Yes. Good morning. Welcome to those in the room here and those on the webcast today. It is great to be here in person in New York City at the Stock Exchange, one of my favorite places. I think it's the coolest place, right? We've got a very informative morning for us. Before we get started with the agenda, I just want to highlight that we will be making forward-looking statements in our presentation, in our comments. Those forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Those risks and uncertainties are described further in our safe harbor statements within the presentation, but also in our Form 10-K annual report and 10-Q filings. With a little bit of an ode to the baseball season that just concluded over this weekend, I'm going to go through our batting lineup here this morning.
Leading off for us is going to be our President and CEO, Jeff Benck. He's going to talk about the journey we've been on and the journey that's in front of us. We've got Rob Crawford, our Chief Revenue Officer. He's going to talk about our go-to-market strategy, the market sectors that we focus on, and sub-sectors. He's going to highlight within each sector, a customer case study. I'll have Mike Buseman, Chief Operating Officer. He'll talk about the investments we've made, our locations and facilities, and capabilities. I'll be batting fourth and bringing it all together in terms of how we perform against the midterm model, and what's the next model look like? What are those financial targets? With that, I'm going to turn it over to Jeff.
Morning. Great to be here. Can you guys hear me? Okay, there we go. Got a little bit. It is great to be here and good to be in person. I thought I would start right off with a few key themes that you're going to hear today. We're going to take you through where we are, like as Roop said, on the journey. One thing to start with is we were a company that struggled for consistent growth. We absolutely have reignited the growth profile for the company. We know what we're good at. We're focused on high-value markets. We're discriminating about the business that we take. We've stayed true to that, and that's helped us build a very robust portfolio. We also are investing in IT infrastructure, HR systems, buildings, facilities, resources to be able to sustain the growth.
We've even stepped up our focus on ESG. We'll talk a little bit more about our sustainability investments. In our business, scale and utilization is key. Really with that growth profile, it's allowed us to really leverage our fixed costs and be able to drive margin improvement on the top line, and ultimately on the bottom line. The last thing you're going to see today is that we're raising our financial outlook. We are coming near the end of the midterm model that we talked about. We put in place back in 2020, looking through 2022. Today, we're going to talk about where we go towards 2025, a little longer term and an extra year out there, but you'll see improvement in that model.
For those of you that are joining us that may not be familiar with Benchmark, let me give you a little bit of background on the company. With our top-line growth and the strong growth that was this year over 20%, we are approaching that $3 billion mark as a company. We have had three sectors that have grown over 30%, we've seen strong growth in industrial, medical, and semi-cap. Five of our six sectors are growing this year. Broad-based, very diversified, and we'll touch on that in a minute. We also have over 20 manufacturing facilities around the world where we produce our products. We have seven global design centers, and we like to have those 400-plus engineers doing product development, really co-located with our manufacturing teams.
In that way, it really helps us deliver on the value where we can pull in engineering and manufacturing and supply chain architects together to help accelerate time to market for customers. We'll talk a little bit more about the value proposition, but certainly, we're happy to engage customers wherever they are on that journey, as a company and bringing products to market. We've been going through a transformation, right? This has been a transformation journey for us that really started with kind of optimizing our portfolio and footprint, really looking at where do we want to be? It wasn't long after I joined that we were deciding to not continue a very large compute contract that represented $300 million in revenue.
That's always a tough thing to say, "Oh, we're going to not renew that." That was absolutely the right call for us because it wasn't the kind of business where we really had the value add that we really seek as a company. We also rationalized our footprint and our facilities. Over the time since I've joined, we've closed or divested of five manufacturing facilities that just were either subscale or they weren't where customers wanted to be, and we made the decision, that difficult decision to transition from those. Thankfully, we've had great success in retaining customers during that journey. Absolutely, important to understand where you want to compete and where you want to be for fulfilling the work that we do. We've also invested in capabilities, and we really do have to be in front of where the industry's going.
Capabilities like microelectronics, capabilities like photonics. We absolutely, automation, robotics, we have to be able to provide the capabilities that our customers need, so that when they come to us and say, "Hey, have you ever dealt with this complex RF tuning?" We have the know-how, and we can build the product that they need. We also reinvigorated and really energized our team around lean methodologies, and it was great to be recognized by the National Association of Manufacturers or NAM for our global Olympics. We do this kind of Olympics competition around lean and lean projects across the company to really get the whole organization focusing on how can we be more efficient and take advantage of that, and really plays into how do we continue to strengthen our capabilities.
Not long after I joined, we also stepped back and said, our vision, if you'd have read it four years ago, it was like, we're going to grow revenue and deliver better financial results. I'm sure for the Wall Street analysts, you guys are like, "That's great. That's what we want to see." It wasn't really that compelling for customers, and it wasn't that compelling for employees. We really stepped back and said, the vision we really are fulfilling is collaborating, innovating with our customers to develop products that they didn't even think they could do, that they didn't even dream were possible. Helping them fulfill that is really what we work on every day. Guess what?
If we fulfill that vision, revenue will grow, profits will grow, and earnings will grow, and the outcome will be better financial results versus that was more the what, not the why. We've shifted that a bit. We also stepped back and looked at our values. We also felt like, hey, this is really our code, and we'll talk more about that in a chart. We thought that was important. We really wanted to do more around diversity and inclusion. It was an opportunity to look at what else could we be doing there. We established an inclusion council. I'm excited about some of the affinity group work that's going on in the company, because it really starts with our employees. Without employees being energized and engaged, we can't fulfill that mission.
Ultimately, that really led to us booking a ton of new business. We've had really strong bookings in 2020, 2021. 2020, we closed bookings over $800 million, 2021 over $900 million. That's really the lifeblood, right? That's the leading indicator towards the revenue growth that you've seen, and that's come through in 2021, grown over 10%, 2022 approaching the 30% number. We've also done a nice job of attaching engineering services with every manufacturing deal that we look at. We think that's important, because that's great further value add. It also helps us improve our stickiness with customers, that we help not only build it, but we help design it. The company did strategically decide, even before I joined, that we were very compute and telco-centric.
If you go back in the mid-2000s, in fact, for those of you that might be familiar with the story, back in mid-2000, we built $1 billion worth of Sun computer equipment a year. We were $1 billion a year of Sun. We were way too concentrated. The gross margins at that time, and those of you in a trivia contest here, below seven, like 6.8% gross margin, which if you think about what flows down from there, it's pretty tough. We just looked back 10 years here and showed a little bit of a cut, where we were by sector back in FY 2012. Back at that time, A&D, we didn't even have broken out. As you fast-forward to now, much more diversified, right? Compute and telco, much smaller piece of the business, less than 25%. A&D, we pulled out from industrial.
Back in 2012, I think A&D was in industrial. You see the growth in semi-cap and the growth in medical and a great set of work the team accomplished over that 10-year period to get us more diversified into higher value. We traditionally have said we have these higher-value markets, and then we have the traditional markets. We distinguished the two, and we always said we want to get north of 80% in the higher value, and we were there. Last year, we spent a lot of the year over 80% higher value. What we want to do starting today is we really want to look at classifying our sectors a little bit differently.
The reason why is because compute and telco to us are no longer lower value, because we pick sub-sectors in those markets that are more complex, harder to do, and really work that we covet. I'll give you an example. For computing, HPC, high-performance computing, we're talking very large form factor boards. We're talking water-cooled systems. We're talking complex assembly. Not everyone can do it, not everyone has the capability to do it, and we've become pretty adept at that. Rob's going to talk more about that in a few minutes to describe some of the projects that we've worked on. Because of that, we think about advanced computing for us as not just HPC, but it's quantum computing, and it's those higher-value areas. We won't be building laptops or PCs. That's not the business that we're interested in.
That part of advanced computing is really higher value. In the telecommunications, same thing there. Next-Gen communications probably more appropriately reflects the 5G and the broadband infrastructure that we work on. We don't work on set-top boxes, for example. Because of that, we really want to shift to this new sector focus, which is not a huge change. It's just that notion of we're going to get to 80% high value, and then we have these traditional markets. It's really all become high value. It's going to oscillate around the margin profile of the company, but we really feel that this more appropriately reflects how we're going to market. We also want you to give investors some insight to that. It is interesting, some of our competitors, we'll see them in next-gen communications, but they'll fold it into industrial.
They'll act like they're not there, but we know they participate in the same space that we do. That's how we're going to reflect, and you'll start to see this as we break out earnings and stuff. We're going to move to this new nomenclature. I touched on our value proposition and our vision. It's really about impacting lives and solving complex challenges with our customers, partnering together to create innovative products that many times no one imagined were possible. That term, When It Matters, we actually trademarked this. I was actually surprised we could get to trademark, but we trademarked When It Matters.
It's so appropriate that we talk a lot to our teams about, "Hey, you're working on this defibrillator, and it's saving lives." "You're working on this green technology that's going to save energy, and it's going to help the environment." "You're working on this protection, this mechanism for the war fighter, and making them safer and bringing our soldiers home." There are so many examples. Rob will touch on some of these, but I really think it's so appropriate because there's so many times where we're working on solutions that are just changing the world. That just has been a great value prop for us, and our mission really supports that. Turning to our values. A lot of these carried forward. The company always was high integrity, was always committed to customers.
We added this value around we care, and we think we're a little differentiated here. Everyone wants that caring partner, but we believe it kind of starts for caring for our people. We absolutely had to do that during COVID because our teams didn't get to stay home. They actually come to work to build the products that we do. We built ventilators. We built defibrillators. We built infusion pumps. We were helping with the COVID fight, and we had really to care for our teams and keep them safe while they came to work. Our belief is if we care for our people, they will in turn care for our customers. It's a pretty important value that we just kind of updated over the last three years, to add that into our culture.
They already had been there a bit, this is really the code of conduct that we operate on. Talking a little bit about sustainability. We certainly have seen a change over the last two, three years where investors care more about ESG. Our customers care more about ESG. We partner with AMAT or Applied Materials because they have this green initiative by 2030, and we've worked closely with our customers on what we need to be doing to support that. Also our employees today care about what are we doing to help sustain the environment to have the right social and governance processes and philosophies as we go forward. I will say the company did a fair amount of tracking energy usage and things like that. We just didn't do a great job of articulating that.
This year and back in March, we published our first sustainability report. It's a great document to really get into what are we doing around these topics of environmental, social, and governance. It's a great sort of starting point. Certainly, there's more that we can do as we go forward. We're going to look to set intensity targets this year for where we would like to take this. We've, even at the board level, increased our diversity. We added both a woman director along with a diverse director to our board of directors, which has been great in supporting that. Then internally, I mentioned earlier, we started this inclusion group, I'm sorry. It's leading to some affinity groups we're launching. Our first one we're doing is Women in Technology, which is really appropriate because we have over half of our workforce is women.
We think that's pretty cool and certainly more that we could do here as well. During this whole COVID period and George Floyd and all that, it really kind of made us step back and go, are we doing enough from an inclusion and diversity? A lot of training going on there and certainly progress being made. Maybe the last comment I'll make here is there are a lot of folks that rate and rank this, and thankfully, we're seen as very low risk in this regard. ESG continues to be important. We're also balancing this with the ROI. We know in some cases, we'd love to have solar at every one of our parking lots, but return on investment is not always there.
We do have to look closely at what makes sense for us and what's appropriate while we look to continue to advance the initiatives here. Okay. I mentioned before, back in 2020, we set this midterm model. We had a few things that we wanted to hit. First one was revenue growth. We said greater than 5%. We blew this away, right? We've seen over 10% CAGR over the last three years. Pretty excited about that. Certainly got the top line growing. From a gross margin standpoint, with our fourth quarter forecast, FY 2022 is looking to land right in the mid-nines. If you look at where we were back in FY 2019, we were below 9%. Operating income will look to be beyond the right side of this. We are adjusting for supply chain premiums.
Roop will talk a little bit about the details there as well, because we know that there is some pass-through revenue that we're enjoying right now that doesn't really bring any profit with it. Last but not least, from an earnings standpoint, over 50% growth this year. Pretty strong earnings profile. It's great to be kind of rolling into fourth quarter and feeling very good about executing against our commitments to 2022. That leads us to what's next. Now let me shift a bit into the strategy section of what we're doing and where we're going from here, kind of caught you all up on our progress to date. The EMS market is huge. $544 billion, that's from the New Venture report. You got to look a little bit closer to, hey, what's our selected available market?
