Good morning, everybody. It's 8:00. We'd like to get started at 8:00 sharp. We do have a webcast, for those joining us on the webcast, welcome to you, as well as welcome to all of you who have made the trip here to Cincinnati to join us for our first Analyst Day in over 20 years. It's a pleasure on behalf of Crown Holdings and the rest of the management team of Crown and Signode that are here with you today, and spent some time with you last night to present the Crown story in a little bit more detail. Just the standard health warning before we get started. To the extent we make forward-looking statements, please don't rely on those, please refer back to the public filings in the 10-Qs or 10-K.
The agenda today, we'll go through a number of topics, providing the presentation today, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Tim Donahue, the President and CEO of the company. You see my brief bio on the screen. We have Gerry Gifford. Gerry, if you just want to stand up so they can see who you are. Gerry's the handsome fellow with the white hair. Gerry is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the company. Gerry has been in the can industry since 1984, before that he worked for Kaiser Aluminum and another aluminum company after college. A degreed engineer. Most recently, before Chief Operating Officer, Gerry was the President of our European division for a five-year stint in Zug, Switzerland. Previous to that, he was President of the North American beverage business.
Gerry is a longstanding industry veteran, well-known across the industry. More to the point, as we talk about what really drives value in our industry and our company, Gerry is a skilled can maker at heart. Tom Kelly, Senior Vice President and CFO. Tom's been with the company since 1992. One of the only smart things I think I ever did, I had the good fortune to actually hire Tom, that was pretty easy. Guy walks in your office, you look at the resume, you have a conversation with the guy, and you're like, "This can't go wrong. Let's bring this guy on board." It's worked out real well for us. Funny enough, we graduated two years apart at Villanova in the same major, in accounting, we didn't know each other at all at school. I think we were both commuters.
If you don't live on campus, it's hard to really get to know anybody. You know Tom very well, Tom's here today. Dr. Dan Abramowicz. Dan, if you want to stand. Dan is our EVP Technology. Dan is extremely well-known across the industry, not only in our industry, across our customers and suppliers. Dan speaks quite often at industry conferences and other can-making conferences. Today, Dan will talk a bit about sustainability and some of the things that we've done in the past, where we were, where we're going, where we think the industry needs to go. You can see Dan's got a pretty nice pedigree here. He's got a whole bunch of degrees that I'm never going to have.
We were joking with Dan last night. Although Michelle Obama's not impressed with Princeton University, we're always impressed with Dr. Abramowicz. We're glad to have Dan with us today. Didier Sourisseau. Didier, if you'd like to stand up. Didier is President of our European division. Prior to that, Didier was running the European food business. Didier's been with the company for 27 years, I believe, at this point. Previously, he ran the specialty packaging business before food. A lot of commercial experience. You spent some time with Didier last night. Didier is going to spend a fair amount of time today reviewing the European food business. We'll talk about that in a moment. Bob Burke. Big, tall guy over there. Says his name wrong. It looks like "Bork" to me, but he says it's Burke. The hockey player's name is Bork.
Bob's been with Crown since 1993. I think Bob's worked in every business we've had, every product line we have, from bottle caps to beverage cans to food cans to aerosol cans. Bob ran our China business for seven years. He was President of the Asia division for two years. Now he's being fed through a garden hose trying to get up to speed since August 1st as President of the Signode business. Bob will spend a good amount of time today on Signode trying to make you feel a bit more comfortable, as we already feel with the Signode acquisition. Between Bob and Ron, you see we got the state of Illinois covered between southern Illinois and northern Illinois. Ron Kropp, if you'd like to stand. Ron is the Chief Financial Officer of the Signode business.
Prior to being Chief Financial Officer of Signode, Ron was actually Chief Financial Officer of ITW. When they spun out, CFO of Signode. Really great to have Ron with us today. I think there's probably nobody in this room today, and it's hard for me to say this because I don't know everybody at Signode, but among everybody I haven't met at Signode, there's probably nobody that understands the total Signode business better than Ron Kropp at this point. It's really good to have Ron here today. We have a number of other managers across the Crown spectrum with us today. Tom Fischer's somewhere around here. Suzanne's in the lobby. Are the other Signode guys still with us this morning, or did they go home, Bob? Where are you guys at? Joe Cummins on the left there is Senior VP of Operations for Signode.
Chad Seymour is the President of the Americas Industrials platform. Michael Watts is Head of Business Development. Aldo Tesi is Controller of the company. A good representation from the Signode family that hopefully you had some time to spend with last night. As we look at the agenda today, we want to spend the majority of the time on the transit packaging business. We call it transit packaging. It's still called Signode in the marketplace, so Bob and Ron will refer to it as Signode. We'll try to spend about 60% of today on Signode. We'll try to leave an ample amount of time for questions at the end for you to ask questions of not only Bob and Ron, but the entire management team, not only as it relates to Signode, but all the businesses. Gerry Gifford and myself will cover beverage cans.
I'll take you through a brief overview of beverage cans. The benefits of the beverage can, I'll review Southeast Asia. Gerry's going to take us through Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, Brazil, and North America on beverage cans. We won't spend a whole lot of time on beverage cans. If you have questions on beverage, we certainly will answer those questions at the end. I think the session today, we'd like to spend time on Signode first, and then Didier will take us through Food Europe. I think food, we look at Food Europe, it's a very large business for us. We're talking about a business with $300 million of EBITDA, and we only spend about $30 million in CapEx a year. The return on this business is excellent year-on-year. It's a business that's not well understood by folks in North America.
It's an entirely different consumer platform in Europe than it is in North America. You have a variety of different foods by region and a variety of different eating habits by consumers across most of the countries in Europe. Didier will try to do his best to enlighten you as to that. It bears almost no resemblance to the consumer habits or the marketplace that we have here in the United States. Tom Kelly will do a brief financial review, and then we'll turn it over to Dr. Abramowicz for a review of sustainability, and then we'll open it up to questions. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Bob, and Bob and Ron will take you through Transit. Thank you.
Mic up there.
Good morning, everyone. I have been given the unenviable task of trying to explain all of this to all of you. We tried a little bit last night, and as you can see, as Tim mentioned, in Crown, we call this the Transit Packaging Division. However, in the market, we're known as the Signode Industrial Group, SIG, or just Signode. We'd like to use Signode Industrial Group, and I'll explain why as we go through this, because Signode, as you can see, is a brand in itself, over 105 years old, all alone. Depending on the part of the world, it has certain connotations that people come to expect with that brand, when in fact, we're much larger than all of that, as you can see. That's what we're going to try and parse through some of these things to help you understand what we're doing.
As you can see, and as you can see from the slides, and I know we spoke with several people last night, we believe we're extremely well-positioned as a global leader in the transit packaging and protection business. That's why this was attractive to Crown. That's why we looked at it and we said, "This is the best company doing what they do." You can see, we've got about 95 locations, 23 countries, over 7,000 employees. We are the only division in Crown that's global in nature. The others are aligned geographically, which we are as well, and I'll explain where that comes from. We do run across the entire globe, from one end to the other.
You can see this year, we expect about $2.4 billion of revenue, just underneath $400 million of EBITDA, and CapEx generally runs in the $30 million to $35 million range. As you'll see, we've got some slides later, and Ron will go through that. A little bit about the mix, how we're aligned. You can see Industrial Solutions is about 60% of our business. This is where we get into geography. In Industrial Solutions, think of this as the large consumable, steel strap, plastic strap, stretch film, these kind of items. These are the major categories in those. What you'll see is the way we do Industrial Solutions is we have an Americas, which is North, South America. We have Europe, covering Western and Eastern Europe, and we have Asia Pacific, which includes India and the Pacific region, as well as the Middle East.
We've got a good spread along those businesses. We do manufacture within those regions. We've had a lot of questions on how do you ship from one part to the other. We don't. We manufacture where the customers are. Because of this global reach, to move things very effectively if needed, if there's a specific product that someone has. You can see in the geographies, when you put all these businesses together, we're about 50% in the Americas, 50% rest of world. It's a nice mix. It gives us a nice diversification and a good spread and helps us balance things. If one region is doing not so well, another region can pick it up, and we think that's a good mix and a good way of looking at this. End markets, you can see, extremely diverse.
Any type of industry that's out there, you look at agriculture, construction, lumber, corrugated, distribution companies, food and beverage, industrials, metals. We have all of these different categories. Again, if one area is weak, we have another one that's performing very well. This gives us a good balancing measure, and we're finding more and more that solutions run across these businesses. Customers are very common in what they're looking for, and we think the things that we learn in one business, we can oftentimes translate to another, and that gives us an advantage that others frankly just don't see out there. Because of this type of spread and where we position ourselves globally, we see things before other people do in this space. Customer portfolio. This is a little different than the can business. Can business, you're used to seeing almost a switch of these things.
For us, just to give you an idea, SIG has over 250,000 customers globally. That's the size of this business we're looking at. When we talk about diversity, that's a diverse business. That could be the largest customers that you see here. Even the largest customer, though barely over 1% of our total sales. The smallest customer may be someone that buys one roll of strap per year. We service them all, and we service them all very effectively. That's the level of support and engagement that we have with our customers. We have a strong discipline in this customer grouping. So a couple of years ago, we had a customer, about 1% of sales, a large multinational company. The pricing became to a point where we weren't happy with the returns we were getting on that.
The demands came for difficult payment terms, and we decided that, you know what? We don't need to do business with that customer anymore. We've started to work them out. End of 2018, they'll be zero now to us. Even though in doing that, it was only 1% of our sales, so it was probably the third-largest customer we had. We completely wiped them out from our business because it was unsustainable and not a good business for us to be in. You never even saw it. It wasn't even a blip on the screen. We filled it up with something else, better business, and we keep moving on down the road. That's an advantage that we have here. Because of this extreme diversification, we have the ability to make changes and movements as needed, and you never see anything happen.
This gives you a little further breakdown of these as we try and bring those graphs together. You can see we're not reliant on any single industry anywhere where we participate. All of the geographies participate in all of the end markets where we are supplying. You can see, though, in different regions, there's different areas where we have better penetration into markets. Some of these customers are global in nature. There's very few, I will say. A lot of them are regional. We think we do very well, and we're very strong in those areas. Certainly, you think about different parts of the world, different countries or different sections, say, within the U.S., you can imagine. Lumber and construction is big for us in Canada. It's big for us in the Northwest of the U.S., Northern Europe, just to give you an example.
Agriculture and fibers is strong in the Southern U.S., the Midwest, Central Europe. These are the areas to give you an idea of where we are focused, and some of the things that we do. Portfolio and brands. You look at the bottom, product diversity. You can see about 45% of our business is what we'll call the major consumables. That's your straps and that's the film, which you can see that's 55% of the business is all the other things that we do, all the other myriad tens of thousands of things that we are doing. You can see, we say globally, there's about a $14 billion market for these transit protection products. You'll also see farther down the slide, we are a number one or number two market leader in over 85% of the markets where we compete. That's on a global basis.
No one comes close to the breadth of offerings and services and materials that we provide. That's why we think we're very resilient in that regard and have a really good business here. You can see innovation. This company has been around since 1913 in one of its forms. ITW, of course, over the years, brought all these companies together, and that's continued to this day. No one else has been able to match this. I would venture to say if you had $4 billion to spend, you may not want to go and try to recreate all of this as we have. That's why we think this is such a great business because no one can duplicate what we do here. Again, diversity. These are just some of the products. A lot of these things get lumped together. You see other protective, other consumables.
These are thousands and thousands of different products that are involved to get us to those kind of numbers. This slide shows you what our global footprint looks like. The light green represents where we have manufacturing and sales just from Signode. The dark green shows you where we have a significant sales presence. You can see, we cover the globe. We span the entire world in one form or another. You'll also see where we have some white spaces, and those are obviously areas strategically we'll look to expand in the future. We have plans to do that. These are the kind of things that separate us from others. What you'll find is we have some competitors that can do a lot of the things we do in one region.
We have some competitors that can do a little bit of what we do across the regions. There's no one that can do all that we do in all the regions. That's what sets us apart. That's what makes this such a good business because no one can match the scale and the size of the business that we have. Now we'll further break down these segments within Signode. We have the Industrial Solutions group, about $1.4 billion of the revenue. You can see the end markets. You're going to see all the end markets are the same because we do span all of these businesses with all of these solutions. Again, this is heavily concentrated in the straps and the stretch films. This is where we align geographically. When you look at Industrial Solutions, we actually run the business as five platforms.
There's three platforms, our Industrial Solutions, which is the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific. The other two will be equipment and tools, and the protective, which you saw on the graph, and we'll further explain. Here's the mix of Industrial Solutions. You can see, steel strap, biggest part of the business, plastic strap, stretch film, both equally sharing. About two-thirds of the business, maybe 70% is these films and straps. You can see, though, the other businesses, they will sell consumables, other consumable products, mostly protective products, and equipment and tools. I know there's been a lot of discussions about razor blade, and these kind of things. Is that what our model is? To a degree, yes. We can lead with equipment and tools. That leads to a consumable sale. We may have a consumable, and then we come in with equipment and tools.
It just depends on where someone is in their investment cycle and exactly what they're looking for. We're the only ones that can provide all those solutions for them. There are some companies that will off market and sell other particular pieces of equipment and things like that, but no one has the ability to sell under the same brand, under the same group of companies, and support it like we do. That's what we think makes us unique and special in that regard. You can see the geo here. We're further breaking down the geographies in Industrial Solutions , a little more spread, even less in the Americas, more in the other parts of the world. You can see a pretty good distribution in the end markets as well. What do we have?
Just giving you an idea, what is Crown going to do with this? I know that's been a big question. Today, you can see we have a very broad product range. We have extremely strong brand recognition and reputation. You've seen a very good, diverse customer base. You'll see more of that as we continue to go through. A very strong safety culture. The things that we focus on in our factories, you'll hear me talk in questions last night, a lot of operational excellence, safety, quality, productivity. In that order, it's undisputed, it's unquestioned. Those are our core values. Dan will talk more about that later. We do the same things in Signode, and we're going to continue to push that even stronger. You can see tomorrow, what are we going to do? We're looking at even more solutions.
All of these things that we have, we're going to continue to do it. We're going to expand those. We're going to continue to provide solutions for the customers so that if they just say, "Oh, Signode, that's this." No, we have a lot of other brands. We can bring a lot more to bear on your business and what you need as a solution. That's what we continue to talk with our customers about solutions. We have to make it easier to do business with us. Obviously, you can imagine you have so many brands, we've got a lot of salespeople that represent a brand. What we are working on now, we've got plans we're going to continue to push forward, is how do we go to market? What's our go-to-market strategy? Business is extremely successful today. You've seen that. Over history, it's proven that.
Ron will show you the numbers that show that. What's the next thing? What we're going to do is we're going to advance this business so that when someone comes in, if we have a customer we're dealing with on one level, our salespeople would be able to go in and spot further opportunities with all these different solutions we have. The ideal will be then to cross-sell those things. We're already doing some of that. We have to get much better at it, and we will. We've got a lot of engagement from our people. They're excited about doing these things, and these are the things that you're going to see. Get into a couple other things.
We'll tell you about how we're going to get into more of the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, all these fancy terms we like to talk about, how we're going to bring more technology to bear on the things that we do. Protective solutions. This is a combination. You can see about $600 million of revenue, it's a big business. It's a good business. This is a myriad of products that no one even thinks about and no one really understands. When you look at the board here, I would say 90% of these products are protective solutions. Most of them you never heard of, and maybe never run across again, other than when you come see us. This is where most of our customers lie.
When you talk about a quarter of a million customers, two-thirds of them are in this protective solutions business. It gives you an idea. Very diverse, adds up to a really nice number and a really nice business. This is things like airbags, angle board, corner board, the Reddi-Pac crates, the multi-wall solutions inside. When you look at this graph, say on the bottom right there, if you've ever bought furniture from IKEA and you get the little pads in there, the little honeycomb pads and the ones you just throw away or the kids like to play with, that's our stuff. IKEA is a large customer of ours. Those are the things we do. If you buy a Weber grill and it's got the nice corner boards in there to protect it, keep your Big Green Egg from getting messed up, that's our stuff.
Those are the things that we do. These are customers of ours that come to us and say, "I have a new product," or, "I need to protect this better so that we don't have damage, we don't have losses." These are the things that we do. These are solutions that we provide, and we work with their engineers and their packaging people to come up with these ideas and give them things to protect. We've got some case studies we'll show you to give you a further example of that. There's the business mix of this protective business. You can see edge protection is big. These are the corner boards. If you saw the demonstration with the hand tool, the steel strap, the corner board on the side, that's what we're talking about here. That's edge protection.
That relates, most people think of it as the straight ones like that, 90 degrees, but we protect the edges of coils. We protect materials, lumber, corrugated, all of these types of things. That's where these types of products are used. Airbags, simply for shipping. Air, truck, rail. These are the things that you put between pallets to further secure them with inside a shipping vessel. This is going to help protect them and keep them secure. Honeycomb corrugated is like I was just speaking about. Those different products that generally go inside of a box. Or they could go on a trailer as well between airbags. Sometimes we have, we call it void fill. We have to fill up more space in there as well.
We use a honeycomb product that's, again, very low cost, but very durable and resilient for what it does and what its intended purpose is. That's the honeycomb corrugated. Other is just thousands and thousands of different products that go from very small to very large that make up this protective business. You see the geography is heavily centered in the Americas. We have over 40 facilities within the U.S. This is one of the businesses where these products, we need to be fairly close to our customers. These are things that don't ship as well. Think more of this like the cans. We want to be closer to our customers. We'll distribute out from our plants, whereas the straps and films are a little more dense in their packing, and we can send those a farther distance as needed.
