, has a margin profile that's accretive to our future margin aspirations.
It'll be a nice add over time.
What about the broader capital allocation strategy? Where does M&A fit within the other potential uses of cash?
Yeah, what we've said is, one, as you think of getting to kind of our free cash flow, one, we wanna continue to invest competitively in R&D. You'll continue to see us around at that 6% level. We'll continue to drive towards our margin goals, which will increase cash flow capacity. After that, we've actually been trying to leverage CapEx. CapEx has been around $1 billion. That's really more to support the durable core. A lot of that goes at driving capacity and efficiency in the plan. It both drives growth agenda, but also helps support our Simplify. It kind of builds up the moats that we have in that durable core. Dividend, folks have come to rely on a consistent dividend. We just increased for the fifty first year.
We have a payout that we feel is competitive around a 30% payout ratio. From there, really, M&A is our preferred allocation. We'd be more opportunistic as it relates to share repurchase, although we have been very consistent about ensuring that there's no dilution of shares from share-based comp. I think you should largely see it get allocated towards M&A.
We've had a very robust start to the flu season, which we're all upset about, but it does oftentimes help your business. How should we think about this flu season with an early start relative to Becton Dickinson and your typical historical trends with flu?
I can certainly start on that. You know, it's still to be determined how the flu season pans out, so we shouldn't call, you know, what the opportunity looks like for the full year. What we saw in Australia, which is often, you know, looked at as a surrogate for what comes to the U.S, was something very similar. An early, very steep spike and then a significant drop with a narrower band under the curve than usual. You're starting to see that curve is actually mirroring Australia right now in the U.S. You're seeing flu drop precipitously earlier in the season than typical. You'd normally see it going up in this period of time in January. You're actually seeing it come down quite significantly.
What it looks like for the full year, to be determined, but, we're really pleased with our portfolio there, with our, we've seen the COVID and flu combination test, which we always said was going to be the go-to assay, on Veritor. We certainly see that continuing. As we've mentioned, we're working hard on bringing forward a flu COVID combo for over the counter so that everyone here will be able to just go into the store and test yourself for flu and COVID, you know, at home in the future. That continues to progress well in our pipeline.
With the last minute or so during COVID, Becton was able to place a number of boxes around, the U.S. and the world as COVID testing rose. How should we think about your ability to capture future testing off of those boxes and the staying power they have?
Yeah. We're certainly seeing that in BD MAX. You saw us last year. The flu COVID combo test, you know, is certainly over historical levels than flu was pre-COVID because of that larger footprint. You know, we're seeing strong double-digit growth continuing in BD MAX COVID testing with those base reagents that are now being leveraged across a significantly larger footprint. Of course, at the same time, we're really excited about the BD COR platform, which is expanding us into the higher throughput molecular platform, where we're also gonna be offering respiratory tests on that platform as well as vaginitis and screening assays for things like HPV and STDs. We're seeing good progress and number of exciting launches coming up.
Great. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. Thanks so much for joining and thanks for listening.
Thanks, Rob.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone. Take care. Good questions. Thanks.