What's the SAM or the targeted market that we go after? That's around $100 billion. Still very large, and that's the complex sub-sectors within that market. Growing nicely, almost 7%, pretty strong growth in the market. That's a CAGR, so that goes out several years to 2026. The other dynamic that is pretty interesting is the level of outsourcing in the sectors, even though it's moved quite a bit, medical used to be 30%, now it's approaching 50%. There's still a number of customers that are doing their own manufacturing. It's amazing when Rob and I will discuss a new opportunity, how many times that we're not competing with another EMS player, we're competing with internal manufacturing. Even in a recessionary environment, customers are really deciding, hey, it's a tough economic environment. Should we be building this?
Is this the most efficient way to go? We've seen that trend continue, and we think that's great for the market. The other dynamic is, and we all see it every day, is electronics are everywhere. You think about the growth in electronics, and certainly we do a lot more than build cards and boards, but it starts there. If you think about the fact that the Internet of Things is certainly driving that initiative. You also see intelligence at the edge, where you want to have smarts in a lot of devices. Beyond that, it's sort of that digitization that's happening. You just think about, while we don't play much in automotive, just electric vehicle sensors, just like over 4,000. You go back a few years ago, there were a few hundred.
This trend towards electronics and intelligence everywhere is really playing to the market opportunity that we're going after. We are absolutely focused on the sectors shown here. Medical, very important sector for us. We like medical a lot because it tends to be pretty resilient to the macro economy, and it continues to have amazing products that we get to work on here that are pretty important. Aerospace and defense, really, regardless of political regime, we've seen strength in A&D and investment for that, particularly with the war going on and wanting to make sure that we're protecting the home front, has been a pretty good market. Industrial, clearly a lot of movement towards automation and robotics are kind of key themes there. The team will talk more about that.
Semi-cap, back to the whole semiconductor proliferation and what's happening, and the move to more domestic manufacturing is interesting, right? With the CHIPS Act that we know, probably not a 2023 help, but when you look at 2024 and 2025, starts to become a bigger play there as well. Advanced computing, whether it's supercomputers or complex systems that continue to drive that forward, chasing that ever-faster machine that can run those calculations quicker. The whole broadband everywhere and infrastructure improvements, the move to 5G. We see a little bit of competition between the cable and the phone companies, and how do they make sure they stay up to date, whether that's fiber to the home or 5G if it's wireless. A lot of good opportunities in the sectors that we're pursuing.
Our strategy is really coming back to we got to deliver on that vision, right? The best way for us to do that is really through this product realization capability. Product realization services for us is about engaging early with a customer, helping them with design, pulling in our manufacturing team, whether it's design for manufacturability or design for cost, getting their feedback on that, having our supply chain team engage early and working with them through that journey, really wherever they want to meet us, but we love to start on the left side. Mike will talk a little bit more about our experience here when he's up. Operational excellence, being the best at what we do is super important. Certainly, we understand that customer experience is critical to maintaining the business we have.
Also partnering, never has partnering been more important with our customers than in the supply chain environment we're in, where we're working together to solve critical dependencies here. We know frustrations are high, like, "Geez, I want more product," but we're gated by this particular supplier, and how can we work together to go solve that? We made a ton of progress here. Fortunately, we're not done. We're still constrained, but we certainly invested in strategic inventory to help our customers, and we're absolutely making progress on the challenge that the industry is facing in this space. It's been a great opportunity to partner with customers to get that done. Then we're investing in people, processes, and solutions. Michael will talk some more about our investment here. I already talked about diversity and inclusion, why that's important to us.
Just absolutely focusing on employee engagement. We actually had a third party that we started two years ago, doing a survey with employees on engagement, then taking actions and initiatives against making sure that we're empowering our teams, driving decision-making down, but also trusting our teams to do the right thing. That's helped us, and it'll continue to be important because it really starts with our people. Then all of that really leads to that disciplined financial model, right? How do we sustain the double-digit growth? How do we continue to improve our margins and ultimately grow earnings twice as fast as revenue? Which we've proven the ability to do that over the midterm, want to do that certainly long-term. In fact, I'll just do a little teaser because Roop's going to share more detail here, but I can't resist, right?
We believe we can continue to grow at 10%, we believe that that CAGR is important. We built a pipeline of new wins, and we think that we've got great momentum that we can sustain over the next three years and continue to grow double digits. There'll be some ups and downs. We all know there's some recessionary risk next year, and we've seen a slowdown in the semi-cap space, and we'll continue to work through that, but we feel good about our top-line potential. We also believe that there's an opportunity to continue to increase margins. We believe that while we're in the mid-nines, we believe we can get north to 10%. We think that's important. That will be best in the industry or with the best there.
That ultimately will allow us to get operating income over 5%, and we'll discuss that a little bit more. Then what does that lead to? It leads to shareholder value. How do we provide that capital, and how do we deliver that? Well, for investors, earnings growth. You're going to see that obviously come through the model. We also will continue to support the dividend, and that's the intent. Then also, we also have buyback. We still have over $150 million that's authorized for us to continue to buy back, and we'll continue to look at intrinsic value, and as that makes sense. I think we've done a pretty nice job of this, but we'll continue to look to deliver value to shareholders through those mechanisms, be disciplined about that. Let me stop there. We're excited about where we are.
We think we've made good progress on the journey. Certainly more to come. Hopefully, as you go through today, you'll see a little more detail than we typically have time to share with you about what we're doing. With that, Rob, please take over and talk about our go-to-market strategy.
Okay. That thing kicks in, some sound. Okay, my name's Rob Crawford. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer here at Benchmark. Just a little bit of an intro to me. I joined Benchmark about three years ago, came to work for Jeff three years ago. I came from another EMS company. I was at Celestica before I came to Benchmark. I'm really not an EMS guy. Most of my career I've spent in the OEM world with device manufacturing of some kind or software. I think that is interesting because it gives me a little bit of a customer perspective on how they look at companies like us.
That's one of the things, if I do anything today, I want to make sure you guys get a feel for how our customers see us, what makes us different, what makes Benchmark stand out in this market, because it's a crowded market. There's a lot of players in this space. How do we find the right customers? How do we have confidence that those customers are going to value what we do? That's a process, and we've been working on it a lot, and so we're going to talk through that today. Okay. Jeff talked a little bit about the sectors. This is really important to us.
These business sectors mean a lot to us because they kind of define the customers that we want to pursue, and they define it in the end, and it defines what we do from an operations perspective because we deliver against the expectations these customers have. You can group them into kind of five groups, is what I've done. I combined the advanced computing and communication together. We're pretty balanced between these five. In general, about $500 million of revenue contribution from each of these sectors. That balance is healthy because it allows us to diversify risk across a bunch of different parts of the business. One sector may be running while another one may be stalled, vice versa. We're able to have a little more diversity protection on our business. There's things that these guys have in common, right?
There's high barriers of entry to service these markets. I'm going to talk about that a little bit because that really is where we build value. We have things that are protected by barriers of entry our competitors can't do, it allows us to protect our margin and be successful with customers. They're also long lifecycle sectors. Aerospace, semiconductor, capital equipment, these sectors, when a program there runs for a long time, years. Which is great, right? Over time is where operational efficiency kicks in. We start to be more profitable with the business. That long life cycle is important. They're growing. We're going to talk a little bit about growth. There's multiple growth drivers in our business, and I think it's nice to kind of compartmentalize them a little bit.
Basically, you've got kind of compounded annual growth for each of these sectors is fairly modest, but they're growing, which is good. One of the things we do is when we look at these sectors, we pick customers within those markets that are growing faster than their market. If I'm picking customers, I want to pick the winners. I want to pick the guys that are growing faster. If we're partnered with them, it's going to help us grow faster than the market. The next thing you look at a little bit is just this electronic stuff. All the stuff on the right-hand side that Jeff talked about, man, electronics are everywhere, right? The more there's electronics in medical devices or industrial devices, there's more interest in what we do. We add more value there. That's helping the business grow, which is important.
Jeff talked about outsourcing. We do see more companies moving to outsourcing over time. These markets, he showed the penetration earlier on that chart, 30, 40, 50%. There's a whole ramp of business opportunity that's available just by people moving more to outsourcing than where they are now. The more they go outside, the more they come to us. The last thing we do is we book new business. We call them bookings, but if I get a new customer to work with me, or I work with an existing customer on a new program, that's a booking. We measure that. That's what really allows us to capture market share from other guys. If I'm getting a lot of bookings, I'm typically taking market share away from our competitors. That's another way for us to grow.
The big growth rates that Jeff showed on the slide earlier, much bigger than the CAGRs these markets have, and it's driven by a lot of things we're doing with our model to get us there. How do we do it? The first thing, when I joined the company, one of the things we really tried to do is focus on these sectors. The guys that run these business sectors for us come from the OEM world. They understand the customers, they understand the markets, and they understand the requirements. What that means is we have a lot of credibility. If I go in to talk to a customer about a medical device, I've got a guy that runs that business that's been an OEM in the medical device business.
We've got a lot of credibility, and, in the end, this establishes a level of trust because think about how big it is to partner with a company like us. What are you saying? I'm going to give you the rights to build my product for me. A lot of times you ship it directly to their customer. That's a big part of their value as a company. How they pick the partners to do that work is based on credibility and trust, almost always, right? If I'm good at establishing that credibility and trust, I win more, and that's what we've been doing. These sector leaders are really important to us. The second thing is we're being really picky about the customers we chase. You can look at those 5 sectors that we had up a minute ago.
You could build almost anything for anybody, right? They can be broad. There's a lot of things we have to disqualify when we're looking at customer engagements. Is there an engineering opportunity in there? If there is, it's a pretty good fit for us. Those kinds of things are important. We're picky, and we care a lot about the portfolio of customers. We've got somewhere north of 100 customers that we really have meaningful good revenue from. That portfolio is the biggest part of my value. Those customers and the makeup of that portfolio are really important, and we are very focused on making sure we're bringing the right types of customers in to work with us. Then we also tier our customers.
This was kind of a new concept, we've got some customers that are big, that are in multi-site, that are doing a lot of stuff for us. We care a lot about making sure that those customers, we have a very deep partnership, executive level of relationship with them, and that's important. These businesses, when we engage with a customer, that engagement lasts decades. It doesn't have to last months or years, it's decades. Some of our customers that you see that are on our list of customers have been with us for 10-plus years. Those things last a long time. Making sure that we treat the customers well, that we're focused on. The other thing is a lot of these customers are growth customers. We get a foot in the door, hey, we won this program.
There's 10 other programs we can win right after that. All we do is execute well, continue to execute well, and grow. Those growth customers are important. Then targeting good fits for us. I want to make sure we have a good match between what we do and what they need. That's kind of this whole process. Talk about a sales management approach. We're pretty disciplined in terms of how we approach this. It starts right up with the first thing is these sector strategies. Each of these sectors knows what they're good at. If I go to the guy that runs our medical sector and say, "What are we good at?" He's got a list. We know. That's the number 1 thing I want to do, is I want to make sure where my value is understood by us.
I go target the right customers. If I've got great fluidics capabilities, I want to go chase fluidics customers because they're going to like talking to me. We do a lot of qualification, and it's somewhat bi-directional. In our business, it's like dating a little bit. You got to make sure that they like what we have, and we like what they have, that we've got a business partnership that's got potential. That qualification is something we spend a lot of time on. Our value proposition in that case, and those customers, is very differentiated, and that helps us win, and it helps us protect the value add in the models we have. Partnered engagement model, that's a big part of qualification for us.
If we're working with a customer, they've got willingness to work with us, kind of maybe multiple sites, engineering, those are the kind of partnerships we really look for, and that's part of what we want to drive with our new customers. We need to launch them successfully. You come work with us, we're going to make sure we launch you and that you have a delightful experience working with us. Underpinning all of this, we've got a CRM system. We've got a team of guys out there that are chasing customers. We track metrics. We're doing a lot of the normal things that you do to make sure your sales model is working. More than anything, we've got a great team of people. We've turned over, in the three years I've been here, we've turned over half the sales team.