The protective business, though, is a lot of very small operations, could be 10 people in a building, could be 100 people in a building. This is an area we're looking at. Heading into the future, what will we do in order to maybe consolidate some of these businesses? We're looking at these kind of opportunities where they may exist. You can see the end markets. Distribution is a big one because we make a lot of this. We make a lot of board feet of these corner boards and angle boards and things, a lot more than most people can use. We have a large distribution business that we sell to. Distributors meaning Uline, Grainger, Veritiv, these kind of companies. These are some of our customers, very big customers in this business.
This starts to give you an idea of what the products are. In various areas. The multi-wall, I talked about. That's the honeycomb type of products inside a package. PDM, custom foam-based packaging. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Syntex is FIBC bags. These are bulk bags, woven fiber bags. We make the fabric with plastic fibers, essentially, to create bulk bags. Reddi-Pac is a profile box where the protection actually becomes a shipping container. If you think of something, you buy a drive shaft for your classic car you're fixing up. It may come in one of our Reddi-Pac type boxes. By the time you open it up, it's protected it, but it's created a crate and solution for that. That's a nice business. That's a very engineered solution. Angle board, that's the edge protection.
There's angle board, there's corner board, there's chip guard. Angle board is, think of it as layers of paper glued together. That's what angle board is. It's a little more difficult than that, and it's a little more engineered than that, but essentially, that gives you an idea. Corner board chip guard, depending on the geography, what we call it, this is a composite material. We will recycle post-consumer waste or post-industrial waste. We grind it up, we melt it, extrude it into a corner board shape, layer it with paper, then that becomes an edge protection as well. We actually reprocess trash and make good, useful things out of it, which is a pretty neat thing when you think about it, some of the stuff that we do. Plastic packaging, we make plastic tear sheets.
Food and beverage companies are large customers of ours in this business. Proud of the customer of ours in this business. Plastic tear sheets, as you think, the layer pads between layers. We also make what we call plastic slip sheets, which are some companies that are doing away with pallets that the products sit on, and it actually sits on a plastic slip sheet onto the floor of a trailer or something. What they'll do is they'll grab those and slide those around, so they don't have a pallet to deal with. We also produce those. That's a big product line for us. Shippers is the airbags. So you can see on the trailers, the airbags holding the material secure on the walls of the trailer. Stopak is Shippers is paper airbags, essentially. Stopak is the woven fiber, woven fabric airbags.
Same stuff or same end use, but different materials depending on the needs of a customer. Caritex, PrimeBulk, these are container liners. So if you think of a 20-foot shipping container and you have a bulk resin that you want to ship for a long way. A lot of this business is we produce in India, we produce in Thailand, and some of those are for Asian products coming to the U.S. Some of these come to the U.S. to ship products back to Asia. What these are, this is a poly bag, for lack of a better term, that we stick inside of a 20-foot container, and it's got chutes and ways. So there's a loading chute and there's an exit chute.
At the end of the run, and they want to distribute these products, you open the door slightly, you can see the chute coming out the end of the trailer, what they'll do is they'll tip these trailers up to empty those products. The liner bag itself can be taken out of there, removed. So the liner is clean. It's protected the product inside. It's protected the trailer as well. These, again, depending on the needs, if it's ocean-bound freight, if it's truck, we have different materials and ways we can help protect those products further. Down River is a collection of all of the above. Down River is kind of a distribution business where we make bulkhead liners.
You'll see I've got another example on this coming up, try and explain the Down River business a little more to you because it becomes kind of the great integrator of all these things that we do in protective. What are we doing today? We have market-leading brands, again. We have people with a lot of application knowledge and expertise. As I spoke about, when you think about specific products that you want to protect, there's a way to do that. There's a good way to do it, and there's a not so good way to do it. When you buy something at home, you open that box, you expect to see it or get it just like you saw it on the store shelf or inside the locations.
Those are the things that we help our customers achieve, is to be able to do that. Again, as I said, low customer concentration. Over 150,000 customers in this business. Low CapEx. This is a business where the CapEx is extremely low. In order to put in new lines, do expansion, and we say low, you have to think now from the Crown perspective. Low is a relative term, right? We're not talking can plant type of costs here. We're talking single digit type of costs here at most. Sometimes even less than that. The advantage we have here, though, is you don't just put in one line making angle board. There's no economy of scale. You won't have enough customers to keep it going. It doesn't work that way. Our plant in France, in Gunther Packaging, we've got 10 of these lines running in one place.
That's the type of scale that it takes. Well, when you do that, you're making a lot of feet of angle board. In order to do that, you got to have the large customer base to be able to support it. That's why we say, again, if you've got a big pile of money, you're probably not going to invest in a lot of these businesses, because there's so much work to be done to put these together. It is extremely difficult to ever try and replicate, and frankly, there's probably better businesses for people to be looking at these days and other opportunities. We're going to continue to look for product adjacencies. That's how this business came together. It was a lot of work over a lot of years by folks from the ITW group. They had a good vision.
They said, "Let's look at all of these different ways that people are moving materials, and what can we do better to help them protect those materials?" That's how this business came to be. This is where we'll talk, and you'll see a little later few slides, about adjacencies. What do we see we're already doing? You look at the boxes you have right in front of you. That's a protection product right there. That is specifically engineered and designed to protect that tin, so that when you take it home tonight, you put it in your suitcase, and you get there, it's going to look the same as it does right here. That's the idea. That's our hook. That's how we sell to our customers.
If that's what you expect as a consumer, that's what we try and deliver to our customers and the kind of things that they want to do. Equipment and tools. I'm an engineer as well, so I kind of like this business. This is pretty exciting to me. I like this. This is the stuff. When we go over to Florence later today, you're going to see these pieces of equipment. You'll see the MOD-GPX. You saw the hand tools last night. The third machine is a bowl machine. Think that's horizontal stretch wrapping. You'll see it going around and around, horizontal loads. You've got a stationary stretch wrapper, again, the hand tools. We have the Octopus machine, the Haloila Ring Wrapper. That's a machine where the pallet stays stationary, a ring moves up and down, and it's wrapping as it goes.
That's one of the iterations of stretch wrapping that we do. The last machine you see is a Lachenmeier. We call it the Lachenmeier. This is a stretch hood. This is very high speed output. Think here, a lot of our customers here are in bricks, lumber, these kind of things. Very high output. A lot of people with bulk bags that are moving at very high speeds, up to 200 an hour. The Lachenmeier machine will take a big tube of plastic, we stretch it out, bring it down over a load, essentially release it, and it wraps to it. If you go to Home Depot, you go outside in the garden center and you see all their pallets on the shelves with that kind of film over the top, that's the stuff.
That's what we do, to give you an idea. A big part of equipment and tools, obviously, you have the equipment and the tools, the stuff you get to hold onto and handle. Bigger piece, though, you'll see in a minute, is the service and parts that come with this. Anybody can buy a piece of equipment. Anybody can give you a piece of equipment to put out there. What do they do to follow that up with the parts to go with that equipment when you need them, or the service to make sure it stays in good running condition all the way through? That's what we do. That's our hook. This is where we excel. With the Signode machines, we have both a blessing and a curse. We're blessed that they are so good and they last so long.
It's a curse because we don't get many repeat sales as a result of that. What we do get is when people have new projects, they have new expansions, new locations, if someone comes and say, "Hey, where'd you get that at?" That's where we come in. Those are the things that we can help people do, that's where they see the advantage of what we do. When you talk about service and parts, that's what makes us sticky with the customers. Someone said, "How do you retain those?" I had a question last night. What about the consumable? Anybody, some consumables companies, your competitors, will sell equipment as well. That's true. They can. We don't hide from the fact you can run our strap or someone else's strap on our equipment or someone else's. That happens.
It's no different than running competing cans on the same filling line. It's the same kind of business. It can be done. Where we believe we have the advantage is we're the only ones that can sell the equipment, sell all the consumables that go with it, the service, the parts, and guess what? You're still dealing with the same Signode Industrial Group. You don't have to call this person or that person or that person. Then they get into fights with each, "Well, that's your problem." "No, it's your." "Well, it's his problem." Now with us, it's our problem. We will come in and solve that. We have the resources, we have the people, we have the commitment to get that done because it's our name on the product. That's the advantage we provide. That's what makes us sticky.
Again, you can see equipment is 12%. Tools and equipment is, let's say, 30% of this group, of $500 million. Parts and service is 60% of it. That shows you right there, that's the aftermarket. That's the things that can keep people coming back to us and what we do. And this is where we excel, and we're market leaders in this, and no one can match us in the things that we do. We say we have 7,000 people, 1,200 of them are in service. That's our touch points. That's our people touching the customer and the things that they're doing, and the things that help support those businesses. You look at the geographies and say, "Wait a minute, Asia Pacific is missing." In Asia, we have a little different model. They sell equipment and tools through the Industrial Solutions business.
If you remember on that graph, there was a 12% equipment and tool sale. That's largely Asia Pacific. It's just a little different model that the business was developed over the years. There are equipment and tools in Asia. In fact, all of our metals equipment, the things you would see in steel mills, metal service centers, they're all manufactured in India and shipped globally. You can see the end market. We have a lot of third-party distributors that we sell through, a lot of direct sales as well. Some of you met some of the salespeople last night as you were walking through, and that would be direct sales, people working directly for equipment and tools. However, within the geographies, there's also people that are specialized for equipment sales. And they will take care of those initial contacts.
Think of it as in a lot of these cross-selling opportunities as well. If a business has a relationship with a customer, we want them to maintain that. What we will do, though, is as soon as someone, we start getting into more specific details, technical details, they'll pick up the phone, they'll call in the experts, the brand experts. Look, there's so much here. No one person can know all of these things that go on. But I assure you, we have people in each of those businesses that do know what's going on. And that's when we are continuing to work on these opportunities to bring in the right people at the right time to help handle those kinds of situations. Here's some of the equipment. Special application, we call them SAM machines. This is food and beverage plants.
This is where we would run it out of our SAM group. The way we divide up the equipment and tools is we have now what we call global design centers, and they have design control for our engineering. The equipment and tools business is, let's say, 1,000 people. Probably half of those people are engineers and service techs. More than half. It's a large number of people committed to this business. And most of those people are the engineers that are designing these things. You can see, general purpose equipment, design control of that sits in Chicago. SAM's design control resides in Chicago, on our Glenview campus. You look at global wrapping. The expertise there is in Finland. That's the Haloila business. They run our global wrapping technology. Tools, hand tools, are controlled out of Switzerland, Dietikon, just outside of Zurich.
That's where those expertise lie. E-commerce, that's Loveshaw. That's in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Little plant there, Loveshaw. Been there for 60 years. When we talk about the e-commerce business, that's where we have this design control. As I said, India controls for the metal segment. Why do we do that? Because these are highly specialized, highly engineered pieces of equipment. You saw some of the stuff last night. You don't just put these together. The problem that we can create for ourselves, and did over time, and that's why we're going to this model, is that if you have a solution in. We've done a lot of work in Japan. We're quite heavy in Japan with the steel strapping heads. They've done a lot of advanced work there.
The problem was, though, Japan would be on the cutting edge of doing things, and over in Glenview, we would have a steel customer come to us, and they would create a solution for them. Then the guys in India would create a solution for them. That head you saw over there, we've got 34 different versions of that same head. Essentially doing the same thing. Now you would think, you should have one or two for plastic and one or two for steel. We agree. That's why we've instituted the concept of design control centers.
Now in equipment and tools, if you want to make a specific change to a piece of equipment, the stuff inside of it that really makes it work, you have to go to one of those global design control centers for them to okay it, approve it, or say, "Wait a minute, we've already got one of those. Use this one." We're working to consolidate these things down. 34, that's just for steel, 34 heads. You get to plastic, we got 39 different heads. There's a lot to keep track of with these things. We're working again to optimize the supply chain, working to deliver better solutions to the customers that cover a broader range, and take learnings from one industry and move it to another. What are we doing today? Again, global capability, strong individual brands, high performance, and reliability.
Like I said, both a blessing and a curse. We're sticky with our customers because we can provide a complete solution that no one else can. How do you get better with that? That's what I said. We're looking at these design consolidations, trying to take cost out of the system. You saw last night, additive manufacturing, 3D printers. There's a lot of those things that we can do. Now think you're a customer and you've bought a Signode piece of machinery, and you bought it in 2000, 20 years ago now, and it's still going. I don't want a new one because this one works fine, but you need a part. Guess what? We phased out support on that five years ago. Now I still need this part.
What will happen is you call us, and we'll say, "Yeah, we'll have to go in the archives. We'll pull out that part. We don't have any, so we're going to find a local shop somewhere and say, 'Okay, I need this made.' How many? I need one." Okay. Your lead time is about 6-8 weeks, and your cost is way up here. That's just the nature of it. That's equipment business. We all understand that type of model. Today, tomorrow, we'll be able to say, "This is the part you need? Yep. We're going to digitize that." Guess what? In eight hours, Joe over there is going to hit the button, and you're going to have that part. We're going to take it, and we're going to package it up, and you're going to have it tomorrow.
We realize at the end of the day what customers want, one of the things we say is, the viewpoint of our customer, I order it, I get it works. That's all any of us care about. That's certainly, I assure you, what our customers in the industry care about. That's what we're trying to provide. How do we do it quicker and at lower cost? That's what you saw. That's just a very small example. You look at some of the big parts that we're doing, that's going to continue to advance, and we're going to be on the cutting edge of doing those things. We get into, this is where you start talking about the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, digital connectivity. We're working on this.
Our machines today have the ability, if you configure it properly, a machine goes down, it'll call you on the phone and say, "I'm down. Do something with me." We can do that today. That exists. What do we want to do tomorrow? One of the tasks I've given our guys in equipment and tools and kind of blew up their heads was I want to be able to take a customer, if I'm a customer, I can take my mobile phone and I go out to the line that's running, and I've got Signode equipment, and I use the strap, and I use the angle board, and I use stretch film.
We want to be able to have a customer doing their daily walk, be able to go out and say, "I need some stretch film." They can scan the barcode on it's going to upload to their system. It'll remind them, "Hey, you also use edge protection. Do you need some of that?" "Let me go look." They'll walk over here, then they're going to scan their edge protect. "Your quantity says you're good there." "What about strap? Are you low on strap?" They can scan the strap. "You need two more coils of that." They say, "Okay, confirmed." By the time someone gets back to their office, all they have to do is hit enter, the orders come to us. By that point in time, it'll all be digital.
We'll already be loading a truck, chances are they'll have it tomorrow or the next day. That's where we want to do these things. That's how easy we want to make this. Again, so that people come to us, I order it, I get it works. Very simple, and that's what we're trying to focus on. Here's how we prioritize. If you had the opportunity to come to PACK EXPO a couple of months ago, you saw this. You saw us brand as Signode Industrial Group with all of these brands below, and you saw a booth that had a lot of stuff in it. You're going to see a mini version of that today over in Florence.
This is how we align our business, and it's so big, it's so diverse and broad, we had to have a way of putting it together so customers understand who we are and what we do. This is how we've put this together, and all of our businesses align with one of these particular products or one of these areas. Again, our competitors, some do pieces of this very well in a small area. Some do it very well in small pieces across all of it, but no one does it in all the pieces in all the areas like we do. To give you a little bit more explanation. End of line. Think about, you have a product that came out. You want to ship these pointers out across the world. You could come to our PDM business, inside the box.
You got to think inside the box. The things that you have on your table, you want to ship those metal tins to us, to whoever, all around the world. What we'll look here is these are engineered solutions. You can see there's a honeycomb protecting, it looks to be a window. You have the foam, which is protecting a valve train for an air system. Two of our largest customers are Ford and General Motors out of Detroit. The PDM business run out of Detroit, Michigan. They're engineering these products. Again, now go back to your drive shaft for your classic car you're fixing up. You may have a Reddi-Crate that's protected it because it's quite long, right? Inside that, you may have a piece of foam, and that part fits perfectly down into the foam. That's us.
When you look at that picture, you've got a Reddi-Crate that's protecting the outside, of course, using some plastic strap from us to be able to secure it and hold it together. You open it up, and you got the foam inside that we've made at PDM. It's specific to that product. Guess what? You get it, and your drive shaft's perfect. You put it right in your car, and you go driving down the road. That's how we can operate. That's a solution sale. That's where we're headed with this. In the bottom, you've got an FIBC bag. It's a polywoven fabric bag, bulk bag, resins, sugar, rice, agricultural-type products, those kind of things. This is creating either the primary package or something inside the primary package to protect the product. That's what we're doing here.
PDM tagline is, "Think inside the box." That's exactly what we do. When we get into bundling, that's the next piece of our honeycomb structure. This is strap. Think strap here, mostly. Plastic strap, steel strap. You see the hand tools. They use versions of this. You go to the airport, especially in Asia, they do a lot of this. You can pay to have your bag sealed up with strap. That's our equipment. Those are the kind of things that we do in that type of business. You can see in the bottom left, those are ingots. Those are aluminum ingots from a mill that are being shipped. Then you see a horizontal wrapper. That looks to be tubing, steel tubing or something, that's being wrapped and prepared for shipment. This is the bundling type of solutions. Unitizing. This is stretch film.
It's going to be a big one here. You can see we have tear sheets between the layers of cans, food cans there. You've got the strap going on a load of bricks. You've got some edge protection. You've got the Lachenmeier stretch hood machine, then you've got our stretch film. You got an Octopus wrapper. You've got the rotary turntable wrapper, various other ways. The one in the bottom right is actually a product we manufacture in Bulgaria and we sell largely in France and Germany. It's a very strong ergonomic push in those areas, as you know. We actually have a wrapper that's mounted to a forklift. The people can actually take their pallet sitting there, and they can drive a forklift up to it and stretch wrap it in place right there. You don't have to move those around.
It's less product damage, less transportation, lower cost to the customer. Guess what? No one is being endangered or having any problems long-term. There's another type of solution. These are the kinds of things that we provide, and this is specifically in unitizing some of the things we do. End-of-line warehousing. We don't stop at just getting it ready for shipment. We have an automated storage and retrieval system company called StorFast, you'll hear about them when you go over. There's a nice presentation. We've got the people there. These are extremely large facilities, as you can imagine. We don't build the facilities. We don't build the structure. We hold the software, the brains of this thing. These are the things that we put together and where we have the ability to develop these types of systems.
Again, as companies are going more and more to reduction of labor, lower cost, protection of goods, e-commerce, these types of things, we have a solution for that, too. We have several of these facilities running throughout the world today and a nice backlog of things to come as well. End-of-line transport. We've done all these things. We've put it in the box, we've protected the box, we've put it on a pallet, we stored the pallet in the warehouse. You're ready to ship it. What do we do now? When you go to put it on a trailer, you put it in a rail car, you're going to ship it by air, whatever. This is where we come in, we can do these final things to help make sure that it's going to arrive in that condition. These are the airbags.
This is the honeycomb void fill. You can see a bulk liner on the bottom right. Top right is, this is where the Down River business comes in. We talked about Down River and all the things. These are the folks that look at your truck, your container, what you want to ship in and what you have. What our customers will do is then say, "I'm going to use 20-foot containers. I'm going from A to B, and I'm going to have 10 different pallets of these dimensions." We take all that, and we put it into models and start figuring, number 1, the most efficient way of doing it to get as much. Did you know you can get 12 of those in there? Not 10, you can get 12 the way we configured it. Okay, great. More savings.
We'll also put in the different types of protection to segment those and protect them individually in order to optimize that container and make sure that it's fully secure. We don't want things sliding around. That's what we're protecting here. On the bottom left is, let's say, a refrigeration truck. If you think about that, you think in the supermarket category. These guys will ship the reefer trucks all over the country, right? In the very first section up by the white, say if that's the refrigeration unit, that first section, these will be rigid bulkheads put between sections. That first section will be your freezer section. Then between the red and the green will be a cool section, a refrigerated section. Behind the green will be the ambient temperature.
Depending on what type of shelf-stable products you have or don't have, we can further segment those trucks so that when a truck leaves a distribution center and it's going to your local Kroger, it's got exactly the things it needs, and it's optimized. Instead of having three trucks show up, we can have one show up with everything already on it. These, again, are the kind of solutions that we can help provide. Innovation. What's next? What are we doing? How do we stay out in the lead? The problem is, remember I said 85% of the market's number 1, number 2. When you're number 2, it's a little easier to operate. You know there's someone in front of you. You know what to go after. When you're number 1, you got to set your own pace. That's what we're doing here. Next gen plastic battery tools.
You saw those last night. The hand tools, that's the ones that Drew was operating last night. Well, actually, we're going to implement a new version of those. There's a new one of those coming out. Again, those are all designed and built in Switzerland for the globe. We send those everywhere from there. The Octopus, there's a ring wrapper. You're going to see that machine over in Florence. The MOD GPX, you're going to see that machine later today. This particular Octopus is, we realized there were customers don't have quite the same technical needs. If you're in a part of the world that's a lower cost manufacturing area, you may not want one that does 50 different automatic functions.
We take what we know and what we do well, the basics of what we do well, and we strip costs out of it as needed to give a customer what they want. Instead of a machine that's XX in cost, we can make it X. We can make it something less than X, depending on what they need. That's an example of what this machine is. Does the same functions. It will perform every bit as well as a machine that costs five times as much. It just doesn't have all the fancy technology and other things on it. The MOD-GPX, this is, again, the general strapper. You'll see these things can be as small as this little stand here, it can be as big as your table, depending on what you're trying to do with it. It can be automated, it can be standalone.
You can operate with a foot pedal, you can operate it with roller conveyors. The advantage of this machine, as you can see, and you'll see later, there's a big steel aluminum frame, and then there's a strapping head underneath it. You think about that. Well, wait a minute, strapping heads, what you guys do, that's our hook, right? That's our good stuff. What we did was, you saw the modular strapping head for the big machines last night. Think about that on a small scale. Now, this is a machine that if you want to run steel strap or plastic strap or polypropylene or PET or whatever, chances are, or if something breaks down, all you got to do is change out the head in a modular form, and in five minutes you're up and running again. That's the advantage of these machines.
Now we make them all the same, and depending on what a customer needs, we just finish it up, put on those bells and whistles they want, and off we go again. A reduced lead time. Lead time on this machine, these are all made in Glenview, in Chicago. We took the lead time down from about eight weeks to about eight days, to give you an example of doing these kinds of things. What is the advantage of doing that? Now we have to set up our systems, our suppliers, and make sure all of these things happen, and that's what we do. That's where we're good at making these things happen. You can see we've got over 1,100 current patents. We've got another over 200 pending just in this, just in equipment and tools.
Last week, just to give you an idea of the level of engagement we have, we had a presentation for the Signode Innovation Society. Over the past three years, patents that have been awarded. We had over 60 people globally that have been awarded patents in just the last three years alone, just in equipment and tools. We came in, had a nice ceremony. I tell you what, the level of excitement and engagement was phenomenal. People are excited about this. We make a nice plaque. Of course, we get photos with them, give them things to take home to share with their family. We've got plaques on the wall. We've got hundreds of plaques on a wall in a conference room from as far back as 1970. We continue to show those. The new people, they put their patent up there.
They go back and they start comparing, "Well, this one's mine, and that one's mine." It's phenomenal. There's a tremendous amount of excitement about this, and people want to get involved in the exclusive club. They're continuing to work on these things. Consumables. You can think equipment and things like that, pretty easy. You can put a lot of technology into those. Well, guess what? We do the same thing with the consumables business as well. You look at strap. What you'll see today is a state-of-the-art strap manufacturing facility with an equally state-of-the-art recycling facility attached to it. We recycle over 55 million pounds of PET a year, and we put it all back into strap. That's what you're going to see today. We take post-consumer scrap, we take post-industrial scrap.
We take our own strap back, chop it up and reprocess it, and put it back in as well. That's the things that you're going to see today. There are certain things, certain secret sauce that we do to these things to make it run better on the lines for slip, make sure it runs through the machines properly. That's what you see as an additive. Forklift inflator. One of our largest customers there is FedEx. You think about a FedEx distribution center, and they're putting a lot of different things onto their trucks. Well, now you got to go back and think, now we're using airbags, we're using the multi-wall type containers. Well, an airbag, it has to be inflated with air. What we've done now is we've developed a way of on that forklift, the operator has a nice long hose.
It runs off the battery of the forklift, and they can inflate their bags real time, right there. They don't have to go and grab another air hose and do all these things. This year, our next generation, you're going to have a battery handheld. Think about the battery tool for strapping. We're going to do the same thing for an inflator. I told the guys the dream is I push a button on the inflator and it pops open all on its own. That technology doesn't exist yet, but we already have the idea, and we're already looking at it. These are the kind of things we're looking at in there. Paper slip sheets, as I mentioned. Certainly in Europe, there's a lot of transition to this. People are getting rid of pallets, so we have a way of getting them to move their materials safely.
The APXboard is a corner board, so it's a standard corner board. What we've done, and Drew had some samples. The APXboard is, when you think about a corner board, and if it's solid, there's obviously a dense buildup of material there. Well, the APXboard, essentially you have to think now about rigid structures. Think like an engineer. There's only part of it that really needs to be more rigid. What we've done is we leave that part rigid, and we reduce the layers on the outside so that it thins out. It's eliminating cost. It provides the same function, but in a less critical matter, we can reduce cost by still providing the same thing. That's an APXboard. Again, very simple stuff, and we're having conversations with people, and why didn't anyone think of that?
That's what makes these engineers and these people that think of this stuff, these patent people, the innovators, special, because they think of the stuff that becomes obvious to us later on because they've done a good job of doing it. That's what we promote in our business. Case studies. Here's a good one on edge protection. This is, you can see, here's an angle board product. These are, you can see, hurricane-resistant doors and windows. These cost a lot of money. Any of those of you that live in the South and the Southeast and have these on your homes or whatever, you know. Imagine you're putting these in.
You have to upgrade from what you have, and you get that at home, and the corner's all damaged, and you've got a $5,000 door that you can't use, and you got to go back and wait, and it takes another 6 weeks to get it because everybody else wants one. Now you got a problem. Plus, the company that built that has a lot of waste. They can't do anything with this. They got to take it apart, try and put something back together, salvage what they can. What do we do? We come in, we got a solution. We say, "We'll give you a Reddi-Pac crate." This little corner board protection you see it as is a 90-degree. That's patented. That ships to the customer as just one straight thing. When you flip it up 90 degrees, then we lock it in place.
We patented that. How do you patent paper locking into itself? It's not so easy to do. I challenge you to try it at home. Again, these are the kind of things that set us apart. We have people thinking about this stuff and love doing this stuff. What then we can provide is our customer, a consumer that's happy they got a material. I order it, I get it works. It's a good tagline for us across the business. A study in contract packaging. This is particularly India. You can see Tata Steel. If you go to one of the steel mills, Tata in India, you're going to see Signode people running their back end of the line. Tata gives us a coil, a finished coil, and then it goes on to our system. We actually contract the people.
We handle the whole thing. We will take that coil that they've given us, and you can see we put edge protection on it. We put coil wrap on it. We will put the banding on it. We will put the markings on it. We will deliver it to them in their warehouse, where their forklift driver comes and picks it up and puts it on a truck, puts it in the warehouse. We handle all of that. It's a big black box to them. For us, we do all of our things inside. Guess what? It's our equipment. It's our conveyors. It's our materials. It's our people. This is a total solution that we can provide to people. Others take bits and pieces of this. Coca-Cola in India. We have a contract with them.
Coca-Cola gives us their cartons of cans or packs, however they put them together. Again, we take those, we bundle them, we unitize them, and we give them, deliver them to the warehouse so that then they can take them and put them on the truck. These are solutions. These are universal. We can do this anywhere. We do have people that are looking at it. E-commerce is another one. Amazon is a big customer of ours. In the U.S., they specify only our Loveshaw machines for doing their box erecting and sealing. Guess what? Now we've leveraged that into Europe. Some of you have probably seen Amazon is looking at reducing primary packaging. They want to get rid of. You buy something from Amazon and you get this in a box that's as big as our tables, right?
If some of you have had that. Amazon says, "Hey, that's not effective. We got to do better." Guess what? We're on the leading edge of that, being involved with helping them make sure that what this comes in is going to come to you in the same way, and they don't have to process it again. Those are the kind of solutions that we're looking at with them as well. What our goal is to take something we've learned in one business and say, "How can we apply it somewhere else or give it to someone else as another solution?" That's what we're doing. What's next? We've had a lot of questions on, is Crown going to invest in the business? What are we going to do? This collection of companies, Signode Industrial Group, was put together through acquisition over 100 years.
It took 100 years to create that. That's why I say it'd be hard to duplicate that today very quickly. What are we going to be looking at? Are we going to continue to look at acquisitions? The answer is yes. We have an active pipeline. We have a group that's looking at these constantly. We have bankers that are calling us all the time saying, "Hey, I have this, I have that. Are you interested?" A lot of our competitors are family companies, so they're not, in some cases, highly sophisticated or fancy, but they want to get out of the business, so they call us. We're the biggest. Their biggest competitors say, "Hey, are you interested?" "We'd like to get out. Are you interested?" We're always the first contact that they have. Are we going to look at this? Yes.
In our core markets, solutions, whether it be strap, film, any of those kind of things we provide. The protective business is a primary. These are very small, okay? We're not talking hundreds of millions. We're talking single digits. These are very small pieces. They're nice bolt-on opportunities, in many cases. It either expands our market share or expands our presence in a business we already have in a new place. Or maybe it's something adjacent. PDM is a good example of an adjacency. Ron will talk about some of these things more. He's got a lot more experience. In end-of-line packaging, again, you think about the contract packaging. Can we provide a total solution from taking a product out to delivery? The answer is yes. In many cases, though, we have to bring in some type of integrators for pieces of this.
We can't do everything like that today. What are we looking at? Areas, engineering companies, control companies, these kinds of people that have expertise in integrating some of these things that we have. That's what people are looking for increasingly. Companies are becoming less sophisticated, and they want to hand you this and say, "Okay, give me the black box at the end of the line." That's what we're working to provide. That's where some of these things come in. We will continue to look at this, and we will continue to make moves as needed. With that, I'll turn it over to Ron, and he can give you some more information on this, as well as some of the financials.
Thanks, Bob. Good morning, everyone. Bob talked about the M&A opportunities in the various categories. These are the five deals we've done since we separated from ITW in 2014. These are either in the protective space or in the equipment and tool space, which, as Bob talked about, is really where our focus is on M&A. Let me just take you through each one. PDM, he talked about. That's an example of an adjacent acquisition. We're already inside the box with our multi-wall business, which is corrugated inside the box. This expanded our inside the box capabilities with foam. It's foam technology. By the way, there's other potential companies in this space that we could expand to down the road. PrimeBulk and Stopak are both Indian manufacturers in the protective space. Stopak is airbags. PrimeBulk is container liners.
Both of these are low-cost options for products that, unlike a lot of our protective products, airbags and container liners can be shipped around the world. It's easy to collapse them down and ship them around the world. These are really worldwide businesses that we now have a low-cost source of supply for lower-end airbags and container liners. StorFast is a business that's in the warehouse automation space. That's really expanding our end-of-line packaging capabilities. We had already done a lot of business with StorFast out of India, where we put together some lines for customers and we're using the StorFast technology and equipment. Relatively small business, but brings a lot of engineering capability based in Europe. Then SMB is an example of another expansion of a core market. They make strapping machines out of Germany.
They're in the medium tier of the strapping machine business. We tend to play in the higher end. Really a focus on the corrugated, the print industry, and expanded our capabilities on the lower end. All these companies, as you can see, we acquired at attractive multiples, especially after synergies. The synergies we've brought here are things like cross-selling. For example, the SMB machines. We expanded the selling of those into the U.S. using our Signode U.S. network of salespeople. Pretty quickly after the acquisition, we got the German SMB people here in the U.S., all the salespeople for Signode, trained them on the product, gave them the literature, and we started selling the machine. We've sold a lot of machines since the acquisition a year and a half ago. You can see overall, the revenues are relatively small.
These are small, generally privately owned businesses. That's where most of the acquisitions have come from over the years, really from the beginning as we built up the Signode business at ITW. Small niche businesses. In total, acquired revenue is about $70 million, and we paid about $80 million for these businesses. You can see the multiples here. Turning to financials. First of all, a couple of things on the basis of presentation here. This is all at constant currency using 2018 average FX rates, with an assumption for the last couple of months. There's no FX in any of these numbers when you look at between years. This shows the last five years back to 2014. A reminder, May of 2014 is when we were acquired by Carlyle.
Also in the numbers, an important thing to realize is price is an important element that impacts the financial statements, at least as you look at it year to year. For our consumable products that are commodity-based, steel strap, plastic strap, film, protective on the paper side, we generally have some level of price passthroughs. Some of it contractual, some of it is just based on how the market operates, the structure in the market. As commodities go up and down, that has an impact on our revenue, our reported revenue. If you look at, for instance, in 2015 and 2016, you can see the revenue dropping. A lot of that was price. As commodity costs went down, we also reduced prices to our customers. Doesn't have an impact on EBITDA because it's a passthrough.
When you look at just the reported revenue growth, what we tend to do internally is look at revenue excluding the impact of price. If you look at that for 2015 and 2016, for instance, excluding the impact of price, we actually grew 1% instead of being down 1.5% and flat in 2016. Excluding price in 2017, we're up 2.5%, and excluding price in 2018, we're up 4.1%. The overall revenue CAGR here, as reported, is 2%, but if you exclude price, it's 2.5%. On the EBITDA side, again, the margin percentage will be impacted by price. We tend to look at that excluding the impact of price. Our margins in 2014 were 15.8%. Our reported margins here are 16.3% in 2018.
If you exclude the impact of price over that period, it's 16.6%. We've been able to improve the margins over the years during the Carlyle period into 2018 for a couple of reasons. One, coming out of ITW, one of the big value creation tools was to figure out how to leverage the decentralized business. Those of you who know about ITW know that we were very decentralized. ITW still is. Therefore, when we separated from ITW, we had 100 decentralized business units. One of the things we looked at pretty quickly is how do we better optimize the business from a cost and an execution perspective. Procurement, for instance, was a big opportunity for us.