We're bringing in talent from our competitors a lot. Plexus, Celestica, Jabil, Flex, we're hiring all the best people we can find from our competitors. I want to have them in our team. That's a big part of what we're doing. We've seen great results. Jeff mentioned bookings. We've had several years here where we've shown growth and momentum in booking. Really important. This is our lifeblood. This is the early indicator of revenue. The way we quantify a booking is it's an estimate of the annual revenue opportunity for that program that we win. That's within a three-year window. If I book $1 billion worth of business, there's potential for that to be $1 billion worth of revenue within three years. It's a good leading indicator of revenue. We look at realization, it's really important to us.
Everything we book may not turn into $1 because things happen. Customer's forecasts are maybe too lofty. Business challenges happen. Realization is something we measure, and it's actually something we now pay our sales team on. If our sales team's out there booking business, majority of their compensation comes when that business becomes revenue. I've got salespeople that are focused on meaningful engagements with customers that are going to generate revenue for the company. Okay, now I'm going to jump into the sectors a little bit. Each of the sectors, I just want to talk a little bit about the sectors, what makes them different for us, how we position ourselves, talk a little bit about competition in those sectors, and then we'll give some customer examples of companies that we're working with and get some of their feedback. We'll start off with medical.
Medical is a great sector for us. We started as a medical company 40 years ago. When it all started 40-plus years ago, we were a medical manufacturing company. What that means is all of the quality systems, traceability systems, all the things that are required in manufacturing medical devices, kind of were inherent when we started. All the systems that Mike uses to manage his factories are fully traceable. And there's FDA certifications that are required. ISO 13485 is a standard that seven of our sites around the world have. We've got that level of certification. Not everybody's in the medical business. Not everybody. There's some other guys that are, right? Plexus is one we compete with here quite a bit. They can be a challenging competitor in this space. Jabil, big company that we compete with.
Finding the right competitive niche is important when we approach customers. You see pretty steady growth. It's been crazy, though. I was talking to Jason, I think medical is one of these businesses with COVID and everything else. We saw a lot of things get thrown up in the air. Overall, good steady growth in this business, and we're confident. I think Jeff showed the numbers. This is one of our highest growth sectors in our business right now, which is great. We're super encouraged by it. What's driving that is all of this stuff. The medical world is changing. You've got lots of exciting things going on with robotics and with software and microelectronics, things that are pretty complicated. The fact that we've got an engineering team is a big differentiator for us at Dentsply.
We've got 400 engineers that are pretty qualified. They understand these markets. They can go deep. Usually our customers are focused on their solution, which is, "I'm going to go make patients feel better." Some of the stuff that underlies that is technology we can help them with. Microelectronics, we've got all this experience. Microfluidics, we've got all this experience. As those things are driving a lot of innovation, those medical companies are looking for partners that can work with them. That's kind of what we bring to the table. One of the nice things that we do see is that we're diversified around the world in our medical capabilities. We've got engineering and manufacturing in regions in three major continents around the world, which gives us the ability to take a customer. A lot of cases, we'll have a customer like Stryker.
They want to be able to build products closer to their customers overseas. The fact that we've got factories overseas is an advantage. European companies, same kind of thing. They want to access the Americas market. I've got factories in the U.S. That global presence is something that's a big benefit to customers. Here's just a little glimpse. You look around the different types of devices that we work with. I'll start at the bottom right. Fluid management is kind of the fastest-growing part of our business right now in medical. You've got just interesting things that are going on there in terms of drug delivery, even stuff like life sciences. We're working with a company that's doing genome research, and they need to manage fluids in terms of the work that they do. That's part of that business sector.
The other thing you see are handheld devices, like what I'm holding, right? You see more and more doctors and medical professionals using portable handheld devices. There's one of our customers called Butterfly. They've got a device about this size, and you can do an ultrasound, and it plugs into an iPhone. You can get the image of the ultrasound on your phone. It's actually really interesting. That kind of miniaturization, microelectronics, getting things in smaller packages is something we see a lot of right now in medical. Optical imaging. A lot of things that you do with robotic surgery involve optics and visual interface with the products. We've got a lot of expertise there. The connected medical devices.
A good example here is a company called Owlet that we work with, and they do a baby monitor that wraps around when you're pregnant, and if you're having a baby, you can wear this monitor mat that monitors the health of the baby, which is kind of cool, I think. Medical imaging is a big thing. MRIs, we currently build the smallest MRI. It's actually portable. Kind of cool. It's a neat thing. Medical robotics is one that we're seeing a lot of interest in, both in the U.S. and Europe. We're working with multiple companies in that space. Energy delivery is one I'm going to just talk a little bit about. This is defibrillators, right? If you have a cardiac health issue, you might have irregularities in your heartbeat. Defibrillators are what make you feel better.
They give you a shock, and they get your system back on track. You'll see these AED devices. If you go to a football game or if you go to an airport, these things are all over the place. We are kind of the big honcho on making defibrillators. We've got a ton of experience. We make these devices for some of the biggest companies. A company like Stryker, for example, the biggest in the business. We're very involved in the manufacture of their product, but we're also involved with some smaller companies. This one's kind of interesting. This is a company called Kestra that we work with. They're based up in the Pacific Northwest, and they make a device that you actually wear.
One of the challenges with, if I've got a heart issue and I'm in an airport, somebody can grab an AED thing off the wall and give me a shock. If I'm lying in bed at home by myself, I don't have that option, right? This is a vest that you wear or a garment, they like to call it, that you can wear when you go to bed. You can wear it around town. There's two parts to this thing that are important. One is what this gal's got in her hand here, which is the monitoring device. Then there's the actual device that provides the electric shock to your body. That wraps around your torso. A couple things that are interesting here.
There are other products in the market that do similar things, but they get a high false warning, meaning it gives you a shock when you really don't need one, which is not a good thing. With Kestra, they've actually gotten really good. The way that they monitor and when you actually need a shock, there's less than 1% mistakes. They do a very good job of monitoring that, which is great. The other thing is they've got 16 different versions of this garment. Half of them are for women. They're designed for women. It's unique. They're comfortable. This is a cool company. Brian Webster's the CEO. He actually had worked with Benchmark at previous companies. He came from Stryker and Physio, was familiar with us, liked us.
When he became CEO of Kestra, he called us up, and we are manufacturing his product in our Minnesota site today. Great relationship. One of the interesting things we also are going to be doing on this product is aftermarket. These devices get used. A lot of times it's a bridge device. You wear it for a little while, and you may need to get a heart transplant at some point. That device would come back. We can refurbish it. We put it through the same testing and send it back out for other patients to use. Okay, that's Kestra. Okay, let's talk about aerospace and defense. This is a sector I love. It's one of these that Jeff mentioned. We see a lot of interest right now, especially with the escalations in Eastern Europe.
The devices that we build here and the products that we build are doing a lot to hopefully keep us safe. If you look at the business, it tends to be one of these that just grows at a pretty steady rate. This is the presidential budget that you're looking at and how it's kind of progressed over the years and how it's projected to progress pretty steady. Flat, steady growth. That spending kind of continues. That makes it a very attractive business. It's stable, but it's not for everybody. Defense is not an easy thing. To be a manufacturing partner and engineering partner in the defense world is not easy. A lot of clearances required. In the case of defense solutions, we build them in the U.S. They have to be built in the U.S.
The fact that we've got a lot of sites in the U.S. is an advantage for us. There's also a ton of regulations and restrictions. You've got AS9100, you've got ISO 9001 for quality. You've got to have all of these certifications, which is important. You've also got a lot of IT restrictions. They're very worried about cybersecurity. All of our facilities that build products that go into the defense applications need to have very strict cybersecurity protections. That's an investment we've made. That part of our business is interesting. You think about these things, the stuff that we build for the defense industry goes on a boat, or it goes on an airplane, or it goes out in a tank somewhere, or it sits in a backpack on a soldier's back.
They need to be ruggedized, and that ruggedization reliability is really important, and that's something we've got a lot of experience with. How do you protect electronics when they're in rugged environments? Something we're very good at. Those are the things that I think kind of differentiate us. It's an interesting market because we compete with a different population of people. There's companies like Ducommun that are out there, smaller companies, but they're very focused in this market. Sanmina with the SCI Group is probably the one that would line up against us in terms of scale. Not as many competitors. This is a tough business to be in. Those barriers of entry help us here. You also see some interesting stuff going on. Unmanned vehicles is a big thing right now.
In the war fighter world, they're doing a lot with drones, unmanned vehicles. The thing is, those things, just like airplanes, need to have the same reliability. That experience with reliability and testing is helping us even in unmanned aircraft systems. The one thing I'll mention here on supply chain, it's interesting. The supply chain environment's a little rocky right now, I think everybody knows. It's hardest in defense because all of the stuff that we build that goes into defense applications, if you change it's a big deal. If you go to the Army and say, "Hey, we swapped out this resistor for this other one," that's not okay. Because the reliability of products in this space is really important, they need to know that everything's built the same way.
Supply chain has been a little bit more of an impact probably for us on fulfilling defense product demand. Okay. We'll walk around the battlefield a little bit and just give you a feel for where we're doing stuff. Marine systems, even if you're out on the ocean, things like satellite connectivity, communications are really important. We build a lot of the radar systems and communication systems that would go on a boat. The dismounted soldier is an interesting one. Northrop Grumman's a big customer of ours. A lot of the things that we do for them actually end up on the body of a soldier in the field. The ground equipment. Think about Bradley and Abrams tanks and Stryker vehicles. These are the ones that are out running around in the brush, in the desert, and they need to stay connected.
All the connectivity solutions that keep those guys, to where they can communicate with each other, it's really important. Unmanned aviation. Customers, Honeywell's a good example. Both unmanned aviation and manned aviation, a lot of the communication systems, a lot of the things that you do to outfit an airplane, the same stuff you need to do with an unmanned vehicle. Those companies that we work with help provide that technology across both manned and unmanned aviation. You get into satellite in the middle. That's a company like Viasat that we work with that do satellite communications. A lot of times that's a great way when you're out in a remote area, need to connect, satellite connection is good. We also do a lot with just communication. There's three-letter agencies that are familiar with what I'm going to talk about now.
This is an example of a product that we do. There's a company called V2X. These guys were acquired out of Raytheon. Actually, originally, they were part of Raytheon. They do what's called a GMR. It's a message router, Global Message Router that is used for communication in the battlefield. What happens is you've got soldiers that have communication systems, maybe on a backpack. You've got a ground vehicle with a communication system that's part of that vehicle. You've got helicopters. All these guys need to be able to communicate. They need to be able to communicate securely. I need to know where you are, GPS locations. I need to have communication that can't be intercepted. That's very sophisticated technology. That's technology that we partnered with our customer on this development and deployment of this technology.
We've been through multiple generations, this is a very critical part, especially if you think about everything that's going on in the world right now, even more so, right? That I've got unmanned vehicles, I've got manned vehicles, I've got tanks, I've got utility vehicles. I've got people on foot. Making sure everybody knows where each other is and they can communicate is important. This is a pretty good example of When It Matters, I think. I'm going to talk about commercial aerospace a little bit. This one, defense spending is kind of a gradual, predictable thing. Commercial aero's been crazy, right? Because COVID, everything that happened. The dip that you see kind of in that, I think everybody recognizes everything that was going on with air travel, you saw commercial aerospace really shift in terms of demand over the last few years.
It is coming back, which is encouraging, I think we see that both. They've got single aisle and dual aisle airplanes. We participate in both of those markets. This market, just as a point of reference, is smaller than defense for us. If I look at A&D, about 70% of our A&D business comes out of defense. Commercial is a smaller piece of it, so the volatility that we see in commercial didn't impact us as much as some of our competitors. Competitors in this space for us are companies like Celestica is a big one. They do a lot in this space. Probably our primary competitor for commercial aerospace. Plexus does this as well. Aircrafts, we've all flown recently, right? The electronics in the aircraft are unbelievable, right?