As we looked at the businesses, we had our plant managers in all the various plants, in all of our 90 plants, buying their own raw material, buying steel, buying resin, buying paper. We brought in a professional centralized procurement group and started buying those commodities on a global basis, because those are global commodities. A lot of benefit from that. We still have more benefit from that to come, especially on the equipment and tool side. The easier commodities to get at in our decentralized environment was the big commodities. What takes more time is, and you'll see these machines, but you think about these machines, there's 1,000 parts on these machines sourced from all different vendors. We're generally an assembler, so we're buying finished components, and we're assembling them together.
As we've gone through the procurement process, we've identified opportunities on various different models of machines. Bob talked about standardizing the plastic heads and the steel strapping heads. Part of that process is to look at, okay, what do we want the next head to look like? Now let's go and source those components from the right low-cost provider. Historically, when the businesses were run on a decentralized basis, they were sourced by really local suppliers. You would have a business in Glenview that sourced from local suppliers within 100 miles because they can get it quick. They knew the guy. That's how they operated. Well, that's not necessarily the best engineering or the lowest cost when you're starting to talk about components here. Bob talked about the next generation battery tool that we had out yesterday.
That was a good example of a product that as we developed it from the ground up, we looked at where should we source these components. As we found low-cost opportunities, the real important components we continued to make in Switzerland or source in Switzerland. Things like the housing and some other things that are less important to the overall product, and we could source on a low-cost basis. We sourced those from Asia. We were able to bring to market a next generation battery tool that's significantly lower cost, but at the same price point, which has driven a lot of the growth of the product over the last year. Those are some examples on the procurement side. Also, we've been able to look at, in the decentralized organization, how we best optimize the back office. That's taking a little bit longer.
That has long runway because you're really talking about 80 different units with 80 different ERPs and figuring out how to best optimize that. We've started down the path of looking at which businesses make sense to put together into an ERP, centralize the back office, and reduce the SG&A footprint. For 2018, we're expecting EBITDA of $387. As I said, 16.6% margin. CapEx, Bob talked about. This is our CapEx for the last five years. It's very low, especially relative to Crown, the can business. 1.5% of revenue is what we average, and that's been pretty consistent over a large number of years. It's a low CapEx business. You'll see the plastic strapping plant. There's a certain amount of maintenance built into that. Let's say $20 million-$25 million of the $35 is maintenance.
The rest of it is investments for growth or investments to make the plant operate better, maybe with less people, cost saving type projects. Given the strong, stable EBITDA, low CapEx, we generate a lot of cash in this business. Overall, $359, the EBITDA minus CapEx, it's about 15% of revenue on a pretty consistent basis. The cash flow, because of the low CapEx and the high consumable portion of our business, it's very consistent. Every month, we're generating cash. When we separated from ITW, one of the big focuses that we had the organization really change was generating cash and managing working capital. We made it part of our culture that we generate cash every month to pay down debt.
Every month in the ownership period of Carlyle, and that's continued under Crown, we're generating positive cash flow, and we can pay down debt. Very consistent. All right. Next, I know there's a lot of questions about the impact on the recession. First of all, the only numbers that are out there publicly now, and that I think a lot of you have looked at, are the segment numbers that were reported in the ITW years. What we wanted to do is really show the numbers that strips out a lot of the noise in the ITW numbers. In the ITW numbers, you have businesses that weren't sold out of ITW or were divested before the separation. You also have a lot of noise around FX restructuring impairments during that period on the profitability side.
What these numbers are, and we're using a constant currency based on 2011 constant currency, because that's what we had. The constant currency numbers for the businesses that were part of ITW back at that time that are part of our business today. It doesn't include any of the acquisitions that we've done since then. Those aren't meaningful to the overall numbers. From 2008 to 2009, revenues did decline 23%, and EBITDA dropped $121 million, which is 38%. If you do the math on that's a 22% decremental, which, given our business is more like a 30% variable margin business, that's actually a pretty good decremental. One of the things we did in that period is we did a lot of restructuring, took out a lot of fixed cost, took out some plants.
We reduced the plant footprint by 10 plants, five of them steel plants, since 2008. It certainly had an impact. The next year, revenues came back 17%, and EBITDA came back even stronger at $103 million, which is a 34% incremental. We were able to leverage that reduction in fixed cost and bring back the EBITDA. Also important is because of the nature of our business, we were able to reduce working capital almost $120 million between 2008 and 2009. Which meant that we were generating more cash flow, actually, in 2009 than 2008 during the recession. You look at the numbers. Yeah, were EBITDA and revenue down? Yes. Were we losing money or bleeding cash? No. You can see the headcount. We were able to reduce headcount, and that continued not just in 2009, but also into 2010.
What the recession allowed us to do is really take a hard look at the business, like a lot of companies, and really say, "Okay, which plants do we need? Which people do we need? How do we better organize for the future?" We feel like we are in a lot better position for the next recession, whatever that looks like. Hopefully, it doesn't look like the 2009 recession, given all the worldwide impacts. The next recession, there will be one, we think we are better positioned. Why? One, we are diversifying away from more cyclical markets like metals, which was 28% in 2008 and now is 21%. That's only 700 basis points. That doesn't sound like a lot. You do the math, that's about $160 million of revenue. That's a meaningful shift in the mix of our business.
Also, as I mentioned, we have taken out some fixed overhead, including some plant overhead. We shut 10 plants, five in the steel side. For instance, we used to have three steel plants in the U.S., one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and one in the Chicago area. We have now consolidated that down to the one in Chicago area that serves the whole country and Canada. There is also a more favorable segment mix. The protective business didn't have as big of an impact in the recession as the strap business did. The protective business was only 12% of the company in 2008. It's 23% today. Partly due to acquisitions, as we have acquired more and diversified there. Also, we have more exposure to India. I talked about the two Indian acquisitions, but we have also grown a lot organically in India through contract packaging, like Bob talked about.
Our India business has doubled. It was a $100 million business. Now it's almost a $200 million business, and the EBITDA has doubled as well. India, in the recession, went down a lot less and came back quicker than the rest of the business. Overall, and I know there's a lot of questions, I think generally, this is a way to really look at the numbers, and we think we are in a better position where it won't be as drastic as it was last time. With that, I will turn it back over to Bob.
You got me for just a couple more minutes here, as it turns out. You can see, this is some of the things to take away from this cash flow profile that Ron mentioned, about a 90% cash conversion cycle. We fully expect that to continue. There's no reason not to expect that to continue, we will keep delivering cash back to the company to make the best use of those funds. Leading industry position, as I said again, number one, number two position in 85% of the markets where we compete on a global basis. That's a strong position. We don't take that lightly. We think we can find ways, we will continue to find ways to deliver better value. I know you have heard this out of us before. We think we are underpaid for what we do.
You're going to see it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to make a can. It takes a lot of work to make the stuff we do as well. We think there's a tremendous amount of value in that. We're going to continue to work to unlock that value. The broad and innovative portfolio of equipment, consumables, tools, all the things we do, it's unmatched. No one else can do all of these things that we do, and we think that's a very good position to be in. Diversified business, end markets, customers, geographies, you've seen that. We're across the world, all the geographies of the world, developed economies, emerging markets. We're in all industries in all those areas. We see things coming before others do.
We have ways to move things around and position and shift in order to weather things like Ron was just speaking of. We're going to continue to do those things. Commitment to operational excellence. This is one that we think at Crown we've demonstrated that we're pretty good operators over the years. Pretty good stewards of capital and making right investments and doing a good job in running facilities. In SIG, we do a very good job. There's a lot of dedicated people. We can do better, though. We know we can do better. We're going to continue to focus on operational excellence. As I said, we're a manufacturing company at heart. We go to market a little differently than the can businesses do, but that's no less attention in our operations: safety, quality, productivity. In that order, it's undisputed. That's how we focus.
What are we going to do? We're going to continue to focus on operations. We're going to drive out cost. We're going to look for the best ways to run our facilities and take advantage of any opportunities that we have. Strategic initiatives, you've seen some of that. Some of it could be acquisition, could be continued investment in our business, could be consolidation of facilities. Some of it we just don't know yet. We continue to learn more every day of the things that are going on. Every month, something else comes up. We're unlocking more potential. What you'll see from us in the short term is a continued investment in our core business, those CapEx type numbers that Ron shared. We're going to invest in what we already have because it's really good. There's a tremendous number of organic opportunities out there.
As I've traveled and talked with the people in the businesses, there's 7,000 people. I assure you they are very excited to be under Crown and can see that there's a long-term plan in place now. There's a long-term owner that's committed to the business. That at the essence is a manufacturing company, and that's what they like. They know that we're going to be stable, we're going to make solid decisions. They've looked at the history of Crown. It's a proud history, just like the history of Signode Industrial Group. We've got a lot of momentum. We're starting to win hearts and minds. We're changing the culture. As Ron said, it was very decentralized. It's a big ship we have to turn. We're turning it. We're going to continue. It's going to be a year's process.
It takes time to make a cultural shift of that magnitude, but we're going to continue to do it. We've got a good start. People are excited. They're invigorated. We're going to continue pushing in that direction. Organic and inorganic growth opportunities. This is something I mentioned Ron talked about. It's an investment in our core business that we have today. It's looking at potential adjacencies, things to add on, the good stuff that we don't even know that exists today. It will come up, and we're going to be in a prime position to take advantage of it. I think the company has demonstrated that we will take advantage of those opportunities where they exist. There's white spaces. You looked at our map. There's white spaces we have in Signode.
Crown looked at that many years ago and said, "Hey, where do we want to go next?" We're looking at the same thing. I came out of Asia, so I understand some of the things that go on there. You look, we've got big gaps in Asia. We know how to do business. Crown knows how to do business in some of these places that maybe some other people don't. We've got good experiences there. We know how to steer away. We can spend smart money in this business to help us drive in those places where we already are at and continue to find synergies around the world. We've had cross-management meetings across the geographies now, Signode people introducing to Crown people and vice versa.
What we decided is, Didier and Hoc Kuan and Djalma, we said, "Look, we get these people together in a room and just see what they can do." What we would do is Signode presents their business, Crown people present their business, and then we essentially just stand back and let them go. It's tremendous, the things that have come up already, the synergies that we're finding, things we didn't even think about, people are finding. When you plant the seed, people are going to grow it, I assure you of that. That's what we're finding across these businesses. People are excited to be here and excited to be part of Crown. Again, the great performance you've seen out of Signode over all these years, you'll continue to see that.
That's what we expect, and we'll continue to find new ways to grow and deliver more value back to the company. With that wraps up for the Signode Group, and I'll turn it back over to Tim.
Thank you, Bob. Thanks, Ron. Hey, just before I move on to beverage cans, just a few thoughts on Signode from the Crown perspective, and I think some of you have heard me say this. If there was one mistake we made with the Signode acquisition was not doing an event like this earlier, and that falls squarely on me. I'll fall on that sword. It's not that we were uncomfortable with the business or we didn't believe in the business. We had a fellow that was running the business that's essentially a hired gun for private equity, and we knew he wasn't going to stay with us, and clearly, he's moved on to another opportunity.
Quite a good professional, what I was always hesitant about was to take him on the road and have him describe the business, and then knowing that he wasn't going to stay very long, and then we had to come back and explain to you who's going to run the business. Just to underscore, that never had anything to do with our comfort or our desire to continue to run and grow this business. I think one thing you saw here, Ron presented some numbers. The EBITDA has grown about 20%, 25% over the last decade through a recession from 2008 to 2018, with very few acquisitions, very little acquisition. There's some divestiture in there as well from the time Carlyle owned it and very little capital.
I think you look across the can space, and you look at EBITDA growth that we've all had in the can space, and it comes with a lot of capital that needs to be invested, and in many cases, it comes with the consolidation of the can business across the globe via acquisition. This is a business that organically grows through price management, cost control, and further penetration of the products they have in existing or new markets. It has not been reliant on acquisitions or large capital. From that perspective, when we looked at this business, and I'll assure you, we spent a long time looking at the type of business we wanted to add onto our can portfolio that we thought would generate real value in the future.
It's why we settled on Signode because we could see the real value that was added in this business just organically in their own price policy, their own ability to recover inflation, their own ability to push organic growth into new markets and new territories, or with existing customers with new products or existing products they had. From that standpoint, we were extremely comfortable with it. We didn't come about this lightly. We spent a long time, for some of you, I know Mark Wilde, you were in the office, several years ago, and we had a pretty open discussion with a group of investors that perhaps the opportunities in the can space were quite limited, x adding a plant at a time on, whether it's in Brazil or Southeast Asia.
We can do that, but that's going to take a long time, and we'll talk about Southeast Asia in a minute. As we're looking at creating real long-term value for our company and our shareholders, we are always mindful of the fact we may need to look at another substrate or another form of packaging. We looked at a variety of opportunities, and a lot of those opportunities carried a lot of risk. You had to believe a growth story, or you had to pay an incredible multiple for a growth story, or you had an opportunity to buy something that had marginal growth, that had good penetration or good market position, but it required a lot of capital, so there wasn't a lot of cash flow that was generated in the business.
Here was a business right here that we looked at that, boy, that's got world-class positioning in almost every business and every market they participate in. It doesn't require a large capital or acquisition strategy behind it to make it successful and grow, and it generates a tremendous amount of cash flow, and the risk was much lower, and it's a business that traditionally looks a lot more like the can business that you all remember from 15 or 20 years ago, where you just show up, and as long as you're disciplined and you know how to run the factories and you support the folks in the factories, you're going to generate a lot of cash. With $400 million of EBITDA and $30 million in capital, boy, the return starts to add up real quick in a business like this.
Bob mentioned that we're doing our best to change the hearts and minds of a very decentralized business into something that's more centralized. The only thing I'd like to mention on that, Joe Cummons and I have had a couple discussions on this, and we talk about this inside of Crown all the time. It's incumbent upon us, in the corporate space of any organization, to support the folks in the factories. I'll assure you, we've got folks in our factories, whether it's Signode or across the can business, that show up every day, 24/7. It doesn't matter whether it's Thanksgiving or Christmas. If they need to run that factory, they're there running that factory, and we need to support them.
By supporting them, that means we don't waste money or do things outside of what's necessary to do to service our customers and provide ample return to our stakeholders, any less than we expect from the folks in the factory. It's a discussion Gerry Gifford and I have all the time. We need to support the folks in the factory because without the folks in the factory, there's not a whole lot that flows up top. I think what Bob talked about there is nothing different than what we do in the can business. I think from the standpoint across the Signode platforms, I think the folks in the factories are going to find that very welcoming. That, wait a second, we're back to a manufacturing company here.
We're going to make stuff, and we're going to try to deliver stuff to our customers, in the most cost-efficient manner that we can. With that, I'd like to turn over to beverage cans. You're all very familiar with beverage cans. We won't spend a lot of time on beverage cans, so there should be ample time in questions if you have questions for beverage cans. I'll touch on just general topics in beverage cans, some Southeast Asia, and then Gerry, as I said earlier, will pick up on the other regions. As we look at the global beverage can industry, you see the per capita consumption on the left side of the slide. The U.S. still far and above any other region on per capita consumption. You get into Southeast Asia, and some of the markets are different.
For example, you get into Cambodia, and I think the per capita consumption is north of 200 as well. I'll talk about Southeast Asia in a section, that's really a function of as these markets had exploding growth over the last decade, the can really jumped over glass. To the extent that they had returnable glass in a lot of the markets, a lot of markets had returnable glass, returnable glass has weaned itself away and gone to one-way glass. Those markets bypassed one-way glass, and they went from returnable glass to can for a lot of the growth. They still do have returnable glass for some of the products, in large part, one-way glass is much smaller percentage in those markets. Brazil, quite high as the can continues to penetrate beer, I think, in Brazil, and Gerry will show you the number.
We're over 50% now of the mix in beer. Still a relatively small mix in CSD. Europe continues to grow. Returnable glass being much more prevalent in CSDs than we see, clearly, in the U.S. Glass almost nonexistent in the U.S. any longer. China, Southeast Asia. I'll cover Southeast Asia. China continues to grow rapidly, then the Middle East, North Africa, still a high PET market and obviously some glass as well in that market. Then you see global beverage can demand on the right-hand side of the slide, 335 billion cans with growth of 2%-4%. If you take the midpoint at 3%, that's about 10 billion cans. That requires 10 high-speed lines every year to keep up with the growth globally. Gerry will talk about what it requires in Europe, and we know it requires a number of lines everywhere else.
If you strip out North America, because there's not a lot of growth in the North American market, you have a global market of about 240 billion cans, where global growth, excluding North America, is 4.5%. There are a number of you that have been involved in the can space for a long time, if we told you that the can industry was going to grow 4%-4.5% 20 years ago, you'd have said it's not going to happen because the world was much smaller then, at least in the can space. We were much more focused on North America only. If you ever told me that we were going to have 4% annual growth in the can space, I'd have done backflips. I would have never believed it. It's where we sit today.
Really what we're talking about is 10 high-speed lines a year just to keep pace. That doesn't include the amount of equipment that's required to modernize and upgrade and do different sizes, much of which we do make in our can-making equipment operations in the U.K., which also comes under Gerry's purview. Moving on to our global beverage can footprint. We have 54 can plants. That does not include end plants. That's just the can body plants. We produce just south of 70 billion cans globally. We have about 20% global market share. I think on a global basis, we're certainly number two. There's somebody that's certainly larger than we are.