Just like with cars, Jeff was talking about cars, you've got sensors, you've got motors, you've got entertainment systems and seat backs. You've got so much going on. Satellite connectivity, communication, flight data recording. All those things require a ton of electronics. We're able to participate in that market with our customers. In our experience here, this is all about reliability. If I'm going to put stuff in an airplane, it's got to go through, they call it HALT testing, which is highly accelerated lifetime testing. Where you actually have to test these things, have certain numbers of cycles, there's actually performance penalties with our customers. If for some reason things fail before they're supposed to, they actually have financial penalties. All the testing that's required for reliability in this space is super extensive. A lot of environmental testing, a lot of reliability testing.
It's a big requirement. Another reason not everybody is in this business. It's a bit of a barrier of entry for competition. They fly around the aircraft a little bit. It's interesting because there's commonality in some of the stuff that we do. Things like flight data recording, avionics, those things, some of those systems, they're using more and more off-the-shelf technologies in defense applications. A lot of the customer examples are the same. Cockpit displays is interesting. Cabin safety displays, we actually work directly with an aircraft manufacturer on cabin safety displays today. Might have been a company that you flew on when you came here. Satellite communications, broadband connectivity in the plane, those are big markets for us as well. Things like flight controls, a company called Moog does that.
If you look at the tail of the aircraft, all the things we do to control the actuation of the aircraft is something that they work on quite a bit. You've got customers like Honeywell and others that are in this space. Industrials. You guys hanging with me? We're going to try and keep this thing rolling. Industrials is an interesting part of the market because it can be pretty broad. Industrials can be a broad category. It's one of the larger, it's over $118 billion as a category within EMS, so it's actually a pretty big part of the market. I think the big thing for us is that we're selective in what we're doing. We're kind of focusing on parts of that market where we really do add value. Things like process automation, robotics. Our engineering pedigree is what helps us here.
We've got all this engineering capability. It's interesting is it applies in these markets because you've got a lot of companies out there, maybe they build earth-moving equipment or they build factory forklifts, those kinds of things. Those are companies that are really good at mechanical engineering. They're less good at electrical engineering and software, the stuff that we do. We've actually found a lot of pretty good connections with companies that are trying to modernize the electronics in traditionally mechanical stuff. That's been a place where our engineering heritage really has helped us out quite a bit. The other thing you would see here is that we kind of focus on what we call high mix, low volume. There's a part of our business that's building iPhones. It's like millions of them running down the line. They're all built the same.
There's another part of the business we call high mix, low volume, which is lower volume stuff that has iterate different things, right? We actually do a lot of work in that space. Not everybody loves that, right? If you go to Jabil and say, "Hey, I want to do some high mix, low volume," they'll probably say, "No, thanks. That's not good for us." It is good for us. We've got supply chain teams that are used to working in those environments. We've got factories that are used to working with products that have variability. We architect our build plans in a way that allows us to accommodate these high mix, low volume products. I'll talk about that a little bit more too. The one thing that's mentioned on the right of slide that's important is this nearshoring to the Americas. Huge thing.
I was talking to Jason, I think, about it earlier. You've got a lot of people right now are wanting to get out of China for a lot of reasons. Maybe it's trade, maybe it's tariffs, maybe it's IP protection. We've got a ton of people right now that are trying to move more of their manufacturing back here to the Americas. Sometimes that's Mexico, sometimes it's in the U.S., and we kind of work with them to figure out the right solution based on landed cost. That's a big initiative right now. It's creating a ton of opportunities for us. We're adding square footage, Mike will talk about it, in our Mexico sites to accommodate that. That's a big trend that's worth noting, I think. We'll take a little bit of a look around the industrial market for us.
Automation, robotics, this is one of the areas that I said is growing. A lot of engineering here. Think about things, automated warehouses that have autonomous devices driving around. There's a lot of electronics that go in these things, super sophisticated. We're working with a lot of companies to kind of bring technology into those mechanical devices. Commercial transportation is an example. You see a lot of electronics in cars now, self-driving. Jeff talked about all the sensors and things. Good example there, I'm going to talk about in a minute, is from one of our customers that does LIDAR work. Capital equipment is interesting. A lot of this is things like kiosks, but a lot of it right now is based on energy.
If you're managing energy, storing energy, using charging from batteries, there's a lot of that going on right now, and we've got a ton of engineering expertise and some really good customer references in that part of the market as well. Control, measurement and test, one of our larger customers in this space is Emerson. This is a good example of high mix, low volume. You would think all these little valves that control flow of liquids and gases around manufacturing facilities were all the same. They're not. There's millions of different varieties. We do a lot of work with Emerson. A lot of the variety that they see in their product, we're able to accommodate in our manufacturing process, which is a big advantage.
Sensing and detection is interesting because this is an area that if you go through the airport and you walk through one of the scanners, we're actually partnered with Rohde & Schwarz on developing a scanner that allows you to sense if there's something maybe on somebody's body that you need to be aware of. We've also got kind of an interesting little company we're working with that has a handheld device for if you have a police encounter and the officer would have a handheld device to figure out if you had anything on your body that might be dangerous. Pretty interesting. A lot of technology that goes into that, a lot of sensing, and the engineering teams stay busy trying to keep up with everything in that space. I mentioned Ouster, and I talked a little bit about Ouster.
These guys do LIDAR systems. LIDAR is not like radar. Light, right? It uses lasers, and it's distance and ranging. It's meant to kind of assess how far things are away. Big part of what you see in autonomous anything is that they've got to be able to see things around them, collision avoidance, all of those things. Ouster's got this cool product. It's a younger company. They were founded in 2015. It's about the size of a beer can, I'd say, or coffee can, maybe. Small coffee can. It's got a little sensor, and it rotates around. It's always building this 3D picture of what's around it. Everybody looks at that and says, "Yeah, cars need that. That would be good." It's funny because we see these things in a lot of places.
We were working with a company a few months ago that builds lawnmowers that cruise around and mow, like a Roomba for your yard, right? It mows your grass. They had an Ouster LIDAR on the top of that thing. Some cool things they're doing. It's solid-state technology, so it's a little less expensive. It's all done with microelectronics, so it's not very big. This is a cool, little company that we have worked with for quite a while. We were just given a supplier award this year for kind of being their partner of the year. One of the things that's hard with these things is you've got to test them. It can paint a 3D picture for you, but how that's calibrated and tested is really, really hard because not all of these things calibrate the same way.
The complexity, we do this work over in Thailand, of calibrating that to be accurate and the test systems required, it's pretty interesting. A lot of our engineering work goes in to make sure that every one of these that goes off the line has the same level of calibration. Great customer. All right. Semi-cap. Everybody's been wanting to talk about this one. Semi-cap, this is the business where we build components that go to capital equipment builders in the semi-cap industry. We'll talk about it a little bit. There's a few things here. Obviously, the last two years have been really growing. There's just been a ton of growth in this business a couple of years. There is sentiment that that's going to settle down a little bit in 2023.
I think everybody's kind of heard rumblings that maybe the semi-cap business will soften a little bit next year. It's been a couple of great years. This one is interesting because the competitive field is pretty small because it's hard. This is really, really difficult work for a few reasons. We compete, Celestica is certainly a competitor in this space, we also compete with people that just do machining. What we do in this part of the market is a little bit different. We're not printing a lot of circuit boards for here. We do a lot of machining work. The components that go into this equipment are super fine accuracy, like at a level that's pretty staggering. If you think about right now, semiconductors, the most advanced technology is kind of in that five-nanometer space, really, really tight geometries.
That's, just to give you a feel, a nanometer is. Actually, I'll flip it around. A piece of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. I'm getting down to five nanometers of precision. Just think of it, I mean, it's super tight. I mean, the level of accuracy on these things is crazy. It's interesting because the equipment that goes into these things is huge. I may ship one of these if I'm Applied Materials or a company that makes these, might ship in a tractor-trailer. These big pieces of equipment. The barriers of entry are high here because I need to be very good at machining, number 1. I need to machine stuff in a clean room environment, meaning I can't have any dust particles. I can't have anything. I can't use any oils for cooling the machine tools.
The contamination of what goes into these pieces of equipment is really, really sensitive. People want to be careful. A clean room is the environment we need to use. The cleanliness is big. The scale of these things is big. Think about something that is the size of a trash can lid but needs to have that nanometer-type accuracy in terms of how it's machined. This is tough work, and we've got a ton of experience. We've got a group called Precision Technologies, Mike will talk about. They're good at this work. The customers in this space love us. It's something we're really excited about. You do see a lot of, I'll just mention on the last slide, the nearshoring.
In the U.S., Japan, Europe, there's a lot of, like the CHIPS Act in the U.S., Europe, Japan, they're doing the same thing. They're trying to get more chip production locally. We're headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. You see Intel, TSMC, these guys are building fabs in state in Arizona, because of a lot of the emphasis on moving some of that manufacturing back to the U.S. That creates demand for us, which is awesome. To give you a little feel for the business. There's kind of the front-end part of the business. This is actually making the wafers that become silicon, or become semiconductors. That's about this little box on the left-hand side of the chart is about 85% of the business. Companies like Applied Materials, ASM, ASML, these companies all kind of fit in that group of doing front-end work.
Those companies are really busy right now trying to keep up with demand. After you kind of build it, you go through the process of doing some tests on it, make sure that you've made it the way it needs to be made. The thing that's hard about these things, as these geometries get smaller, you're using more 3D structures in terms of the way these wafers are built. Accuracy is really hard. You need to be sure you're making it exactly the same way. The only way to validate that is with the test platform. You've got companies that make platforms specifically to test, and then there's the back-end process. I've got a wafer. I need to dice that up into actual die that are used to make semiconductors.
Those are kind of the three parts of the business. We are engaged in all three parts of it. As you would imagine, the biggest part for us is that front-end process. One of the companies that we work with on that front-end process is ASML. Great partner for us, partially because it is a Dutch company, and we have a significant engineering facility in the Netherlands. We have partnered with these guys for years and years. What they do is pretty interesting, right? They make some of the most advanced lithography equipment in the world, and this stuff is really leading edge. It is called extreme ultraviolet process that they use, which is meant to get the really highest level of accuracy. ASML's been a great partner for us for a lot of reasons.
We have worked with them on the engineering side for years and years, but we also work with them and do a ton of manufacturing. The fact that we are in the Netherlands is a big advantage because we partner well with them there. A lot of what they want to do is build more stuff in the U.S. because of everything that is going on. That equipment needs to be deployed in the U.S., we are working with them on ways to start building some of this equipment in the U.S. A lot of stuff gets done in Asia today, too. Great customer. The nice thing is we do all kinds of stuff for these guys. Like this is our value proposition. It is engineering, precision machining, it is electronics manufacturing, it is assembly, it is test.
All the things that these guys need are kind of in the sweet spot of what we do. This customer we are really proud of. They have also given us an award recently as a supplier. Okay. Last one, advanced computing communications. This one is interesting, right? Because Jeff talked about it, this is a big market. If you just do compute and communications, that covers $340 billion worth of stuff. It is 60%-65% of the TAM overall in EMS is in this sector. What we do here, to Jeff's point earlier, is we focus on a few things that we are really, really good at. In the communication space and in the compute space, we are focused in niches of those businesses where we really have unique capabilities. Start with communications a little bit. Everybody talks about 5G.
A lot of people do not realize there is multiple frequency bands for 5G. Most of like cell phone, the 5G that you are used to seeing is in the lower frequency bands. It is either less than gigahertz or it may be kind of in that C-band, which is mid-range, 3-5 gigahertz. There is a whole extension of frequencies higher than that that are being used. The thing is with frequency, on cellular communication, frequency gives you bandwidth. If I run at a high frequency, I can move a ton of data, which is great. The bad news is I cannot move it very far, right? If I need to go super far, I would probably use a lower frequency. One of the things that you are seeing is in these higher frequency ranges, which is what cell phone demand for bandwidth is huge.
Everybody wants these higher frequency ranges. We need to have more devices so that they can connect. Line of sight is a big thing, if you've heard any of that kind of challenges with how this gets rolled out. You need more devices, more antennas, more devices to make sure that the signals can be managed. That's a big part of what we're working on in that space. Our experience, we've got an RF center of excellence in Phoenix. We've got a lot of experience with high-speed development and testing. The hardest part of these high-speed devices is tuning, so making sure that you've got it in the right frequency range, because it can be pretty twitchy as you get up into higher frequency ranges. We do that with filters, and we do that with testing and validation when we do manufacturing work.
The filters part of our business is an interesting part of our business, that's actually grown quite a bit, and there's interest because of this specific capability that we have. A lot of that interest is in moving manufacturing back to the Americas. It's something we're working on with a couple of customers today. This whole idea of millimeter wave RF frequencies that are higher, that enables the bigger bandwidth, is one of the things we're working on here. The other part of the business that's interesting is compute. We get into high-performance computing, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. Let's see this next slide. This gives you a feel for what the world looks like in this sector for us.
Again, 5G, a lot of the stuff that you see in the top middle there is stuff that goes into rural broadband. There's a lot of government spending on making sure people that are living out in the country that aren't close to a cell phone tower have coverage. Rural broadband and being able to get broadband access into the regions out there. Some of these technologies work well for that, so some of our customers are focused in that part of the market. Satcom and free space optics. Free space optics is interesting because satellites communicate to the ground, but they also communicate to each other. If you're out in space and you need to talk from one satellite to another, optics is a good way to do it. They use light to communicate.
The optics and how those satellites communicate together, one of our customers is working on that technology today. Network infrastructure is a big one. As we all know, home offices and everything, everybody's using broadband. I'm competing with Netflix shows while I'm working. I'm not watching Netflix, but my kids are. Anyway, bandwidth to the home is a big deal. A lot of the infrastructure even for wireless connectivity is based on broadband cable connections. We're working with companies like Comcast, or excuse me, CommScope in that space, building out the infrastructure to support all the bandwidth improvements that are needed. As those systems go to higher frequency, it's a complete rework of all the infrastructure. It's a big investment, and that's a very busy part of the business for us right now, I would say.
Smart city is kind of interesting because we talked about these guys, higher frequencies can't communicate as far. You've got smart cities where people are integrating antennas and communication systems into streetlights and into other parts of the city that are less antenna looking. We're working on a couple of projects with customers on that. We'll talk about high-performance computing a little bit. My heritage is in the compute business, I love this part of the business. This is interesting. High-performance computing is not like home computing. It's a different ballgame. It's completely different. The systems that do high-performance computing are deployed in these huge racks, and they fill rooms. They're interesting for a few reasons. Number one, the form factor is usually pretty big. These are big boards.
You're putting a lot of processors and memory systems on these things, they're bigger than a normal. A normal SMT line can't run one of these boards through. It requires a little more space. They communicate not always with copper, right? We're all used to computers talking to each other with copper. They use optics because it's a lot faster. It's expensive, but because these are special built, they use a different approach. The other thing is cooling is a huge problem for these. You got these big supercomputers, they require a ton of cooling. That's all done with water. When you rig up one of these high-performance computers, you do it with water. One of the projects that gets a lot of press right now is the HPE Frontier project. This is a system that's deployed at Oak Ridge National Labs.
Most of these systems get deployed either in universities or research labs, and then there's all kinds of top 100 computing lists that you look at. This system in particular was launched last year. This fits into a category called exascale, which means it's capable of exaflop processing, which is, a little trivia for you, it's 1 million million floating point operations a second. Or excuse me, 1 billion billion. It's 1 billion billion. It's like this huge quintillion number. The performance of these systems is mind-boggling. The rollout for this system, this thing sits on a floor space that's about two basketball courts, to give you a feel. Huge. The power that it requires is huge. The water, it uses 6,000 gallons a minute of water flowing through to keep everything cool and operational. These systems are really unique.
When I say we kind of focus on a part of the market, barriers of entry, this is one barriers of entry protect. Not everybody can build this stuff. Even harder, you can build it, not everybody can test it. How do you set up the cooling system with the water to run reliability testing on these things? It requires a big investment. We've made those investments. It's a barrier of entry. This market is actually something we're really good at, and it's unique to us. There's not a lot of people that can do what we do. We do the work on this, another project that's currently underway that's going to Argonne National Labs. These are huge, huge programs. That's a business that continues to run.
The other thing is, the ones that go into national labs, by the way, have to be built in the U.S. We talk about footprint because it's going into a research lab. It's a government research lab. It has to be built in the U.S. The fact that we've got a footprint in the U.S. helps us a ton on this kind of stuff. One more customer. This is a great customer of ours called Iridium. This is in the advanced communications space, satellite phones. These are handheld devices that communicate with satellites. A lot of microelectronics go into them. Really sophisticated communication technology. We've been working with Iridium for a long time. As you can imagine, when conflict breaks out in Eastern Europe, satellite phones are at a premium. Everybody wants one because it allows communication in remote areas.
When infrastructure gets destroyed, for whatever reason, you can maintain communication. We've seen this business really grow with this customer over the last year as the need for satellite communications, handheld devices, has picked up. This is another one where we got the supplier award recognition, actually November. It's actually right now, we're getting recognized by these guys as supplier of the year. Really good customer success story for us. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up. A couple of things I just want to make sure, really, really important. We talk about sectors, it's important to us. Our credibility is what differentiates us, why people pick us. What I have is I've got an understanding of my customer's business that's compelling, and it makes them want to partner with us. That's a good thing. How we manage that is pretty systemic.
We've got a go-to-market model. It's disciplined. We're keeping track of how many customers we're engaging with. We look at win-loss against all of our competitors. We try to really understand why we're getting chosen and why we win so that we can win more. That's a systemic model that we've kind of ingrained into the company, which is really important. The engineering services piece is important. This is a big part of how we differentiate. We talk about product realization. This is probably our biggest differentiator. The reason I came to Benchmark is because we really do have development engineers. I got 400 of them that are talented. They've been in this business for a long time. The best engineering companies are the ones that understand manufacturing, and we've got 40 years of world-class manufacturing under our belt. It makes us a very good engineering company.
That's a big part of our value proposition. The last thing on here is just kind of the engagement model we have with customers. We look at these customer engagements as partnerships. I'm not a contract manufacturer. It's a transactional relationship, which is not what we do. We have partnerships with our customers. They rely on us for more than just contract manufacturing, and that's a big reason we have customers that stay with us for decades, and we recognize the value of what we do for our customers. Okay. That's all I had. I am going to introduce our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Mike Buseman.
Morning. I'd like to make an offer. If you want to get up and stretch, get food and coffee at the back, please do so. I will absolutely not be offended if you're up and moving around. As Rob said, business runs on buy-in, doesn't it? I'm Mike Buseman, I'm COO and EVP. Unlike Rob, who shared his experience, my background is long-term EMS. I've been in this industry for almost 25 years. I've held similar roles at some of our competitors. I spent about 10 years at a company called MSL, that Celestica acquired. Spent about seven years at Plexus. Steve, you and I were talking about the days of Plexus. Ironically, I spent about five years, just prior to joining Benchmark, at one of the large electronics distribution, logistics, and supply chain companies, Avnet.
It kind of proved to be telling for what the world's tuned into, this complexity of supply chain. I'm long-term EMS. Rob's a little more recent entry. Rob's clearly smarter than I am because I've been doing this for a long time. With that said, I'm really excited now to spend some time, sharing with you how we take a lot of the things you've been hearing about, from Rob, from Jeff, how we kind of bring those things to life in our engineering centers and our design centers and our manufacturing centers around the globe. We're going to hit a little bit about footprint, little bit about capability, little bit about our investment strategy, kind of pull that all together for you, as we get through that.
Footprint comes first, and we believe strongly that it is absolutely imperative that we've got the right presence, addresses, dots on the map and the right capabilities to service our customers and to do all the things that Rob just shared with you. Jeff mentioned earlier, we did some hard work as we consolidated and rationalized five sites. We were very thoughtful about that. As a leadership team, we thought about where do we need to be? Where do we need to have a presence? Where do we not need to have a presence? Those were hard decisions, we're done with those, right now, we're in a great position. The dots on the map that you see up here, this is where we want to be. These are the cities, the countries where we believe having a presence is imperative to our success going forward.
As I'll share with you in a couple slides here, now we're starting to build out more capability. You've heard some themes, multiple years of double-digit CAGR. We've downsized some of the sites. Now we know where we want to invest, you'll hear us talk about investing in capabilities and brick and mortar in some of these locations. A couple big themes off this slide. I'm going to take you down to the bottom of the slide to start with. Total square footage. Just math. Our square footage around the globe, about 50% is in the Americas, 10% is in Europe, about 40% is in Asia, Southeast Asia. It's kind of unique in our industry, okay? There's a couple things I'll point out to you. That 50% Americas footprint, is very different than most of our competition.
You can see a large presence of actually U.S. sites, critical for the kind of work we do, the attributes of When It Matters. Rob gave you several examples of defense products, of exascale computing, have to be done in the U.S., okay? The other thing that's probably draw attention to is in Asia, we really only have one site in China. That's playing to our favor now. Our majority of our presence in Asia is in Thailand and in Penang, Malaysia, where we have multiple sites. Why does that matter so much? For the last 20 years, there's been a huge outsource activity to China. That's changed dramatically. You can say that it changed in the last three years, the last five years, certainly over that window of time, though.
Everything, the convergence of trade tariffs, supply chain challenges, COVID, geopolitical dynamics, have set off a significant change in what we see our customers looking for. When they start thinking about total landed cost, total cost of ownership, they're looking for alternatives, okay? Not that China's bad, but a lot of our customers, they're looking for alternatives to China. We have active projects going on. We've already completed a moving product from our site in China to the U.S., to Mexico, and even within Southeast Asia, over to Thailand or to Penang, Malaysia. That global footprint being very balanced and without having an over centricity in China is really proving to be our benefit right now. The other theme here on this slide is kind of on the right side on the legend.
We look at our sites, we have seven product design centers around the world. That's where the 400 design engineers reside in the company. That dark blue and orange, those are electronics manufacturing in the space Rob was talking about, what we call Precision Technologies or precision machinings. We have 20 manufacturing sites. Six of those are this precision machining capability. The other theme that we have up there, we have nine centers of excellence, and I want to talk about those to you. Centers of excellence to us are sites that are a couple things that happen at them. They tend to be a co-location of our engineering, our design teams, and our manufacturing teams, and that co-location allows us to do kind of the deep thought process around new technology, kind of research work, the things Rob was talking about, photonics and so on.
We develop the technology there, we develop the training, we develop kind of the standard work or the playbook. We can proliferate those capabilities out to sites around the globe. I'm not going to read that all to you, but for example, Minnesota is one of our centers of excellence, happens to be our largest product design engineering location in the company. Also happens to be our center of excellence for three things. We do medical devices there. Anything that requires optics or optical, we do there. Anything that's these liquid cooled exascale high performance compute that Rob was just talking about, Minnesota is our center of excellence. If we have a customer that needs those capabilities, we take them to Minnesota, and we leverage the practices from Minnesota into other sites around the globe. That's the footprint. That's first.
Next comes the capabilities. Again, Jeff and Rob have both said a lot of things to you about new capabilities that we're investing in. We have a very consistent playbook around the globe of how we do our operations. We think we're robust operationally. These are things now that we layer on or enhance the capabilities that we have in support of our partners. We start in the middle with a couple of core areas. Engineering, you've heard us talk a lot about it, and supply chain. We put them in the middle for a reason. They are core to everything that we do. Any engagement we have, we're going to have an engineering or a design engagement, and we have a supply chain engagement. Probably now more than ever, that coupling of design and supply chain is more critical than it's ever been.
We'll talk about some of the capabilities in engineering, like miniaturization and high-speed design in a minute. Today, our partners are looking for us to help them design a product and design a supply chain that truly supports them from total landed cost, also supports them in a global scale. We have many customers now. Rob mentioned Emerson earlier, one of our industrial control, complex industrial customers. We build product for Emerson at seven manufacturing sites around the world. Guess what they want? They want a consistent experience, okay? They want a design that they can move from one site to another site and not have to start all over. That core work on engineering and supply chain, really important to us. The periphery here, there's some areas where we're investing in new capabilities on top of what we do today. I'll give you some examples.