You see we have 11 factories in North America, four in Mexico, four in Brazil, one in Colombia, 17 plants across the Middle East and North Africa, with four of those in the Middle East, one in North Africa, and 12 in Europe. China and Southeast Asia, 12 plants across Southeast Asia, and currently five plants in China. A pretty good mix. We don't have production operations in all the dark green spaces, but this is generally where we sell cans into. For example, Argentina, Chile, we don't have manufacturing there, but we sell cans into Argentina and Chile. We sell cans, or we license our products and technologies into South Africa or Australia, for example. The beverage can.
For as long as I can remember, we've been talking about the death of the can, whether it's the death of the food can or the death of the beverage can, since I've been at Crown, since 1990. I remember Crown made an acquisition of a plastic bottle container company in 1992, and I think at the time, First Boston. Where are you at, Timmy? First Boston was the advisor to the company, and I can remember I was a young guy, and you can imagine how quick I was with my tongue then. I'm probably a lot better now than I was then. I can remember calling Tim Burns. "Tim, explain to me why this is going to be good for us." Tim explained to me why it was going to be good for us.
We ended up doing an acquisition of a plastic bottle company that didn't turn out to be too good for us or for anybody else that ever got into the business. I think the reason we did it is we clearly saw the consumer advantages behind PET as it related to the can. Resealability, clarity. What we couldn't see was how the profit profile was all locked up in the machinery makers, the tool makers, and even our customers. There was no value for us in this business, and I think we and others have agreed to that. It's a very difficult business to make money in. You basically get the scraps, what the customers are willing to give you and what the tool guys, the equipment guys are willing to let you get.
Boy, there's a renewed focus on the beverage can for a lot of reasons. Whether it's sustainability, whether it's the cube effect, whether it's the inherent benefits of 100% closed-loop recycling, whether it's the benefit of a beautiful billboard to advertise and market your product to consumers, not the least, the integrity with which the can protects your product, whether it's a soft drink, whether it's carbonated, whether it's not carbonated, whether it's a craft beer. If you're a craft beer brewer, you really believe in the whole brewing process. You do this as a passion. Most of these guys you meet, these are millennial-type people, right? They're not even looking at making money.
They're looking at brewing something that they believe in, they believe in the flavors that they're producing, they clearly want a package that holds the integrity of that, the beverage can does all of that better, far better than any other package. I could stand here all day long and talk about it, as you know, some of our competitors do as well. Sustainability, we'll mention sustainability, Dan will talk a little about sustainability. We talked about freshness. Every time you open a can, you kind of know what you're going to get when you open a can. It doesn't matter if it's been sitting on the shelf in your cupboard or in the refrigerator for a week or a month, it still holds that freshness, whereas many other packages don't.
We do have the ability to produce and market several different sizes, whether that's diameters or heights. Certainly, from a logistics standpoint, nothing ships better, nothing fills faster, nothing fills with lower breakage and spoilage, nothing cubes better in shipping and in warehousing, nothing chills quicker, requires less refrigeration until it's used than the can. It's a package that we're very positive on. I'm glad to see that consumers and customers alike have come back to the can, not only in the beverage can space, but also in the food can space, because we believe that the can has a lot of room to grow, we think it will continue to grow. First-class recycling rates. I don't think any beverage package around the world comes even close to recycling at the level that beverage cans do.
We know we have several markets in the world where recycling rates, Brazil, for example, are close to 100%. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we're 50%-60%. We should be 100%. We're a wealthy society, wealth brings laziness and forgetfulness, we don't always recycle everything we should. In Europe, I think we're north of 70%, there's no reason why the beverage can shouldn't be and can't be recycled at 100% levels. There's nothing about the can that's not recyclable. Everything is recyclable. There are many competing packages. Let's be honest, they're trash, right? You look at cartons, they're not recyclable. They come from a renewable resource, trees, but they're not recyclable. You look at the PET bottle, I mean, it's recyclable to an extent. It's downgraded. It's not recyclable into the same package. It's not a closed-loop recycling. There's value loss in the system.
For that reason, people don't want to spend the money and the time to recycle it. I will tell you this, without cans, and if you like in the question and answer, Dan can give you more information. Without cans, we don't have recycling globally. You can't afford to recycle anything in this world without the can. The metal pays for recycling everything, whether it's glass, paper, plastics, whatever, what have you, because of the value of the metal. We talked about supply chain efficiency. Obviously, we continuously try to lightweight the can. The joke is always, we're going to lightweight this so much someday that we're not going to even have metal involved. We're just going to wrap it in the graphics and in the inks. I don't think that'll ever happen. Certainly shelf life, nothing comes close. Premium perception.
For a long time in the United States, we denigrated the can. Everybody wanted to denigrate the can. It's the old package. It's your grandfather's package. It's your father's package. It's interesting that the millennial group views the can as the more responsible package. For that reason, they're coming back to, "Wait a second, it's a more responsible package. It's got great integrity to hold my product and preserve the freshness and the flavor. I can really put great graphics and billboard on the project." It's a premium product again. It's not just a premium product in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Brazil. It's becoming the premium product again here in the United States for certain beverages that are marketed, and we'll talk about that in a moment. Easy and convenient, metal chills quicker, barrier properties second to none.
I have a daughter who's gone off to college. She's got a lot of views now. They're trying to brainwash her. I do my best not to let the educational elite brainwash my children. I try to explain to her, I said, "When you go to one of these concerts" She goes to school in Southern California, so she goes to these, there's some goofy concert they all go to now that I'm an old guy, that they go to in the desert down in Palm Springs. She was talking about, "Yeah, it was easy. I just went over, there was a bucket there with water, and there was water in there, and I grabbed a bottle of water, and I drank water," blah, blah.
I said, "You don't know how long that bottle has sat in that dirty water and how many times that bottle's been transported from one container of dirty water to another. You know, plastic breathes. If it breathes, that means some of the contaminants that are in that dirty water over time are getting into that beverage you're drinking." She looked at me like, "What the hell are you talking about?" It's true. There's no package that is a better barrier to contaminants entering or compromising the beverage you're drinking than the can. In the can industry, we feel very strongly about that.
I say these things, and you guys chuckle from time to time, but I can tell you're talking to me, you're talking to Gerry, you're talking to John, or Didier, anybody in our can business, Bob, we feel very passionate about that, as I know our competitors do. Safe and unbreakable, and unbreakable in the filling lines, which is a key feature. Beverage can, most recycled beverage container. I think 75% of the aluminum ever produced in the history of the world is still in use today. There's no reason why that shouldn't be 100% other than our own laziness. I think certainly it has the longest shelf life of any packaging, and we know that by using recycled aluminum. We reduce emissions, CO2, greenhouse gases, energy required to manufacture new aluminum. Just a select portfolio of our global beverage can customers.
You know most of the names on here, just Grupo Damm in the middle is a large brewer in Spain. Saigon Beer is our partner in the south of Vietnam, where we have a long-term partnership arrangement. Not only a joint venture, but also a long-term supply arrangement. Refresco is the Dutch private equity company, or owned by a Dutch private equity company that just bought Cott Beverages here in the U.S. Khmer Beverages, again, the largest brewer in Cambodia. Again, a partner of ours with a joint venture and a long-term supply agreement. Grupo Petrópolis, the second-largest brewer or probably the third-largest brewer. I don't know if they and Heineken are tied. Probably they're the third largest now that Heineken bought the other Brazilian brewer. You've got AB InBev, Heineken, Petrópolis, and Coca-Cola that make up the Brazilian market for cans.
You go to Mexico, you've got AB, Heineken, Coca-Cola. That's Mexico. You come to the U.S., you've got Coke, Pepsi, you've got AB, you've got Molson, you've got Dr Pepper, you've got Refresco. You can see the market for our customers is extremely consolidated. It certainly has been challenging for the beverage can industry for the last 10 or 15 years. I think we're at a point now where our customers realize we have the package of choice that they need to push high volumes and market their products effectively. Certainly, we'll talk about it later. You've heard us talk about it at nauseam for the last several months. The balance of power perhaps has shifted a little bit back towards the Mendoza line.
I'm not suggesting that we have any real power, but we're certainly going to be a bit more fairly compensated for what we do as compared to the situation over the last five or six years. A real good collection of beverage can customers. This does nothing to address the blue-chip customer base that we have in food around the world, and Didier will talk about that when we get to Food Europe. A lot of activity, clearly, from a greenfield perspective as we look at our global beverage can business, and I won't spend a lot of time on the slide. You've seen the slide before. You know what we've done. We've just recently opened a new two-line beverage can plant in Spain, in Valencia, Parc Sagunt. You got two lines there, high-speed lines. It's our initial conversion from steel to aluminum.
We have two steel can plants, one in Agoncillo in the north, in the Bilbao region, one in Seville. Why did we pick Valencia as opposed to converting one of the other plants? Quite frankly, the fillers are in Valencia, and Gerry will talk about that. Damm and Coca-Cola and others are in the Valencia region. It made sense to be in Valencia. We'll, over the next couple of years, convert the Seville plant to aluminum, and we'll maintain operations and have an end center in Agoncillo. We'll have three operations in Spain, and Gerry can talk about that. Turkey, we added a second line to the Osmaniye factory, so we're the largest producer of cans in Turkey, and notwithstanding all of the political and currency turmoil you've seen in Turkey, we continue to do quite well.
We've not seen any demand destruction in Turkey as a result of the turmoil. In contrast to that, the business continues to grow. Largely a soft drink market. Again, a large Muslim population, so primarily a soft drink market for us. We've opened a one-line can plant in Indonesia. Last summer, the plant continues to do well. It's almost fully through learning curve, and I think we're north of 500 million units in the market. It's about a 2.5 billion can market, so we have about 20% of the market, and doing quite well. Again, a large Muslim population, so largely focused on carbonated and other non-carbonated soft drinks, a very small beer proportion in that market. This summer, we commissioned and commercialized a new one-line can plant in Myanmar.
We have a joint venture arrangement with the largest marketer of carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks in Myanmar, as well as longstanding relationships with the brewery in Myanmar. What else can I mention here? Nichols, New York, you're familiar with. Chihuahua, we built another glass plant with one furnace in Chihuahua to service Heineken under a very long-term agreement with Heineken in that market. The only thing I'd mention to you, glass doesn't have to be a bad word. In fact, glass is a great business if your furnaces are full and running, and we're full and running across four furnaces in Mexico, so it's a very healthy business for us. The only one other thing I'd like to mention is you see the light purple box at the top of the page, Parma, Italy.
Probably something we kind of forgot to announce or mention, and we kind of got ourselves into the position. We're kind of in the process. We'll tell everybody what we've done when we get to Analyst Day. We have constructed and commissioned, I think, late November, the plant came online in Parma, Italy. On the same site that we have a large food can factory, we built another building, and we have a one-line beverage can plant operating right now in Parma, Italy. We had been providing cans into the Italian marketplace from one of our two Greek operations. The Greek market is still very healthy, so we'll continue to operate Greece, but this obviously allows us to service the Italian market much more effectively than trying to transport cans across the Aegean Sea, or is that the Aegean or the Adriatic? Aegean. Yeah.
Oh, I got it right the first time. Great. Fantastic. There's a lot of seas, so a lot easier for us to service that market and to grow with our customers in that market. The can, you're starting to see the can penetrate sparkling water. Sparkling water is a big deal, whether it's flavored or not flavored in Europe, as you know, because the access to clean drinking water is not as prevalent across many European countries and regions within those countries as it is in the U.S. So even something like S.Pellegrino, which we're all very familiar with S.Pellegrino, they have a variety of, whether it's flavored or not flavored in can now, and you're going to continue to see that grow.
That covers much of what we've done over the last couple of years, Gerry will talk about one or two new projects we have going forward in some of the regions. I think plastics, there's been a lot of talk of plastics. I would tell you that the movement that you see from the regulators and the NGOs in Europe is real. There is growing momentum, and I think there's growing momentum in one or two of the states here in the U.S. How serious they are to want to curb or outright ban plastics for a number of products, I'm not quite sure, but the momentum is serious, and we'll see where it takes us.
I think the practical answer at this point is that there is no can capacity or glass capacity to replace the incredible amount of volume that's currently used, that plastics currently serves, whether it's for carbonated soft drinks, flat, and/or sparkling water. This could take some time, but just to kind of frame it for you, a 1% pack mix shift would be 1.2 billion cans or one high-speed line. You're talking about an incredible amount of volume that could come to the can industry over time. Let's be clear, the can industry and the glass industry can't service this right now. I think that there are a lot of hands in the pie here, right? There's chemical companies, there's oil companies. They're not going to let this go away.
They're going to find a way to convince the regulators over time to give them till 2025 or 2027 to come with plastics which are more environmentally friendly and more recyclable, and we'll see where that goes. They're going to be under incredible pressure. From time to time, as an industry, the can industry may have opportunities as brand owners look to do something to protect their brand image in the marketplace. You can see that the pack split mix in Europe for carbonated soft drinks is heavily weighted towards multi-serve PET and single-serve PET, with cans and glass making up a pretty small percentage. Incredible opportunity. We'll see where it takes us, I don't think anybody should get ahead of themselves. This can only be an upside for the can, but this is a five to 10-year story.
This is not something you need to put in your models over the next two or three years. We've got a representative sample on the back wall there of a number of the cans we make and others make. One of the things we see now is that marketers are continually and increasingly coming to the can to market their products. For all of the reasons we've already talked about. The high graphics resolution, the ability to use multiple colors, the integrity with which it holds product, the sizes, the shapes, the chilling nature, for all those reasons. You see a variety of products here, whether it's in adult soft drinks, and other, whether it's experience drinks, one-time or multi-time experience drinks.
We're going to see the can continue to gain share across share of stomach, if you will, for beverages. Not only globally, but also in the U.S. We feel very strongly about that. Beverage cans. In contrast to the Signode business, this business is concentrated among many fewer, much larger customers with much greater buying power, very big marketers, long-term requirements contracts. These are requirements contracts. They're not take or pay. We get a requirement from a customer. You're going to give us 50% of our requirements, or you're going to give us 100% of our requirements. Well, if their requirement is a billion or whether it's one, that's our duty to provide that. It's not a take or pay, generally. We do have some take or pays in some of the other contracts.
I don't necessarily want to reveal too much, but certainly, we have take or pays in some regions across some customers. For the large majority of customers around the world, it's a requirements contract. Real-time aluminum pass through. Not only is that on the base ingot, it's on the premium. In many cases, it's on the conversion element from ingot to can sheet. Over 50% of our can sales globally are in the emerging markets. Contracts are dollar-based as aluminum is a dollar-based commodity. Utilization rates are exceptionally high. You've heard me say, many of you have heard me say, if any other industry had utilization rates like the can industry, boy, they'd make a lot of money. We've struggled to find a way to do that. One of the reasons as an industry is we're happy with where we're at. We're trying to continuously improve.
We're trying to protect the package and market the package and grow the package. We're trying to keep the package relevant to our customers and consumers. We'll see some of that change here in the North American marketplace as we go in the next year. As we said, cans are clearly gaining market share across most markets and most segments around the world. You look at the emerging markets, Bob said, and Ron said, much like Signode spent the last 100 years rolling up and building the Signode franchise, we've spent the better part of the last 15 to 20 years, even in some very dark days for Crown, trying to build up our emerging markets presence. In Mexico. We did it through acquisition in Turkey. We did it through greenfield in MENA. We did it through greenfield, and some of it existed already.
Southeast Asia is clearly an example of an area that's somewhat similar to Signode, although not over 100 years, but certainly over the last 15 to 20 years. One by one, can plant here, a can plant there, a second line here, a third line there. Ends here, we'll talk about Southeast Asia to a footprint that's unmatched and, in our view, likely to be unmatched by anybody else for a period of time. In Brazil, we have the number two position. Again, beginning in 1995 with one factory, then another two-line factory. It now has three lines. In 2007, we built another factory, added a line to that one in 2009, built another factory, another large two-line factory in 2011 and 2012, and another factory in the Northeast in 2014. One by one, again, greenfield.
Just takes a lot of work to build a greenfield factory. You've got to go out and market your product and have customer commitments behind it. You've got to know you can sell those cans. You've got to be able to build the factory. You've got to be able to convince yourself you're going to get a return in a certain amount of time, and you got to train a workforce. Making cans, I will assure you, it's not like pressing a button. There's a high degree of skill required to make cans, and we all have times that, whether it's Crown or any of the other companies, we bring up a factory, and sometimes they don't come up as well as the other factories have come up in the past or what we're accustomed to, but we have to work through it.
One of the things I say about the nice thing about the Signode business, clearly, we have a lot of engineered products and solutions in Signode, but for a large variety of those products, the skill level is not required like in can making. You never want to say anything is simpler because there's things they do in Signode that require attention and detail and discipline, that if it was that simple, anybody can do. Making cans is very difficult, and by and large, we do a very good job bringing up factories. We've probably commissioned, in total over the last 10 to 15 years, more new factories than maybe everybody else combined if you stripped out China. That's not a small undertaking. Southeast Asia. Spend a little bit of time on Southeast Asia, and then I'll turn over the beverage discussion to Gerry.
It's a 24-billion can market, I'll show you the map, what we're talking about here, we're talking about everything that excludes China, Japan, Korea. That's not Southeast Asia. We're not talking about South Central Asia, which is India, Pakistan, we're not talking about Australia, New Zealand. We're talking about the countries we consider Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Borneo, East Malaysia, you'll see the map in a moment. It's a 24-billion can market. We have right around 50% of the market, that's our share. The numbers below that are the industry. Specialty cans as a percentage, 35% across the industry, we're probably a bit higher than that in the market.