I'll give you a couple things that are kind of small. We're going to start with microelectronics. The next gen communication space, we do all kinds of things there, but microelectronics is imperative there. Viasat, the customer that Rob talked about, satellite communications, the satellites that they have up in orbit, we did the transceive and receive modules for them. Most importantly, we took that from a competitor who was struggling immensely getting that product into production. They had about 20% first pass yield. It's terrible, okay? Couldn't scale, couldn't go to volume. We took that. It was a takeaway. Rob's team did a great job. We took that away from one of our competitors, and where Plexus struggled with that, we were able to take that, use some of our design team, some of our manufacturing team.
Today, that is running at 98%+ yield, and it's in orbit supporting Viasat today. To do that work, it was almost black magic kind of work. It's kind of work that's in the nanometer range. It's gold wires that are very specific angles and attack, and how we attach that to a substrate. An example of capabilities that we invested in to help our partners get to their next level of performance. Another small thing, microfluidics. We do microfluidics for many customers now. Think about a device that's supporting dialysis, okay? Is processing human blood.
We actually build a system that when we test it, we don't use human blood, we use a synthetic blood, but that device, you talk about When It Matters, is performing dialysis, a critical life-saving function, FDA Class III, and the microfluidics going on within that device that we design and we build, supporting people's lives. Rob mentioned some of the things going on around kind of gene mapping, DNA, and so on. We have multiple customers where microfluidics is imperative to the success of their product as it goes to the market. The other one I'll talk about is, I'll move over to the lower right on this slide. Semi-cap space, Rob did a great job. I'm going to let you do the spiel on precision machining now on.
Precision technologies or precision machining, think about big chunks of metal that then we go do work that at a flatness level across 48 inches, we're measuring flatness in the micron range, we have physical features that we're measuring in the nanometer range. Okay? We do E-beam or electron beam welding on that device. That piece of metal, when we're done, is worth about $400,000, okay? It goes into the deposition chamber of customers like ASML and AMAT, who again, as Rob said, are creating the chips that ultimately power all these electronic devices. The really cool thing, we then take that piece of metal that by itself is very complex. We take it into a clean room assembly process, Rob started this. We assemble it into, what they would call one of their modules 10 foot by 10 foot by eight and a half feet high.
The labor to assemble that thing is about 800 hours of labor. When we talk about mechatronics, maybe to help you a bit if you don't know, mechatronics are just really complex systems. Combination of movement, pneumatics, hydraulics, vision, motion, processing. That mechatronics space is really, really valuable for us and a space that we're working a lot in right now. That covers some of the things that Rob was talking about. All those things we're chatting about take investments, in our business, we like to run our shops and have our locations pretty loaded up. It takes a pretty focused discipline around investment, with Roop's guidance. I'll start on the lower right of this chart. To me, really encouraging over the last 4 years, which have been anything but steady state, we have continued to invest in the company.
You can see that our CapEx as a percentage of revenue, has been actually growing over the last 3 or 4 years. Would've been very easy to cut that investment, stop, wait for things to stabilize, but we've invested through this period. You can see this year for 2022, that we're on track to be over 2% of revenue going back into capital investments. Our priorities, I said we're very disciplined. We're on the left side. I won't read them all to you, back to the mantra of When It Matters, the first thing we always focus on is ensuring that the work we do meets regulatory and compliance. We have to be technically good, and technically competent, and technically compliant to be credible to our partners. We work through capacity, capability, investments in some of the next-gen technologies we've been talking about.
I mentioned we're in a growth mode now, multiple years of double-digit CAGR. We've loaded up our sites. That's a great thing in our industry. We are now expanding in the locations that we already have. We don't need different cities. We just need to expand where we're already at. There are three pictures up there. The one in the upper left is the new building under construction in Guadalajara, Mexico. That site's been a big beneficiary of kind of the near shoring, reshoring, and onshoring that Rob was talking about. The picture in the middle is a fresh picture of our site in Almelo, in the Netherlands. That facility, we did a refresh on it, and we also significantly expanded its manufacturing space. By the way, that's also one of our centers of excellence where we have engineering, manufacturing co-located.
The upper right is the newest building kind of in our family, that is the fourth facility that we have in Penang, Malaysia, that we're in the process of commissioning right now. All of our investments are focused to keep driving operational improvements and ultimately to support driving accretive growth for the company. All right. Let me try to pull that all together. We talked about space, we talked about capabilities, we talked about the investments. We believe what we have here is really a full solution value stream for our customers and our partners. We actually lay it out as a seven-step process. You think about what one of our customers needs to do to have an idea, bring that product to the market, they got a twinkle in the eye.
They start with technology development. They work through the concept. They do design. We have to do NPI builds. We have to qualify it, and ultimately, we take it into production. A lot of customers to do that have to go to at least two, if not three shops. They go to a design shop to help them design it. They go to another shop to help them do NPI and qualify it, and then ultimately a third partner to do production. What we've created here at Benchmark is what we call a product realization service. It does all seven of those elements. Our customers can come to us, engage with one company, one partnership, launch their product all the way into the marketplace. Very typically, this starts on the left side. It starts with the design, ultimately goes to manufacturing.
Very interesting, we have customers that engage at other points in this value stream. They can go any direction. We have a customer called YES, Yield Engineering Systems. They are in the semi-cap space, do back-end processes. They engaged with us about two years ago, in a pure manufacturing relationship on the far right of that value stream. Very successful partnership. As they continue to grow, they have done acquisitions. They have found that some of their acquisitions aren't very robust with design on the front-end work. YES has come to us and asked us to partner with them on design and work back through the value stream with them, and we're doing that right now on next generation products.
The summary on this slide is we take all those 400 engineers, design engineers, we take 12,000 manufacturing people, take the supply chain teams, we support customers all the way through their launch to the marketplace. It's great for the customers. They launch to the market more rapidly. They have a product that's more robust, and safe. They have a product that's been designed for global supply chain. It's great for us because it makes very sticky relationships. Sticky relationships are where partnerships really come from. Great for us and our customers because if done well, this takes out cost on the product. Good for the customer, good for us on margins. Most importantly, it builds trusted partnerships. We are seen as that partner that can be trusted to get a product to market.
It helps us get more opportunities and fills our funnel with opportunities. The last slide I have, we believe we win with differentiation. Our customers tell us we win with differentiation. What do they mean? They say, "Look, when we come to Benchmark, we're coming to a customer that's got a commitment to innovative technology." Shared some things with you that we're working on around the globe. Say you underpin that with a company that's got global scale and presence, we can take that technology and take it out to the marketplace, and the whole thing is founded on very trusted partnerships. Rob said it. We're a transactional relationship kind of a company. Our customers tell us we win because we differentiate with those things. I want to bring that to life with you. Rob talked about Ouster, the lidar company. lidar, that technology came out.
Ouster looked around the industry. First thing they said is, "We want somebody who speaks this language." They get it. The targeted sector experience, they started talking to us. They said, "You guys get it. You understand the technology, and you're committed." They then looked around and said, "Okay, we get it, but do you have the capabilities?" Very specifically for this product, we required microelectronics and a lot of optical work. We had those capabilities. They said, "Okay, that's going to enable us to get there." We underpin that then with operational excellence and global supply chain. Ouster is based here in the U.S. Their build, they immediately wanted to launch into Thailand, we helped them launch immediately into Thailand. As we took the first designs, we had to refine it with them. We partnered with them on design, engineering, and manufacturing.
Took a pretty low-yielding product, in the early days, because it was really complex digital lidar, and we turned that into a very repeatable build, repeatable process. We took them from concept, the left side of that value stream, all the way to the right side of that value stream. Today, we support them, and we're in production, back with the scale and agility that we have in production at our site in Thailand. Ouster is a customer that will tell you absolutely technology scale, partnership, and really is kind of that life experience across all those elements. I covered a lot of ground with you. I appreciate the time with you, and I'm going to pause and hand it to Roop to let him talk about delivering shareholder value.
Right. The fourth slot for this morning. It's interesting, Jeff joined us in the spring of 2019, and we as a company, when he came on board, spent a lot of time as a team and throughout the company to really talk about where are we going, what's the voice of the customer, what do we need to do, where do we need to invest, what do we need to do to drive a strong financial model? It took us some time to go through that process. October of 2020, we put this midterm model out. We go back to October of 2020, wasn't exactly the most stable environment, right? Little thing called COVID going on, supply chain constraints starting up, these sort of things.
We thought it was important that we put what our expectations are in the marketplace, even if it was October of 2020. We've talked a lot about this midterm model. Let's measure how we did against this midterm model. Midterm model said from a revenue growth perspective, we want to drive 5% growth. Well, using the Q3 2022 year-to-date results, plus the midpoint of Q4 guidance, and again, one thing to note is these elements are without supply chain premiums. We're excluding the supply chain premiums in terms of these measurements. 28% growth during this period. 28% growth. More than 4x our target in a market that saw COVID constraints, that saw supply chain constraints. How were we able to do that? It's because of what you heard this morning. It's about the investments we made.
It's about the focus and improvements we made in the go-to-market organization and really defining that strategy for ourselves and for our customers. That was critical. The revenue growth that came with that was across sectors, and it's something we talk about. We want a diversified portfolio. We were able to do that. We saw growth. The greatest amount of growth came out of semi-cap and high-performance computing, those marketplaces. The continuous or continued desire of medical OEMs, aerospace and defense OEMs, industrial OEMs to outsource what is insourced or was insourced was a part of that. That's going to set ourselves up for these next three years, and we'll touch on that here in a moment. With that revenue growth, what that allowed us to do is feed our factories. We got absorption.
It allowed us to go and double, more than double our operating income from a dollar perspective and take our gross margins to 3.9% or I'm sorry, operating margins to 3.9%. That's inclusive of about 60 basis points of stock comp. If you add that or subtract that out, you're at 4.5% roughly. Again, when we thought about what's that range, it was 3.4%-3.8%. How did we accomplish that? Where did that come from, that growth? The predominance of that growth actually came out of that top-line growth and getting absorption in the factories. That was the biggest contributor. Our gross margins went from 8.4%-9.6% during this time. We also got the right mix of revenue. That's important. We also received the revenue in business units that were higher gross margin business units.
Of course, we got cost leverage, cost structure leverage. Those were the three contributing factors to driving to that operating income improvement. That led to earnings growth 122%. Our goal was to be 2X our revenue growth rate. We were above 4X in terms of the earnings growth, 122%. $2.11 is the forecasted or estimated EPS for this year. That to me is a major milestone for us as a company. Why is that? Because the company was never above $2 per share per annum in its history. Actually, we were never even close to $2. It really, in this challenging environment for the company and the enterprise as a whole and every Benchmark employee to accomplish that is quite an accomplishment. Kudos to the team.
That earnings growth allowed us to drive return on invested capital or ROIC of 10.1%, is the forecasted number for this year. About 100 basis points above where our current WACC is, which obviously in this market has gone up a bit. This is the first time we have an ROIC greater than 10% since 2017. Again, you can see how this has taken time to build, but now is being driven effectively. The biggest contributor to the ROIC improvement here is the net operating profit after tax. It's more than doubled again. It's coming off of the income growth, obviously. From a capital allocation standpoint, we have focused on driving CapEx. Mike talked about it. Capabilities, both people and technology. That's been a key part of it. We've increased that CapEx during this time. We've also continued to deliver on our dividend.
It started at $0.15 per share in March of 2018. We've managed to increase that during this time. Currently stands at $0.165. We continue to execute on that. Of course, we've done share repurchases during this time. At a minimum, we've said that we will do share repurchases at least to offset our equity dilution. We've done that. If you go back to when I first started in January of 2018, we had excess cash. In 2018, we put an aggressive share repurchase plan in place. If you take 2018 and 2019 and add it to these years, through this tenure, we have repurchased more than $400 million of shares, 15.6 million shares, about 31% of the outstanding shares when I started. That's helped support that EPS growth as well. That's been important.
That's what the midterm model, those were the targets, those were our achievements against that. I would say pretty good. We either met or exceeded every target that we set. Setting a pretty good precedence there for what we're going to do next. What we're going to do next is really underpinned by what you heard this morning around our strategy, around our go-to-market focus, around the investments and the capabilities that we're making. With that, it allows us to then say, "This is where we want to go next in terms of our model." From a revenue standpoint, we want to get 10% CAGR during this period. Now, is it going to be exactly linear? I can't promise that, especially as we've talked about 2023 and some of the headwinds we face in 2023, and that's why you see this range of 8%-12%.