We describe, and as Gerry talks to you, we will describe to you, specialty cans are everything other than the standard 12-ounce, 211 diameter can. You're all familiar with that can. That's the can sitting in front of Dan right now. That's what we call the 211 diameter can with a 202 end on it. 26% penetration in the carbonated soft drinks and 53% in beer. A lot of runway still to go in soft drinks, whether they're carbonated, non-carbonated. In the Asian marketplace, there's a variety of Asian drinks, whether they're rice-based or soy-based, milk-based, coconut-based. We've got one in a large product in Vietnam. It's called bird's nest. Bob's familiar with this. This is basically the spit of the bird that's used to make a nest, and it holds the nest together.
People scale mountains and cliffs to get the bird spit, and they add it to drinks. For a large variety of reasons, it's considered to be very healthy. It's traditional, and it's regional, and it's real. It's a volume of cans you wouldn't imagine that people are drinking bird spit that's added to a beverage, but it's real, and it's meaningful in that market. There are a variety of drinks in Asia, and in many regions of the world that to Americans, we would never consider drinking those. You travel around Asia, there's a variety of food that gets put in front of you, and you're a good visitor to your host, and you do your best to bring it down. Bob's probably the best I've ever seen for a non-Asian to eat something.
I'm pretty good at eating just about everything they put in front of me. There are a couple of things that I had trouble with. Bob seems to be able to put just about anything down, so I don't know how he does it. I think it's a different market, right? The point of that discussion is you can't go to these markets with an American mentality, and we don't. Bob's not in Asia any longer, so we don't have any Americans across Asia any longer. We have a British fellow that runs manufacturing. In Vietnam, for example, we only have Vietnamese. In Cambodia, we only have Cambodians now. The British fellow that was in charge of manufacturing is now back in Singapore. In China, we only have Chinese. In Malaysia, we have Malaysians and/or Singapore Chinese.
In Thailand, we have Thais and one or two Singapore Chinese. We have a local team that understands local customs and understands local habits and local desires and needs, and that's how we go to market. We're pretty much on the ground in that regard. In Brazil, for example, we only have Brazilians. In Mexico, we only have Mexicans. We are, standpoint of a global company, we're extremely diverse and we take the lead from our people in those markets that understand those markets. Certainly in India, in the Signode business, India is a new market for us. We only have Indians in India. These are cultures that go back 5,000, 10,000 years, and they're going to continue long after any of us are here.
You better have people that understand the cultures and the people in those markets, and it's proven to be very successful for us in that regard, and we've been able to grow this business unlike anybody else in the market. You see it's been 7% CAGR over the last five or six years, and we would expect that to continue across Southeast Asia. You're seeing 1 billion, 1.5 billion cans of growth every year in Southeast Asia. That's one to two can lines every year in Southeast Asia. If we're 50% of the market, we've got to be prepared to spend some money to continue to service our customers' growth and service the market growth every year to the tune of a half or one can line every year.
It's not a can line every year in every market, but it's probably at least one can line every year in Asia, whether that's at an existing facility or a new facility to continue to grow. It's an opportunity that we're willing to underwrite every year because the payback has been phenomenal. You hear me say it, and pride can be a really bad thing, but this is one thing where we're very proud of our Asian team. Bob and the fellows that came before him running the business and the folks that are still there. We had a business that had operating income of $40 million 10 or 12 years ago, and it's got operating income of $180 million now. Largely, that's greenfield.
That's one by one by one, just trying to build up a business in the face of an extremely challenging environment in China, we've been able to do that. It's something that the team should be very proud of and we're very proud of them and it's why we continue to underwrite the investments in Southeast Asia. The map that I talked about earlier, you see the listing of where we have locations in the marketplace. This is the map that we describe as Southeast Asia. We're present with manufacturing in every country other than the Philippines, Borneo, and Laos. Philippines is a pretty small can market. There is a can line there already by somebody else. The markets of Borneo and East Malaysia are serviced by the other Southeast Asian countries.
We can cover Papua New Guinea from our other Southeast Asian countries, and Laos is adequately served whether it's from Cambodia and/or Thailand. You see Myanmar on the far west, and we go as far east as Indonesia and/or Da Nang in the central of Vietnam. Really good coverage. You see we've got three can plants in Cambodia. It's a country that's got 15 million people, and it's only 30 years ago or 40 years ago, some of the largest atrocities in human histories were uncovered and unfortunately perpetrated in that country. That country is slowly rebuilding and it's a very young country. It's a country that has people that are highly educated, much like Vietnam, coming out of a French educational system, very highly educated, very motivated, very good workers.
The opportunity is really bright in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, and we're fortunate to be on the ground first there in the can industry and have leading positions there that position us quite well for continued growth in those markets. Just a quick wrap-up. I think the picture there, Bob tells me, is Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The fellows there in the picture on the bottom, they're probably at some university in the U.S. somewhere, but I'm not really sure where that is. You never know where these stock photos come, right? We do know that's Phnom Penh on the top. We've had a leading presence for decades in Asia, whether this was at Crown before the CarnaudMetalbox acquisition, through the CarnaudMetalbox acquisition, and certainly accelerating greatly over the last 15-20 years, and specifically over the last 10 years.
A great platform. I think we have an unmatched platform in this region for continued growth, and we'll continue to put capital behind it. Very attractive markets. As I said, they reflect very young populations. The under-25 population across many of these countries is approaching or exceeding 30%. Rising incomes. Our customers continue to make very large investments in filling, and largely in can filling. We do have a good balance of beer and non-alcoholic across the region. As I said, country by country, it's different. You have high beer consumption per capita in places like Vietnam and Cambodia. Then you have other regions where for religious and/or other reasons, that alcohol is either not permitted or not preferred, or beer is not the preferred alcohol that's consumed by consumers. For example, in India, in the Indian culture, there's nothing against consuming alcohol.
They just prefer spirits largely to beer. You have to be mindful of those things, and our local teams do a very good job doing that. That's just a brief recap of where we're at in Southeast Asia. You should continue to expect that we take advantage of opportunities from time to time. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Gerry Gifford. He's going to take you through Europe and some of the other markets that we have in beverage.
Good morning. I'll start out talking about Europe. $69 billion can market. Crown shares 18% or $13 billion. On the specialty side of the business, as Tim has mentioned, Europe's standard can is 33-centiliter, so the 61% represents everything other than 33-centiliter cans. This has been a fast shift in Europe from standard cans to specialty cans, and we have stayed with or above the market. Out of our 12 manufacturing facilities in Europe, 10 of the facilities have multiple sizes of specialty cans. The CSD market is only 14% in cans. Beer is at 55%. Our market position is number 3, and you can see an excellent growth rate of 2.8%, and it's been pretty consistent over the years. We would anticipate that type of growth going forward. Again, a lot of the growth tends to be in specialty cans.
As our customers add to capacity, they're usually doing it in sleek and slim sizes, and on the beer side, in 50-centiliter cans. We are sold out in this market. This is our 12 manufacturing plants. As you can see, the top plant, Custines in France, that was a very old 3-line steel beverage can plant. We converted that to aluminum cans. We did the first line in 2016. High speed, state-of-the-art, light-weighted aluminum cans. We finished up at the start of the year in the second quarter with the second line conversion. Now we have 2 high-speed lines that are manufacturing more cans than we did with the 3 lines producing steel. Parma, Italy, Tim had mentioned our new facility here. We have an excellent market presence in Italy. It's a growing market. We needed to support and protect that market.
We used to ship from Greece up into Italy. Now with that growth, we're starting that facility up in January. As we put in new facilities and new lines, we're always putting in the flexibility and the size capability to do multiple sizes. All different sizes, both in diameters and in height to service the business. Even though we are sold out in Europe and we've added these facilities, the other one is in Spain. We need these facilities to start up and start up on time in order to maintain our share and service our customers. In Seville, that will be our final plant to convert to aluminum from steel. That will complete our conversions in Europe to aluminum. We will do that at the end of 2019. By 2020, we'll be 100% aluminum across the globe.
Valencia, Spain, as Tim had mentioned, in this region, there's a concentration of both CSD and beer customers. No other competitors are in this region. It gives us our third facility. We have a strong presence in Spain that we want to maintain. The Turkey plants, Izmit, has been there for many years, since 1984. Osmaniye is the new facility. We did the first line at the end of 2016, the second line in 2017. Excellent startup. We have an excellent team. We used capabilities and people and resources from Izmit to help with the startup of the Osmaniye facility. We have 1 plant in Eastern Europe at Kechnec that supplies that region. We have a long history in the U.K. with our 2 plants, the one in the north in Botcherby, and the one further south in Braunstone.
The Braunstone plant not only manufactures beverage cans, but it also manufactures 2-piece food cans. The market has had growth between 2%-4% consistently annually over the years, we have outpaced and over-indexed and are towards the top of that range. There's been a growth in select countries. There's been the shift of CSDs into aluminum cans and a shift from glass into cans in the beer segment. Again, we have a strong presence in the South and in the Mediterranean and in the U.K. As I mentioned, the conversions in Valencia and Seville. Brazil, 26 billion can market. Our share is 29%, or 8 billion cans. The specialty here is also very large at 50% of the market, and we're at that level or above. CSDs, the cans only represent 10% of the market, and for beer, it's 53%.
We're number 2 in the market. You can see the excellent growth rate of 4%. Our four facilities, in Brazil, Cabreúva, Estância, Ponta Grossa, and Teresina. The market's comprised primarily of beer. Even though the economy has been difficult and there's been some political tensions, beer sales are up. When the economy is bad, the people drink beer. When the economy is good, they drink beer, they celebrate the economy. It's a very good product for Brazil. There's been a shift from returnable glass to cans, that will continue. There's various sizes, and we do multiple sizes in the facilities. Recent sizes of 9 ounce for beer has become very popular because it stays cold longer by the time you consume it. There's also the 18 ounce for beer that's become popular.
All of our facilities manufacture specialty size cans, and four out of the five manufacture both 9 and 18 ounce. We are in the process of constructing a new one high-speed line plant in Rio Verde, that's right in the center of the country. Most of the population of Brazil is along the coast. Capital, of course, is in this area, there's excellent growth, and we have good customer support in the area. Just like in Europe, when we go to build a facility, we have it supported by long-term contracts. Predominantly beer, the shift from returnable glass in Brazil to cans, and the various size introductions. In the Middle East, it has been an excellent market for us for decades.
As many of you are well aware, in recent years, there's been a decline in the market, predominantly in Saudi Arabia with the way the economy has gone, the introduction of taxes, the Saudization, the exit of people. Most of the decline that we've seen in the Middle East is a result of Saudi Arabia. It's a $17 billion can market. We have $5 billion cans. We are the number 1 supplier of cans with a 32% share. It is another market. It's the number 1 market in specialty cans at 73%. Almost all sizes are represented. We service that very well. We have the capability and the flexibility to handle all the specialty. These are our facilities.
We have the one in North Africa in Tunisia, the two in Saudi Arabia, one in Jeddah, one in Dammam, one in Dubai, our plant in Jordan. We've had this strong presence for decades. We've had this weakness with the geopolitical issues and border closings. We had a competitor build a facility in Iraq, with our difficulties over the border, we've lost that volume. With the general decline in the market, we've been impacted by the situation in the Middle East, it's still a good market for us. U.S. and Canada, $93 billion can market. As you can see, very flat, around $93 billion cans. We're number 2 with a market share of 22% or $21 billion cans. The specialty mix is only 29%.
That's still large considering the size of the market, but it's been a slower shift to specialty cans in the U.S. and in Canada than it has in Europe or the Middle East, Brazil, and in Vietnam or Asia. The CSD market is 60% cans and 62% for beer. These are our facilities. As everyone knows, we have the new facility in Nichols, N.Y. We built that facility. It's state-of-the-art. It's high speed. It's a mega plant with high volumes, high flexibility. We built it to also service the specialty can market. We're on our way to selling out specialty cans out of the Nichols facility. Previously, we were shipping specialty cans from the South, from Batesville in Texas into the North. This has been a big plus for us. As everyone knows, initially, we had a difficult startup, but recently, excellent performance by our team in Nichols.
In the last few months, it's performed very well. We're not represented well in the West. However, we've got a plant in Ensenada where we service Southern California and the Southwest of the country. The U.S. is a stable market. There's been a decline in the U.S. in the beer can market. However, for us, our beer is predominantly in Canada. Our beer volumes are with Molson and Labatt and Moosehead. We have not seen the impact of the decline that has been seen in the U.S. On the other part of it, we've had a dramatic growth on our CSDs in the U.S. and Canada with new products, especially sparkling waters have skyrocketed. In 2018, we were sold out. In fact, we were oversold.
We're putting ourselves in a position to be in a better place for 2019 by having a higher level of inventories at the start of the year. We'll make hundreds of millions of more cans in Nichols next year. We had excellent production in 2018. We produced about 600 million more cans in 2018 than we did in 2017. It's just that our sales were that much improved in 2018. We also shipped hundreds of millions of cans from Mexico into the U.S. to service our customers. Mexico is a 16 billion can market. We have a 37% share. We gained the number one position, as Tim had mentioned, with the acquisition of Empaque from Heineken. The specialty can market is 16% of the market. CSDs is a tiny portion of the market at 5%, and is predominantly beer at 37%.
9.7% annual growth, and we expect for that to continue. We in fact expect for that to increase over the next couple of years. Our four facilities, as mentioned, the one in Ensenada helps service the U.S., and on occasion, the one in Monterrey helps service into Texas. We also, as Tim had mentioned, we have our glass factories. We have the one in Meoqui in the Chihuahua state. That's our new facility. It's a one-furnace glass factory. The other one is in Orizaba, which is right in this area, which is three furnaces. Next to the one in the south is our sand mine for silica, which supplies both the glass factory in the south and the one in the north. We also sell silica to the market. Again, number one due to the acquisition.
Continued strong in domestic beer, but also exports of beer from Mexico into the U.S. There's been a shift from cans to take the place of returnable glass. One-way glass has increased, and there's also exports of filled glass beer into the U.S. With that, I'll turn it over to Didier Sourisseau , who will cover Food Europe.
Thank you. Good morning. I hope you are not going to suffer too much with my accent. A little bit of exoticism in that presentation I think is great, I will keep my strong French accent. I'm very happy to introduce you Food Europe, which is my biggest sector in Europe. I will try during that presentation to show you how solid is that business. I will try as well to explain you its dynamism, the trends, You will see how it's different from U.S. I will try to show you as well why Crown is a first partner of choice. Let's start with a quick overview. We produce 11 billion cans, 25 billion ends, and 5 billion closures.
We have 40 plants, 5,500 employees, and we cover a very large territory, as you can see, from Portugal to Russia and from Madagascar to Ireland. If we are producing in 18 countries, we are selling everywhere in Europe, and we are exporting our ends everywhere in the world. During the past years, we have well restructured Western Europe, and we have specialized our plants all by technology, all by market segments. In red, you can see our mega end centers, which are supplying the can manufacturing plants in green. The facilities which are producing closures are as well dedicated and in purple. For what we call very special product, which are serving the infant nutrition segments, we have as well dedicated plant, which are adopting pharmaceutical approach. In the packaging industry, it's better to be located close to our customers, and this is what this slide is showing.
The acquisition of Mivisa in 2014, which was mainly located in Spain, completed a unique footprint that we had and gives a very close proximity to all our customers. We are strategically located in the agricultural areas and very next to our customers' filling plants. You can see in green the vegetable and our customers who are there. In yellow, the sweet corns, tomato in red, around fruit. What is very unique as well in terms of footprint is we are everywhere on the coast, from Africa, Portugal, Spain, and North Europe, close to the fisheries, which makes our position really unique. The footprint has evolved with the industry, For instance, we have accompanied our customers when vegetable has been developed in Eastern Europe and in Russia. This makes Crown the first partner of leading brands.
With nearly 40% of market share, 11 billion cans out of the 25 billion on the market, we face, nevertheless, odd competition, as you can see. The market, it is still fragmented, but it forces us to be and to stay very competitive and with a very high level of flexibility. We enjoy working with blue-chip companies, as mentioned, Tim, earlier, in Europe, and our top 10 customers represent 40% of our total revenues. Indeed, by nature, we have very large customer base built with small companies, traditional companies, as well as international companies. You can see that our top 10 represent a very incredible customer portfolio and with a very remarkable cover of all our market segments.
Bonduelle who is a leader for the vegetable market in Europe, Princes for ready-to-eat, Abbott and Danone for infant nutrition, Bolton and Escurís for the fish, Landguth and C&D for the pet food, Nestlé and Unilever being multi-segment. Here, you can see our main market segments, which are the base of all our approach in terms of sales, in terms of marketing and industrial. The biggest one is the seasonals, what we call seasonals, which weight 40% of our total volume. In that segment, like I would just say, you will find the vegetables, the sweet corn, which is extremely popular, tomato, and fruits. That segment is very stable. Of course, from one year to the other, the harvest can be different, and you know that this year we are not a very good harvest. The consumption by itself is very stable.
The second market that we have is what we call culinary or ready-to-eat. That segment as well is very traditional. This is where you can find all the very traditional food in Europe. Like for instance, in France, pate or foie gras. Like in the U.K., baked beans. We are producing 1 billion cans for baked beans. All these cans are very traditional, and this is a very solid base for that segment. I will come back to that a little bit later to tell you how our customers are marketing this segment. Fish, 15% of our sales. It's a healthy growth and profitable market. It's extremely popular in Europe and the quality is very good, and it's a very good quality for money. In the poultry, like in Africa, it's very cheap access for protein, it's a very good and solid segment as well. Pet food.