Ultimately, over that three-year period, we want to drive to that 10% CAGR. Where is that revenue growth? Whereas during the mid-term model, the revenue was driven, as I said, from semi-cap and high-performance computing. We're actually going to see those continue to be strong and have some growth. We're actually going to see the primary drivers of revenue during the 2023 to 2025 actually come from medical, industrials, next-gen communications. That revenue growth is going to enable the non-GAAP operating margin expansion 5%-5.5%. Again, this includes, we've estimated it's still at 60 basis points of stock comp within that 5-5.5 range. That margin expansion is going to come from three primary areas. Number one is actually the mix of revenue. That revenue is going to flow through our factories and get that absorption, that utilization.
That's actually going to be the biggest driver of that operating margin expansion during this time. We'll also then get operation efficiency separate from that mix of revenue. Then second biggest actually is cost structure leverage. We will continue to invest, as Jeff said, in our people, in our systems, in our processes. The rate at which we invest be far less than where our revenue growth rate is, such that we get that cost structure leverage. That non-GAAP operating margin expansion is going to support earnings growth. We still set the same target, 2x our revenue growth rate. By doing that, and using the revenue range that you see of eight to 12, it says at a minimum, we're looking at something greater than $3.30 of EPS. Obviously, the share repurchases will also help support some of that expansion, which is important.
With that income generation and continued or improving working capital efficiencies, we're focused on driving strong cash flow from operations and free cash flow. During this time, we still expect to invest somewhere about $50 million-$60 million of CapEx per year. When you factor that down, what we're targeting is $70 million-$80 million per year of free cash flow. Part of that cash flow generation is the income, the other part is working capital efficiency. We do believe that supply chain markets and environments are going to stabilize over this period. That'll help support facilitating the inventory turns, which you see on the far right-hand side of this, and driving the inventory turns towards five to 5.5. With the free cash flow that we generate, we have three priorities. Number one, we want to pay down our revolver.
Today, we have interest expense as a result of the borrowings, during this period, as we pay down that revolver, we'll also see interest expense reduction during that time, which will support that EPS growth as well. That's factored into this. Number one is pay down that revolver over the period of this as we generate free cash flow. The second item is we're going to continue to support the dividend. We'll evaluate whether we take that dividend up as we move forward and as we generate this cash. At a minimum, we're going to continue to have the dividend at the $0.165 as we move forward. As we talked about, share repurchases will continue to be at least enough to offset equity dilution. As Jeff said, we'll evaluate whether opportunistically we should or can do more share repurchases.
That cash flow generation, along with the income generation, is going to support our ROIC improvement to 14%-15% is our target range. From a WACC perspective, we estimate that's somewhere 400-500 basis points above our WACC. Just finishing up on the right-hand side here, cash conversion cycle. As I mentioned, inventory velocity improves during this time, which is going to help support that cash flow generation. We also then need to focus on supplier and customer terms management that'll support that cash conversion cycle. Of course, as we pay down the revolver, debt to EBITDA improves from where it is today. That's the three years and the 2025 targets that we just spoke of. Let's talk a little bit about 2023 as the first year launching into that three-year period. Net sales, $2.85 billion-$2.95 billion.
Operating non-GAAP operating margin of 4.1%-4.5%, again, inclusive of stock compensation. Which takes you to an EPS of about $2.35-$2.45. If you take the midpoint, about $2.40. Effective tax rate, 18%-20%. There's a number of initiatives we have underway that might improve that tax rate as we move forward. We're working through those at that time, or we're working through that as we speak, but for now, 18%-20%. Again, the free cash flow of $70 million-$90 million for 2023. In closing, we believe Benchmark is a compelling investment opportunity. We talked about the revenue growth that we're focused on, 10% CAGR.
That 10% CAGR over this next period of 2023 to 2025 will help support margin expansion to 5%-5.5% operating margin expansion, along with a focus on driving free cash flow during this period and driving an ROIC of 14%-15%, 400-500 basis points above WACC in our estimation. We believe that helps support our stated objective of driving long-term shareholder value creation. With that, I want to invite Jeff to come back up, join me for a Q&A session. I do want to note for those that are on the webcast, we'll take questions from the room, but if you have questions for those on the webcast, please submit your questions on the webcast and we'll take those as well.
Thank you. Just in light of what really was a contributing factor to the strong results you've put out the last couple of years, semi-cap. If we're looking for potentially a down cycle in semi-cap, walk us through, if you would, how we get to that kind of operating margin that you're talking about, especially given how profitable that business is.
You want to start for me?
Sure.
Jim, appreciate the question. A couple of different things. As I noted, Semicap is still going to be a strong contributor as we look forward. However, the growth in the medical sector, in the industrial sector, next-gen communication sectors, that growth rate will be at a stronger level. The other part of that is if you think about our Semicap is primarily in the precision machining area, right? The EMS side of the house is going to see a lot of that growth. Therefore, the utilization that we get in those EMS factories is going to improve even further where that operating margin expansion, gross margin operating margin expansion comes from.
Yeah. Just to add to that. We are looking at Semicap moderating from a growth perspective. Some people are forecasting the equipment to be down 20%, as much as 20% next year. We have won a ton of new business in that space. That's helping us certainly as some of those new projects ramp that are going to help moderate that potential headwind we might have in the semi space. We certainly think 2023 that it won't be as big a top-line growth driver, but we do think it'll hold up nicely for us. We still are very long on Semicap in the sense that we see the CHIPS Act, just in the Phoenix Valley, for example, there's new fabs coming up with TSMC that aren't even out of the ground yet. Intel's building two new fabs there as well.
When those fabs get built and they're complete, of course the capital equipment has to go in to build chips. That's where we come to play. We do the subsystems and some of those builds for large customers like Applied Materials. We are contemplating in our growth that Semicap will not be the kind of 30% year-over-year driver that it was before. Roop talked a little bit how the utilization in EMS really helps us from the margin profile and how we still feel that we can progress things as we go.
One other thing to add to Jeff's comment, Jim, is we still see semi-cap growing next year. It's not as if it's coming down, right? That utilization in our factories within the precision machining area will continue on. Right? The other part is, Jeff mentioned it, we've won a lot of new programs. Those new programs were ramping throughout 2022. As we get into 2023, you'll see them get more towards their normalized gross margin level as well. All those are contributing factors.
If I could, just one question, I'll pass it on. Just as we think about the expanding opportunity in medical and industrial-
Yeah
next-gen communications that you've talked about. Is this coming from program wins within existing customers, new customers? Is the margin profile in those three sectors? Does it vary much? Is medical, for instance, higher than industrial?
In general, maybe I'll start. Medical does tend to be higher than industrial, it's kind of always been that case. The profile can vary customer to customer a bit, but I would say medical stays maybe in a little bit tighter band. I'd also say it's a mix in terms of new customers or existing customers. We've seen incremental wins with customers that we've had for a long time. One of the large communication customers, we've built product for them in the past, but they're going through a very big upcycle and infrastructure build-out for broadband. That's a huge opportunity for us that we'll build on. I think when I think about 2023, we had an unprecedented number of new product introductions over the last 18 months where we were getting new product that we were doing first builds and starting to ramp.
I see us sort of moving more to a mode where that first off, freeing up more supply chain gives us opportunity to continue to grow. We then start to get into more of a run rate with some of those customers. Still seeing growth, when you're starting out, sometimes we'll predict, okay, we're going to see revenue from this customer, and then it takes three months longer or six months longer because of yields or because of design changes or ECs and things like that. I feel like when I look at the profile for 2023, a lot of it is stuff that started back in 2021 and 2022. When you ask the question, is that a new customer? Some of those are new customers, but they're new customers a year and a half ago, and now they're there.
We see good follow-on program activity across those sectors. I think you were asking about like industrial would be a little bit, you know, closer to corporate margin where medical would be on the higher side of that profile. We don't break it out because it is pretty competitive and we've talked a little about competition. We don't say what the margin is by category, very much follows the value add. When you blend it together, we feel pretty good about being able to continue to progress it. Thanks for that. Anja, you had a question?
Thank you for taking my question, and thank you for the presentation. I'm just curious what you previously called the traditional computing and telco, and now you grouped that into with all the other end markets. How should we think about the margin among those compared to other segments?
Yeah. One of the things is this has been a transition over time. As we've won new programs, we focused in some of these sub-sectors, whether it's high-performance computing, secure computing, these sort of areas. The margin profile of these is not the traditional, hey, it's a PC margin for compute and these sort of things. As you think about the margins, they will be at or around the corporate averages, and in certain programs, they can be slightly above that, in most cases.
Thank you. That was helpful. In terms of, you mentioned you had aftermarket service opportunity in the medical with Kestra.
Do you have that with other customers as well, and would that be a growing opportunity for you?
It's a service we offer, and not every customer takes advantage of it. We do provide it if desired, and so we do both aftermarket services like refurbishment, but we also do logistics services and these sort of things on select basis.
Yeah. I would say we probably don't talk a ton about it, but we do direct order fulfillment for some customers where you could argue, once we build it, we actually ship to the customer. They don't know that we're not the OEM. That's a little beyond the production service. We also, even in aerospace and defense, we do refurbishment on product that comes back that maybe has more ability to live on but has refurbishment requirements to keep it up to date and current. We do have that really across verticals, but we haven't really aggregated it to say how big that is because it's just part of folded into each of those verticals. Kestra is a great example.
The reason that that one's sort of interesting, if you have an incident, it's quite interesting that the garment actually emits the gel, and the gel allows the contact to do the electric shock. You can imagine when you go through an incident like that, then it has to be kind of reloaded. Also the lifetime of how long you wear that. If you're waiting 3 months for a transplant, then when that 3-month period is over, you no longer need it, and you could, with the healthcare provider, recycle that and stuff. That's why that one's a bit interesting in terms of their aftermarket potential.
The one thing other, additional thing I'd add to Jeff's comments is whereas some other competitors may call that out more specifically, in terms of a business area, for us, it really is factored into our EMS business unit. When we think about whether it's Precision Technologies, so PT or EMS, et cetera. Those aftermarket services are in that EMS space.
In EMS. Yeah. Jason. Wait, hold. Just trying to help the folks on the webcast be able to-
Yeah. Can your current footprint support sort of that 10% CAGR growth over the next few years? I guess relatedly, how much capacity do you have or what sort of revenue run rate does your capacity currently support?
Yeah. I'll start. Maybe Jeff, you please jump in as well.
Yeah. On the first question, you said, can you repeat the very first part? Sorry.
Yeah. Can your current footprint support?
Oh, current footprint. Oh, go ahead.
10% CAGR?
You want to start on-
Yeah. It's a dynamic equation, right? We know we will need to invest additional in our rooftops or capacity, right? Maybe we have cold space that we need to light up and make it usable. That is factored into our CapEx estimates as we move forward. Today's footprint will it support the $3.3 billion on the low end of the range that we put in the long-term model? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on where it is and the nature of the work and these sort of things. Factored into our CapEx is additional capacity expansion as necessary.
I mean, we've come a long way in utilization. When I got here, again, not a number we share, but we know we were behind the industry. Part of the reason we consolidated five of the facilities, right? We said that, look, they were underutilized. When you make the decision to close a facility in San Jose, which might be a high-cost region, maybe not the best place to build high electronics. Well, as we move customers to another facility, now it helps fill that facility, and we take one that wasn't fully utilized, and we decide to reduce the footprint. It's interesting, we have really pivoted from where we were consolidation to now we're really more in an expansion mode. We're expanding around the epicenters that we already have established, right? We're looking at incremental footprint in Phoenix.
We're looking at incremental footprint in Penang, Malaysia. We're expanding a building in Brasov, Romania. We're expanding a position in Almelo, Netherlands. We're very judicious here about not popping up a new location in Florida. Because we want to leverage our management team, our SG&A investments. We want to be able to leverage those around those epicenters where we already have a position. We talked about a few. We didn't really lay out all of that, where it's in our capital plan that he reflected and what we're thinking about. We do have a large number of new projects going on. Not all incremental, three or four new buildings, but even like Romania is a great example. The space we occupy is a square, but we only had three-quarters of it built out.