We have two opposite trends in pet foods. The multi-serve is declining when the single-serve is going up. With the new sustainable laws that have bring in Europe, I think that we can see big reverse of the trend for the multi-serve, I will come back to that later. Finally, the baby food or infant nutrition is really strategic for Crown. It requires a strong know-how, and very specialized and added value services to our customers. That market is growing, and we still see big potential here. Now we have seen this short introduction. Let's speak a little bit more about why metal packaging in Europe is the preferred pack. On 74 billion packaging units in Europe, 62% is for metal. It's remarkable the presence of the metal in Europe. Why metal remain the best?
Simply because this is the best way to preserve food without impacting the taste and keeping the nutritive ingredients, which is mainly vitamins. Furthermore, no other packaging can offer the same shelf life. It can go to 3 to 4 years, which is absolutely unique. In terms of supply chain, this is the best value for money. In parallel, our customers are investing into new retailers and new equipment and continue to improve the quality. There is a very strong marketing activity, which supports their sales and development. Let's see our top 5 customers' drivers. The first one is about safety, integrity. That's for sure, our packaging has to be safe, and there is absolutely no compromise with that. This is what we provide. Second, on side of the traditional food, it is important to recruit new and young consumers.
That's why we are seeing the development of new healthy recipes. Third, there is no alternative in this aspirational movement to deliver high quality and to premiumize our product range. Fourth, no discussion, it has to be convenient, at least as convenient as the other substrate. Finally, I think it's very important, at the time where brands are challenged by the end consumers, they should demonstrate good value and the recyclability of the packaging is a very good one. Let's see some example. Here, on your left, this is Bonduelle in Europe. They are commercializing their brands, which is called Cassegrain, which is their most premium brand, with very high quality vegetables and proposed a large variety of recipes and sold it into a rectangular can, premium can. You see on the photo, a very interesting experience.
They have just opened a new concept store where they are selling all their product range and all the very quality of the design of the shelf reflect as well what they want to do. On your right, Mutti, Italian tomatoes customers, is suggesting the quality of its paste product with the printed cans. It is sold all over the world. Another very unique experience, just to show you the premiumization of the can in Europe. This is that restaurant in London called Tincan that serves nothing but seafood from tin cans. Guys, it's very good. 88% of the processed fish cans is in metal cans. Here it reveals, I think, the positive image of the food can in Europe. This true story of the fish can is here on your right.
This is a tradition in Spain and Portugal, in all tapas bar, to enjoy seafood from cans. The choice is amazing. You really have to go there if you have not done it's absolutely amazing. Even if you go into the supermarket, the biggest shelves is with fish cans. Lots of recipes with olive oil, with lemon, whatever, it's absolutely incredible. I think it reveals the dynamism of that market. Moving to healthier food. Another way to recruit, I think it's very important to recruit the new generation of consumers. We can see a trend through organic recipes. You have here an example in France with the brand, d'aucy, which has developed a new organic recipe with ratatouille. Interesting. They have as well launched a limited edition.
They are pretending that this is the harvest of the year, and a couple of months later, you can get your can. Look at the design of the can. It's far away from a very traditional food can, as we can imagine. But the big brands as well, like Nestlé, with their Healthier Kids program, or Danone, with their baby food program, are developing organic food. For me, it reflects very well the dynamism of that segment and its creativity. All these customers have clearly chosen metal packaging as it fits well with their product mix. It's a very good sign for the future. Moving to convenience. Crown developed the mini can for Bonduelle in Europe, which is a 85 gram cans. It's to help the consumers to prepare food such as soup, salads, smoothies, using a measured amount of product.
As overall family sizes are on the decline and the number of single-person households on the rise, single-serve options also help reduce food waste. Convenience for on-the-go consumption. The dessert market is also ripe for single-serve packaging innovation. Crown designed here and supply smaller printed boards for Mont Blanc dessert featuring its innovative PeelSeam technology. Here is the great success in Europe. 92% of the market is yet converted to easy open solutions. We continue to develop this solution in order to reduce the opening force and to improve the tab access. Thanks to this progress, consumer perceives ring pull tin and built- in as a easy packaging to open. Another driver that I've mentioned earlier is safety and product integrity. Again, metal cans is a number 1 packaging in Europe for instant nutrition.
Like we have said for beverage, because it is safe, unbreakable, world-class barrier is great, it's super convenient, and in terms of protection of counterfeiting product, this is the best solution. Over the past 10 years, our customers have invested a lot in Europe. For drying towers and as well for filling lines for metal cans. These investments have been done not only for the European production, but a big part of the production in Europe for infant nutrition is exported to Asia. Once again, it's extremely important to have a very safe packaging as metal. In Asia, metal claims to be the preferred packaging. Finally, I would like to speak a little bit about the circular economy. We have spoken yet before in that presentation about the sustainability of the metal, and it's true that the visual plastic pollution problem has provided a strong political impetus in Europe.
What is very important to understand here, that is the new legislation of the European Community, represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the packaging policy. Just reducing the weight of packaging is no longer considered as a sustainable solution. It's not enough. There is a push for materials that are effectively recycled for mono materials, Metal is perfectly placed for new requirements. Metal can be recycled again and again without loss of quality and fits very well with the circular economy. We make, it is used, it is reused, it is recycled, We make it again. We have said that just before, 75% is recycled. Why choose Crown as a first partner? Because we are well positioned to supply mass market and also added-value products.
From optimized food cans offering cost-competitive packaging for mass market, to premium packaging for brand owners aiming to boost consumers' expenditure on added-value products. We believe in innovation, which brings added value to the brand and convenience to the end consumers. In the last 20 years, the weight of steel cans has been reduced on average by 33%. We propose innovations to all our key customers. We currently have at least one project with all key players. We have a history of 200 years of ingenuity in packaging. We focus on excellence on whatever we do. We believe in continuous improvement and in simple solutions, and we are very proud in Europe to be recognized as a reference in the metal packaging industry.
To conclude, I think the best way is not to speak about us again, but I think it would be very great to see a video about how our customers are seeing us. Let's have a quick video about the market in Europe.
We'll pick up with some accounting after that. I think, here we go. They're over here. You got the column. Column over here. Okay. It's over there. Okay. Looking at recent financial performance, this shows from the end of 2013 to the end of 2018. Earnings up at a 12% CAGR, 299 to 520 over that period. If you don't recognize some of those numbers from the earlier periods, those are restated for the add back of the amortization that we started in 2018. Free cash flow, an average of about $560 million each year, 2013 through 2017, stepping up to $625 million in 2018, and then up to $775 million in 2019. On a subsequent slide, I'll bridge you between the $625 million and the $775 million. You've seen this slide before.
Essentially, what we're trying to show here is we have a history of leveraging up for acquisitions or other things, and then bringing the leverage down. We kept the leverage right around three times all throughout 2008 through 2013. In 2014 and 2015, we did the Mivisa and Empaque acquisitions, levered up, and then quickly de-levered, such that we were back to 3.6 times right before the Signode acquisition. With Signode 4.6, and we're thinking if all the cash just simply goes to pay down debt, we'll take down about a half a turn of leverage a year, such that under that scenario, we'd be back about three and a half times by the end of 2020, which is less than three years since we first did the acquisition. On the debt side, immediately after the acquisition, we had about $3 billion of term loans.
It was some term A, some term B. Some of it was Europe, some of it was U.S. By the end of 2018, we will have paid back some of that debt with the cash flow that we generated this year. There's plenty more pre-payable term loan debt to assist in our de-leveraging. That's where we would expect the cash flow to go. Equally, we have about $5.6 billion today of fixed-rate debt, average rate of 3.6%, but no maturity till 2022. We've got them out on the edge there, and in the meantime, we'll just repay the pre-payable debt. The term loans are pre-payable with no penalty, it should not be an issue. On the cash flow bridge, again, we talked about $625 million for 2018. With an extra quarter of Signode, we'll pick up about $55 million. This is after-tax, after-interest CapEx.
This is the net free cash flow that would come through. The other buckets we've talked about, more or less $450 million-$460 million of capital spending in 2018. Right now, we think that can come down by about $50 million next year. That's the second piece. The final piece is organic improvement. This is essentially everything else. It's the EBITDA improvement we have from the underlying business, as well as any difference in interest, working capital, tax, and things like that. Really a pretty simple bridge. Essentially these three buckets equally contributing to the improvement in 2019 versus 2018. Looking ahead, as I mentioned, what we plan to do is use our cash flow to pay down the debt, which in turn is going to transfer value from the debt holders to the equity holders.
In the meantime, we'll continue to look at opportunities, whether it's emerging market or otherwise. As Ron and Bob were talking about earlier, we do have a number of potential bolt-on acquisitions, but we would only consider them at attractive prices, and I think the ones that you saw laid out, that Signode, for example, did over the last four years, were in fact at attractive prices. If it's consistent with our de-leveraging goals, and if the size of those acquisitions, it's round on the leveraging. We will consider bolt-ons, but these two criteria are critical.
Something else I just wanted to mention is with a large pension plant in the U.K., we have a smaller plant in the U.S., and then we have some smaller other plants around the world. We've taken down our net pension liability on a GAAP basis from over $600 million at the end of 2014. We're down to about $127 million at the end of 2017. We're currently in discussions, again, with our largest U.K. plant to close the plant for future accrual. A number of years ago, we closed the plant to new entrants, but current employees continue to accrue benefits. We're now in discussions with the works council to close out the future accrual. With that, and along with some other initiatives we have, that would involve, in some cases, paying out lump sum benefits, and taking out the liability.
We're looking at paying out, in the fourth quarter of 2018 and throughout 2019, about $350 million of cash out of the pension plan so it doesn't affect Crown's cash flow. Comes out of the pension plan, reduces the assets, but equally reduces the liabilities. Again, no cash flow impact. However, it does have income statement impact in the form of what we call settlement charges. You've seen a number of companies do similar strategies and have similar charges. Based on our estimates right now, we think about a $35 million charge in the fourth quarter of 2018 and another $50 million in 2019, although the phasing is a little bit unclear. These charges will be reported below operating income on that line that was added this year under the new accounting rule, other pension and post-retirement.
The charges will be excluded from our segment income, our EBITDA calculation, and our adjusted earnings. The other pension initiative we have is we're looking to close the U.S. salaried plan to new entrants, although we would continue with the current employees accruing benefits as time goes by. Finally, there's some divergence in practice among the analysts. I think it's about half and half on how you are calculating EBITDA, we just want to explain how we do it. Half of you do it similar to the way we do it, and the other half do not. Using the September year-to-date numbers, we start with segment income, which we give in our earnings release. That already excludes amortization. To that, we add back depreciation, and we pick up the other pension and post-retirement line that is below operating income.
That treatment is consistent with how this was previously treated. Those numbers were always in our EBITDA in the past. They just happened to be in a different spot on the income statement. Beyond that, our bank covenants also do the calculation this way. The settlement charges I just mentioned on the previous slide will be on that line, but will not be included in EBITDA in our calculation. Similar to past treatment, we would have included those items that are non-cash. We would have included them in restructuring and not included them in EBITDA. With that, I'll turn it over to Dan.
Thanks, Tom. Thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit about Crown's sustainability programs. You already know about the sustainability of our products, right? Metal packaging, we've told that story many times. We wanted to tell you a little bit about what we're doing as a company in terms of driving sustainability. This isn't a new journey for us. Our sustainability report came out in 2015, another in 2017, but we've been really doing this for decades, we wanted to explain a bit about that. In 2016 and 2017, we received the highest rating in the metal packaging industry by CDP, an A- leadership rating. I think that shows the things that we've been doing. We have our 2020 goals. We've already exceeded our 5% reduction in energy, and we are 75% towards our emissions reduction goal.
Those are just in the last couple of years. Thank you. What we'd like to do is give you some sense of what we've done historically to put perhaps some of that into a greater perspective. As I said, that leadership position in the CDP rating, already significant progress towards our goals. I want to take you through the six examples of how we've been doing this. Pollution prevention is not a new idea for Crown. Here you can see some examples in the 1990s and early 2000s where we were getting recognized for our pollution prevention activities, exceeding the EPA's 33/50 Program, the WasteWise Program, many others. We have been attacking the low-hanging fruit and reducing our emissions historically over a long period of time.
I think this makes it even more impressive that just since 2015, we've reduced our emissions another 7.6%. We're continuing to do more to improve our sustainability footprint. We already recycle 100% of the scrap that we're using in our facilities. An impressive number of achievements in terms of a focus on pollution prevention. Of course, we do a lot in the area of lightweighting as well, and that has a significant impact in reducing our sustainability footprint. We've done this primarily through the use of technology. At the top, you can see what we've been doing with food can, DWI food can reduction over the years. This has been through new technologies, whether it's our resilient rail technology, which enables us to make the beads on the cans much more tighter in tolerance, and therefore lightweighting the cans.
By improvements in punch profiles, beater tooling that we're using. A steady improvement of performance that takes metal out of our containers. We've done this in food ends using double reduced material, new panel designs, new tab designs, new score profiles, all that help us to reduce the amount of metal in those ends. An example in aerosol packaging. Here in the U.S., we have restrictions on gauge for aerosols from the DOT and in Canada through Transport Canada. We use performance data. We're able to show them with thinner gauge, we were able to provide the same level of safety performance and therefore lightweight our materials. One of the examples you don't see on this slide, but one of the most important historically has been our SuperEnd beverage end.
Remember, that was an initiative back in the early 2000s where we reduced 10% of the metal in the end and 7% of the coatings. That has become an industry standard that's moving throughout the world. Crown and Crown's licensees alone have produced over 500 million of these ends. What does that mean from a sustainability perspective? We have reduced more than 130,000 metric tons of aluminum and over 2,200 tons of coatings by using this new end technology. Translating that into greenhouse gases, that's more than 1.1 million greenhouse gases in terms of reduction. These reductions in the material that we're using and the design of our products are having very significant improvements in our environmental footprint. Moving now to look at it from an economic perspective, one dimension we're proud of is our innovation and our heritage of innovation.
We have a world-class R&D organization, a very unique package design team that understands how to design products to achieve the marketing goals of our customers, but also the manufacturing requirements of our industry. Again, here we have a proud history, whether it's things like the SuperEnd or shaped beverage cans, blow-formed cans that we were producing in the early 2000s. That safety button on metal vacuum closures that's now ubiquitous through the industry. We've been taking this path of innovation forward with new products as well. Some of them you would have maybe seen yesterday, the full aperture easy open end on beverage cans that enables you to get the can becoming a glass, and you get the entire olfactory experience. The beer actually tastes better in this can than it does from another can because you get those olfactory notes. That's why craft brewers like that package.
The EasyLift container that Didier referred to, where we provide easier openability by easier tab access. It's not just as easy as lifting the tab. In fact, the tab has to be laid hard against the end to run through the retort. This is a bistable end that we pop down and then provide that good tab access for the consumer. Our Peelfit technology. Didier showed you the peel seam technology where you have a ring with a foil lid that provides easy openability. Here we've eliminated that ring, so a sustainability benefit. We use a bead on the wall of the can, flatten that, and that becomes the sealing surface for the foil, eliminating the ring entirely. We get that metal savings, but it also means we can put the foil anywhere we want along the side of the wall.
Here you see an infant formula can with a spot at the top for the spoon, so the consumer doesn't have to dig it out from the bottom of the container. Or our InnoValve technology, where we have a unique valve in the base of the can that enables the customer, La Colombe, to inject some nitrous oxide into the package to provide a very creamy latte experience from a can. If you've had a nitrogen coffee, you haven't had good coffee in a can. You have to try this. It's a very different experience made possible through this technology. The last example I'll just mention is this one. It's our CrownConnect technology where we can put a unique code on every can. That enables the Internet of Things opportunities, whether it's traceability, authenticity through the supply chain.
Here it was used by the customer, FACT Beverages, as the first use of a can as a cryptocurrency in the marketplace. Some interesting innovations that we're driving into the marketplace. Obviously, in the economic space, a relentless focus on improving operations. We've done this a number of ways. We've done it through investments over time. Those could be new lines, wider coils, newer back ends, but it's process monitoring equipment as well. We've developed some unique three-piece weld monitoring technology that enables us to measure the quality of each weld as we're producing each three-piece can, or our Integra Double Seam Monitor, which enables us to measure the quality of the double seam in our plants and in our customers' filling plants. Other kinds of technology innovations, use of high solids. You see along some of the samples in the back, some of these matte finishes.
These actually run slower on our lines. Using high solids so that we can get back those efficiencies and those speeds. New necker designs that help us to improve what we're doing. Of course, a lot of knowledge-sharing that happens throughout the company, whether it's ways to think about faster changeovers, lean technology, partnering with our customers and our suppliers to bring new materials in that help to run more effectively on our lines. Looking on the social dimension, we're very proud of what we've done in terms of worker safety, and this gives you a sense of progress in the Americas Division over the last 20 years. This has been driven by significant culture change in the company. We no longer say that safety is our number one priority, because priorities change over time. It's our number one value. We've eliminated the word accidents from our vernacular.