Now we're filling in the fourth element of that with the landlord and working through that, but it's almost doubling our manufacturing capacity in Romania for a very modest incremental investment. We are trying to stay in front of it because we believe that we're going to continue to see the growth that we have because of the business we book. We could do more in the facilities we have. You look at some of our competitors that have similar footprint, and they're 25% larger, sort of says there's room there. We also are hitting places where we do need incremental capacity, and we're investing for that.
The one other thing Mike talked on about mechatronics. Mechatronics is large scale form factor type of work, right? When you're doing that, you potentially need more space. As we continue to make progress in that'll influence what square footage we might need as well. Steve.
Thanks. Just following up on that discussion, can you talk a little bit about Europe? It's a small percentage of the footprint today. Why wouldn't it become a bigger percentage going forward, given some of the reshoring trends that you mentioned?
You're talking about Europe specifically?
Yes, just Europe specifically.
Yeah, I think, we'd like to do more in Europe. We didn't actually project forward what % of the future business it could be. Certainly, looking at our Brasov footprint, we're seeing a lot of growth there because it's a lower cost region, but in Europe. I see with the additional capacity we have there that it could grow to be a bigger %. I think the factor that why it is what it is just we've seen so much domestic and North America growth and Penang growth, and Thailand, that sort of hasn't allowed Europe to expand to be a bigger % of the total. We do have customers, though, I think one of you touched on the fact that really want to build more regionally.
They want to build closer to consumption. I think supply chain environment, everybody's worried about, hey, If I'm going to try to address being more lean, I'm going to need to think about building closer to where the consumption is. I think we'll still see good growth in Europe. I just don't know that it's necessarily going to materially shift, like to doubling as a % of our total revenue.
I would agree with that, Jeff. Maybe just to add to that is we do have some additional European growth initiatives that we're evaluating, and that'll influence that footprint and expansion considerations as well.
Yeah, a lot of it is where customers want us to be.
Exactly.
There are requests sometimes, like could we be doing more in a particular region based on a particular vertical? That'll guide us a little bit. I think we probably, in this discussion about 2025, didn't spend as much energy on what does that ultimate footprint look like as we get to three years out.
That's helpful.
Sure.
Thinking about some of the margin targets, near term and longer term. Near term, you're talking about flattish sales, but margins expanding even from the Q4 levels by flat to 40 basis points, and then further, depending on sales growth. How do we think about what you control in terms of how much margin expansion do you get from manufacturing efficiencies every year, better usage of the footprint, as opposed to the need for volume?
You mentioned flattish sales.
Yeah, that's where I was going to go.
Yeah.
Steve, one thing to keep in mind is the current reported revenues includes that supply chain premiums. We've got about $270 million, $280 million of supply chain premiums in 2022. When you back that out, we're actually about a $2.64 billion revenue in 2022. Call it production revenue or no supply chain premium revenue, right? That, it has about an 8%-12% growth rate for 2023. That's how you get to the $2,850 million to the $2,950 million range. It actually is a couple of hundred million dollars of growth within there, if not more. Now to get to your question on where is it going to come from? The biggest piece of that is going to be on the nature of the revenue growth and the mix of that revenue.
It's going to be much more in the EMS factories. That's the absorption we're going to get in those factories that are going to help drive that operating margin improvement in 2023, and really through 2025, is a critical piece of that, right? The other piece of that, with that revenue growth and not having as much growth in the cost structure, you're going to see cost structure leverage. That's going to help support that margin expansion as well.
You're making sure program by program. I'm sorry.
Sorry. Yeah. Program by program operating leverage. Within there must be cost efficiencies that you're pulling out. Is there a way to think about when you have a mature program, whether it's becoming more efficient at all beyond the core margin? How do you sort of measure each plan or each program as to whether they're-
Yeah
doing a good job as they ramp?
Yeah, it's a great question. We actually, when we quote business, we do time and motion studies, and we evaluate how long it's supposed to take, right? Then we can track against that as the program is being executed. We also measure labor productivity, machine utilization. There's a number of different metrics that are evaluated on a continuous basis in terms of how do we optimize towards the margin that we either quoted or better as we think about it.
Yeah, maybe I should just clarify on the supply chain premiums. It's kind of been a complicated dynamic that we've seen in this current environment. We try to provide more detail in terms of what we're seeing. We certainly think supply chain premiums are going to continue to come down pretty significantly as you get into 2023. Won't completely be gone, but when we were looking at our growth and what product shipments are, we really wanted to separate that from just that supply chain adder that we had that didn't bring margin with it. When you look at Roop's forecast going forward for 2023, it's really stripping that out in both what we see for revenue this year and then what we're projecting next year. We didn't forecast supply chain premiums, even though there will likely still be some, but it'll be a declining amount.
Just like our fourth quarter guide is down from where 3Q ended up.
We did for fourth quarter.
In 2022.
We included in the guidance for the fourth quarter because we have a known understanding of it. No, there's zero in the 2023 model right now. In terms of what we put out today, there is no supply chain premiums in 2023 through 2025. Yep.
Yeah, that's why we can certainly walk through that.
There are a couple reconciliation slides in the appendix, help with that.
Thank you for that.
Jim?
It may be included in the presentation on the reconciliation slides, or you may have mentioned it. What was the impact of the supply chain premiums on gross margin?
The total amount of supply chain premiums is about $270 million-$280 million. The gross margin is about 80 to 90 basis points.
Yep
within a quarter.
That's on the full year, right?
Yeah, that's on the full year. I'm doing this off the top of my head. It's good.
Right.
Again, as we think about 2023, you highlighted some areas where it sounds like you have a pretty good line of sight.
Just given the macro environment, the discussions you're having with customers.
Sure
Which of the markets are you maybe less certain about in terms of variability?
I think semi-cap right now is the one that we're probably watching the closest, just because certainly we've looked at what forecasts are. We're talking to our customers, it's interesting because they see 2024 very strong. 2023 they see maybe choppier, is what I would say, in terms of the semi-cap space. I think industrial looks very solid, just from the feedback with customers. They see a strong 2023. I think medical, it's kind of interesting with medical, you think about the elective surgeries and stuff. They're just kind of getting back, and we've got customers that are just getting back to the revenue levels of where they were in 2019. So we do have incremental customers there too, so we think medical will be a nice growth sector for us as we think about 2023. Industrial, like I said, strong.
Then we know some specific projects that compute continues, advanced computing will continue to be a good space for us in the HPC segment. When you think about next-generation communications, with some of the broadband infrastructure 5G projects that we're already in, they're multi-year, so we know that that'll continue to be strong. We think that that could be a higher growth rate than the rest of the sectors, as we think about next year.
I think the one other thing to reinforce here is, keep in mind, we don't focus on consumer products. We don't focus on commoditized products. When you listen to Rob's presentation, there's a lot of complexity there. So on that B2B complex product side, you're not seeing a lot of softness. It's not to say it may not evolve, but it's really not there.
One other additional question. Just as you think about the model and the way the business develops, I'm curious how you think about customer acquisition costs, trying to identify winners. Maybe walk us a little bit, because you touched on it a little, but maybe talk to us about the process.
Yeah, I think we try to have Rob, maybe we'll let you weigh in on this one because you spent a lot of time on it. We actually have the team come together, both Mike and Rob. When a new customer comes in and says, "Hey, we'd like you to quote on this business." The team kind of looks at, "Hey, is this a fit? Does this make sense?" They actually have their business development manager come in and go, "Hey, I think we should quote on this new piece of business." Literally, the senior team will weigh in on it and go, "Who's the customer? What scale are they? What's their financial position? What's the potential for the product? Can they be a $100 million customer?" Some of these elements.
We actually have a pretty disciplined format that they come in on, and then we say, "Is this a fit or not?" It's kind of interesting because customers, we love to take on new customers, but we're probably as selective of them as they are of us. Because we know it's a long-time partnership that we're going to be signing up for. We also want to balance, we love repeat business. We already have a customer focus team set up for a particular client. We also want to balance these companies that are more mature with startups. We don't want to be all early-stage customers because they may have more volatility, yet we've had a number of early-stage customers that have done extremely well and that have grown to be pretty large entities. Do you want to add to that at all?
Yeah. I do think one thing I would mention is that is on our sectors, come from those sectors, right? We think that's important. I want people to be able to judge their market and understand their market well, and know what the likelihood is that these companies are going to grow like they think they're going to grow and be successful. We look at a bunch of things. We look at financial viability. Are they funded? We look at the market viability of what they're going after. We look at their product viability. Do they have a good product for the market they're pursuing? Job one is we want to pick the account first and with the logo. Is it a logo we want in the portfolio? Is it not?
That's a big decision for us. While new customers represent growth, they're also expensive to get started, and all of the infrastructure that Mike puts in place with an operational team to support a customer, I want to make sure that that logo is going to be really valuable to the company. We are careful.
I just can't help but comment. We use the term guys very broadly because two of the sector leaders are women, actually, that we have. We say guys a lot, like the guys that run the sectors, actually, two of our five are women, actually. They've come from within the industry, right? Lauren, for example, runs Aerospace and Defense, spent a long time at Honeywell, and she understands that space very well. With that. Anything on the webcast?
I think I have a couple of questions. I wanted to wait for the room to clear.
Well, we can come back to the room, too.
Yeah. Absolutely. The first is a broader trend as it relates to looking at 2023. Semi-cap is a space that there's some question marks about. Do we anticipate revenue growth from all of our other sectors, reported sectors in 2023? How do you frame that up?
Yeah. It may be a little early for us to give, and I imagine when we get to February, we'll give more specificity. We kind of looked at aggregate. Of course, you can imagine we've rolled it up with our teams.
Yeah.
We are still going through that operating plan process and all of that. We do see growth in those other sectors. One I didn't mention was Aerospace and Defense. We expect a little bit of recovery there. A&D, because the substitution of components is a little more challenging, like Rob mentioned, you just can't say, "Oh, I'm going to pop in a different resistor or a different micro to make that work." The qualification cycle's longer. Just the ability to be quite as nimble even after going with a broker to say, "I'm going to buy an alternative part," has made that particular sector more challenged in terms of supply chain. Expect we'll see some recovery there in 2023. Do feel pretty good about growth across the sectors.
I think as we get into the February timeframe, when we get to our earnings at the end of the year, we'll try to give color on the growth rates, how we're thinking about it by sector.
Roop, I'm guessing this one might be for you. There's a question on inventory levels and relative exposures between the sectors. Particularly, I imagine there's some curiosity around semi-cap exposure at the inventory line. Can you maybe give a little bit of color on that?
Sure. The majority of our inventory is actually in support of our EMS side of the house. From a precision machining standpoint, and especially with the demand that we've seen, as soon as we can make it and get it out the door, those semi-cap customers want it, right? The predominance of that inventory is really on that EMS side. Even there, remember, we still have unfulfilled demand that we're working through. We're waiting for, as the industry has termed it, that golden screw to enable getting that shipment out as well.
It's also predominance of our inventories and components. We don't have a ton of WIP that, as you can imagine, we try to get to a clear to build where you have all the BOM, and then you can produce it and exit it. We have a large percent of our inventory in components. That is a great point. Our turns are actually above that model turns on the semi-cap side of things. They're already beyond the model. The inventory really, although that business has grown a lot, so there's a fair amount of inventories there, but we're very comfortable with the levels. It's the EMS side where we really see the opportunity to bring inventory levels down as we get into 2023 and 2024, that we believe will clear some of those critical challenges and see significant inventory reduction there.
I guess we're pretty much done with the online.
Great. Any other questions in the room?
Nothing.
Thank you all for attending. Appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk a little deeper about the story. It's great to have Mike and Rob join us. You don't always get to hear from them, but we'll look forward to continuing the dialogues in the coming quarters. It's a great time to be in New York here at the Stock Exchange, and look forward to a strong close to the year. 2023 is going to be great for Benchmark, and hopefully, you guys continue to watch the story and cheer us on. If you're not investing, take a look. Thank you all.