We now talk about injuries and incidents. Accidents imply it was just your bad luck. It just happened to you. It's a shame. We believe these are avoidable, and therefore, we've removed that word from the way we think about it. We've done this through a number of initiatives, something like our safe behavioral observations. Thousands of times today in our company, employees are walking up to other employees and watching them do a task. This is an anonymous process. It's not meant to catch someone doing something wrong. It's meant to find a better way to do something from a safety perspective. I watch a task, and then we talk about it. Is there a better way to do it? Is there a safer way to do it? We are literally doing thousands of those each day throughout the company.
We dedicated ourselves to job hazard analyses, auditing. We make sure our employees are engaged in our safety committee. It's dozens of things that we've done that have helped to drive this improved performance. Another example on the social dimension is our support for education. We're doing a lot at the local level, different plants. In Cambodia, they're supporting a local school, actually sponsoring students and then having them intern. In Shipley, we have a world-class apprentice program, very extensive program. In fact, they represent the U.K. each year in the Olympics of the Apprenticeship Program. They're a very distinguished program. In Thailand, support of local schools. In our technical centers, taking high school students to Maker Faire so they can see how things are made through technology. We're also doing things at the global level. We sponsor something called The Franklin Institute.
The Franklin Institute is a science museum. As you can imagine, hundreds of thousands of students go through there each year, but it actually has much more global impact. They have the most visited science website in the world. They teach teachers how to teach STEM better. Many STEM teachers in high school aren't majors in those subjects. They provide them tools so that they can teach science, technology, engineering, and math more effectively. They put up together traveling shows that travel throughout the world, demonstrations of science at work. We've always been strong supporters of education. In terms of thinking about our future focus, Crown has a priority in the space of renewable energy. We're doing that because we want to reduce the amount of electricity that we use and the cost of our energy use.
This shows our recent investment in Spartanburg, an aerosol plant in South Carolina, a major solar array that has achieved just what we want it to. It's reduced our electricity usage dramatically and our costs. We're looking at large-scale on-site or off-site programs that we can use to continue this progress. Then, of course, innovation, whether that's driving continued use of the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0. How do we take the data we use and use it better to make our factories even more efficient? Of course, how do we continue to deliver innovations like some of the things you see around the room to deliver more for our customers? You know a lot about the sustainability of Crown's metal products, but you probably don't know yet that much about the Signode Industrial Group.
Actually, a remarkably high percentage of the materials they use are made with 100% post-consumer recycle or post-industrial recycle material. They've done that in some pretty innovative ways. The strapping plant that you're going to be visiting in Florence uses recycled green PET bottles. Think about Mountain Dew, Sprite bottles, to produce the product that they sell in the marketplace. Their Angleboard products, their cardboard products using recycled content. Some very innovative things like these coil separators that use recycled credit cards as the material that they use in those products. Signode has a long history of making sure that they have a very strong environmental footprint for their products as well. We're looking at how we can now leverage that a bit more in Crown. For example, we use plastic strapping.
Could we chip our strapping, send it to Florence, take something that they're buying today and give it to them for free, take something we're paying to get rid of today, and turn it into an asset? Those kinds of assets, those kinds of opportunities are going to exist all through the companies. The large coil separators that we have, the cardboard cores in our coils could be used for the cardboard products, et cetera. We think there are some another way you can think about synergies, in this case, from a sustainability perspective.
That concludes what I wanted to do in terms of giving you a sense of some of Crown's sustainability programs. At this point, I think we wanted to turn it over to a broader Q&A. Remarkably, we kind of ended right on the time we tried to target, which gives us about 30 minutes before lunch. Then I think when we're done with the Q&A, I'd like Tom Fischer to come up just to explain to everybody how the transportation to the factory and then back to the airport is going to work. I think at this point, we're prepared to take some questions. Oh, there's a lot of hands. Since we're being broadcast, you got to wait for the microphone. Tom and Suzanne will come around, or Ed and Suzanne will come around with the microphone. Go ahead, Chip.
Thank you. Great presentation. Appreciate the information. A question, I think more perhaps for Tom Kelly, but all of you. You gave us the debt paydown schedule getting down to 3.5 times by the end of 2020 if you use all your free cash flow to reduce debt. What do you assume in terms of how much of the minority or non-controlling interest earnings will be paid out in those years to get to that?
Right. We'll end up at about, we talked about $75 million for this year. We'll probably be a little bit short of that, maybe $65 million. In future years, we're assuming another $75 million in each of the years.
Okay.
George.
Oh.
There's John. I don't think George is here.
Oh, okay.
Okay, thanks. Going back to slide 37, I think during Ron's presentation, he called out EBITDA for Signode. Just curious as to why it was flat between 2016 and 2017 versus the increase this year. CapEx in 2018 for Signode was $28 million, versus $40 million a year ago during a time when the economy is better, growth is better. Why was it lower? Finally, in terms of the case study that you put out for the Great Recession and the associated drop in terms of EBITDA and sales, how would that compare as you kind of think about the business model going forward for a milder recession scenario, maybe 2001, 2002, as it relates to sales, EBITDA, as you think about stress testing the company?
Okay. I'll start with the first question. Between 2016 and 2017, basically flat EBITDA. Biggest driver of that is really the impact of inflation. Certainly, wage inflation has an impact on us. We also saw, like a lot of industrial companies, a lot of freight inflation. That's taken us a while to pass that on to customers, because there's not the structural mechanism in place like there is for steel and resin to do that. We saw an unprecedented increase in paper prices, including some of this recycled paper. There's been a paper shortage for some of this recycled paper. Some big increases in paper. That again, took us a while because in the paper markets, they've been relatively stable over the years. There's not as much of a structural process for passing it on.
It took us a while to go out and get the price increases, et cetera. We've now caught up to that for the most part, but that certainly hit us in the back half of 2018, or 2017. On the CapEx side, I don't know that it's really something to do with 2018 as much as in 2017, we had a couple bigger projects, really towards the end of the year, where we added a new stretch film line, for instance, in Europe. That was a few million dollars. It was more of a timing thing than anything where we had some bigger growth or cost-saving projects that hit in the back part of 2017 versus 2018. On the recession, it's certainly hard to answer that question with any specificity given that we don't know what kind of recession we'll encounter.
I think the way we think about it is, if you have a more normal recession where it's a 5% or 10% drop in revenue, what kind of fall through does that have? Typically, we're about a 30% variable margin. There's certainly levers to pull beyond that on the downside. Probably not 5% or 10% down, you're probably not shutting a lot of capacity. There's certainly some fixed costs you could attack on the SG&A front in that kind of environment.
Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Again, thanks for the details and the time today. I had a couple of questions first on Signode and then a bigger picture question for Tim. We talked a lot today, you did, about the opportunities to optimize the cost structure. You talked a lot about the fact that these are very niche businesses. No one could put these together. You have another opportunity to, I guess, cross-sell. In some ways, the fact that the business in fact exists this way may suggest that maybe it's difficult to actually cross-sell. Do you have specific targets that you can give us here today in terms of the savings you expect from optimizing the cost structure over whatever period of time you'd like to give us?
Similarly, targets internally in the organization for how you're going to optimize and cross-sell and get all these different businesses to actually leverage one another. That's question number 1.
Question number 2, Tim, you kind of touched on it a little bit as well. Last time you did this presentation or an Analyst Day was coming off of a relatively large acquisition that took you some years to get through. It seems like Signode is in a better position than that acquisition was, but can you tell us what the parallels are and what the opportunities are, and what the differences hopefully are versus 1996? Thank you, guys.
I'll handle the first part of that question. I think we can't really share specific targets. Do we have goals in mind? Absolutely. We've got internal discussions that we're having today, and we'll continue to in the future. A lot of these things revolve around, again, our go-to-market strategy. You mentioned cross-selling. That's something we look at. We do it to a degree today. Certainly, as we continue to develop and implement more commonalities in the ERP systems, we're going to be able to ease those types of discussions and opportunities. What we've seen within Signode, because we do have these different geographies and these different platforms, as we discussed, we have people that may have started in Signode, and now they go and they work in one of the protective businesses or vice versa.
We have people that are very well-versed, career Signode people that have touched many parts of the business, such as most of us have in Crown as well. We've got good opportunities there with people understanding the other sides of the business, but better yet, they have the contacts, and they know who to call and when. What we're working on is streamlining those types of communications and making that better internally. We looked also then at the operations side. Again, there's been a lot of work done. You're going from a very decentralized business, not more than five years ago, to one that began that journey of starting to centralize and understand different back-office structures and bring people together where they never were before. We're continuing that. It's a long-range journey. It's a long-range strategy.
Again, it takes time to change those kind of cultures. Someone asked last night, if it's a nine-inning ballgame, where are we at in this? Well, first or second inning. There was a beginning. There was a start to push in that direction. That wasn't the focus, though, of the previous owners. Previous owners were to pass along the company to good stewards. That's where we come in. We'll continue to do that. We've got people motivated, very motivated in that direction. We've had a lot of discussions. It's going to take time to understand, yeah, these are some very diverse businesses, but some of them, when we look at it, we can bring them together to reduce fixed costs. You'll see in the factory later, I think it'll make a little more sense.
You can't think like a can plant that takes up 200,000 square feet and it's all one line. This is a line, some of the lines could fit inside this room. You can bring multiple lines and things together, and if you've got the right people in place, they can manage across those different spectrums. When you think about paper businesses, we can bring various products, a multitude of products together, which we already have in some locations, because they have a common substrate, let's say, and then we can work across those things. Some of you know we do food and aerosol, three-piece type technologies. They have some commonalities in cut, code, and print, those kind of things. You can do some distribution like that. Those are the same kind of practices and thinking we're going to bring to Signode and use that line of reasoning.
Again, people have thought about those things. They've never had the ability, number one, firstly, to go across those borders, the business borders. Number two, it's a long-range strategy and long-range thinking, that wasn't prevalent.
When do you think you might be able to talk about targets? Would that be a couple years from now?
We're actively going through that right now. I think over time, we're going to see as we start to see those things on the horizon, and we get to a point where we say, "Definitely, this is what we're going to do," then I think those are the things Tim and Tom will be able to pass along. Again, we're essentially four months into Crown kind of management of the business. We've got a ways to go, and I think we've made a lot of progress. People have asked me, "What has surprised you?" How good the business is. I don't think we really knew until we got in, and it's Christmas time coming. Kind of unwrap it and see what you got. I think we're very encouraged by what we see is there and what we see coming in the future.
Thanks.
George, I think just to follow on that, I think fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with this business. This is a tremendous business. The first thing you look at when you're the steward of a new business is do no harm. Just making cost reductions for cost reduction's sake is not necessary here. This is a business that's been running exceptionally well through a very difficult recession, like a lot of companies had 10 years ago, through an industrial downturn only three or four years ago. We had an industrial downturn in 2014, 2015, the business continues to grow with very little capital.
To answer your question, if we wanted to put a fine point on it, I'm not sure we always want to put a fine point on it, but there have been a number of initiatives that the Signode team has put in place from the time the Carlyles came in. Mark Burgess and Ron Kropp, they restructured how we go to market and how we manage the global equipment and tools business, that's worked exceptionally well. I think the revenues in equipment and tools, Ron, are up $150 million between 2013 and today. It's just a tremendous amount of growth. It's a different focus. We're going to get around all that, but this is a business that's a platform for future growth and creating value for Crown.
We didn't identify something here that was broken. We thought we were smarter than anybody else, and we could fix it. This is a business that's in really good shape. How do we continue to grow the business, take advantage of the opportunities? Yeah, on the margin, we're going to find ways to do what they do more efficiently. We'll cut some cost out. The cross-sell is a big opportunity. That's a mindset change that Bob talked about earlier. We're trying to change the mindset of perhaps folks in the industrial business versus folks in the protective business and the equipment business. That's an ongoing process that's getting better every day. Yeah. Listen, the differences between this and CarnaudMetalbox, they're stark, right? As I said, this is not a broken business. This is not a business that needs a great amount of restructuring.
This is not a business we bought that comes with inherent liabilities like pension plans, other factory closings, or large consolidation or restructuring efforts that require a great amount of cash. The CMB acquisition, we bought CMB in 1996. Carnaud and Metal Box were put together in 1989. Nothing was done with it until we got it. It sat there for seven years under the new ownership group, after they put Carnaud and Metal Box together in 1989. They did nothing with the business. I was with the company then. I was certainly a junior person in the company.
I can't necessarily speak for what they believed they could bring to the table. Certainly, most of the effort and most of the improvement that took place, took place under my predecessor, Mr. Conway, when he took over in 2001. We made an extreme focus on trying to get back to what a manufacturing company needs to do. That's produce a high-quality product and provide great service at a very low cost. We did take a lot of cost out. That was a long effort. I think we're in great shape today in our European platform, whether it's in beverage cans and/or food cans. This is an entirely different business. I think when we look at Signode, the platform there is to grow.
When we looked at CarnaudMetalbox, it's how we could run the business much more effectively than they were running before. Two total different ends of the spectrum.
Mark.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Tim, for all the information today. I wondered if you could give us a little bit of perspective with Signode on the portfolio, because the portfolio, I think, is much broader than many of us realize. You've got foamed products, you've got adhesive. You've got a lot of different businesses in here. Just when you think about the business going forward, what are the kind of parameters for what you would look at to add to this business and what would you stay away from?
I think first thing is, let's just remind everybody what Tom Kelly said. We bought this business to grow the business and create more value in the future for the Crown stakeholder. We are certainly open to acquisition, but it has to be consistent with the deleveraging goals. Having said that, at the end of 2018, we'll have $8 billion of debt. At the end of 2019, you'll have $7.4 billion of debt. Even if you made an acquisition at seven or eight times as they've done historically, you're not going to meaningfully change the leverage. There is ample opportunity to continue to grow the business and continue to deleverage with the cash flow that's generated. There are a variety of opportunities. I think one of the things they spent a little bit of time talking about today was end-of-line automation.
Any company in any industry, and this business serves a variety of customers across a variety of industries and end needs, has the need to cut cost and become more efficient. One of the ways to do that is to cut your costs in non-productive areas. Productive areas, the product we make. After making the product, how you protect that product, ship it, and deliver it, generally, you don't consider that productive when you're a manufacturing environment. There's a lot of opportunity there for us to participate in end-of-line automation. We're not the only guys that can do that. We can do that, and many other companies can do it. I think we can do it on a much broader scale, and we're generally aware of the opportunities given the products that Signode provides. That would be a large focus as we look forward.
I think there's a lot to be said about e-commerce. I think we're going to be very careful about e-commerce. I think the e-commerce space is going to change. We already do participate in e-commerce, the so-called box or the fitments in the box, but they're generally engineered solutions. It's not peanuts, it's not crumpled paper, it's not things that are perhaps less engineered or less technical. The folks at those other companies would disagree with me. They'd say it's very engineered and very technical, and perhaps it is. I think the amount of void fill required in the future is going to shrink. We'll be very careful how we progress in that regard.
Edlain.
Thank you. Edlain Rodriguez, UBS. I'm going to just piggyback on that question. In terms of opportunities you're seeing for Signode, are there any geographic areas that present best opportunities? You don't seem to have a meaningful presence in China. Is that an area of focus at all or not worth that?
I think we have an operation in Qingdao in China that's about, what, $30 million in sales, Bob, and it's largely focused on equipment assembly and distribution in the Chinese marketplace using the world-class equipment and tools that Signode has out of India and Switzerland and the U.S. It's less focused on consumables, where we can ship consumables, we do. I would say that given the proliferation of suppliers in China and the, let's just say, the less stringent requirements for quality and other measures, China would not be a primary focus. There are many other markets in the world, Southeast Asia and others, that offer great growth opportunities, including in existing markets that Signode's already in. I'd be surprised if we did anything in China.
One clarification for Tom. In the bridge you gave for the free cash flow guidance, that $50 million of lower CapEx, that's versus 2018 numbers? Did you mention that before previously?
The bridge was from 2018 to 2019. Yes, that's '18 versus '19. We previously spoke about bringing capital down by about $25 million, in our latest projections as we go through the budget process, at this point, it's looking more like $50 million.
Eric?
Great. On capital allocation, you talked about obviously debt paydown and potential bolt-on M&A. Just wondering if you could remind us what leverage range you'd be comfortable buying back the stock. Could the timing of that be accelerated given the relative value of the stock? Just for Tom, in terms of the $50 million step-down, what do you think is sort of a normalized CapEx number for the combined company now?
I think on the relative value of the stock, we continue to believe that there are a lot of undervalued stocks right now. Let's not kid ourselves. The market's very volatile. We happen to believe we're extremely undervalued, given the franchise value we have across a number of the businesses and the cash flow that we have generated in the past and that we're going to continue to generate. The target is to be back to 3.5 times by the end of 2020. That doesn't mean we have to wait till 2020 to buy back shares. Depending on how we progress through 2019, and as we're well on track to make $775 next year, depending on the value of the shares at that point and other needs in the business, would we buy some shares in 2019? Perhaps we would.
I'm hopeful that we're not going to find ourselves in a situation this time next year where we feel we're so undervalued versus others in the space. On the prospect of capital, I'll just take the question. It's lumpy. As Ron said, it can be lumpy from time to time, depending on opportunities. If we're at $460 this year and we're $410 next year, I think you should consider a number in the $400 million-$450 million range to be kind of a standard capital spend for the combined company that we have here. We know the Signode number's pretty stable around $30 million-$35 million. Really the mover is the opportunities within the can business. The only thing I would say is, how do I say this without sounding snarky?
If you're telling me that whether we spend $401 million or $450 million one year, that changes the value of the company, a $12 billion organization for $50 million of capital, we're going to have a difficult conversation to come to any agreement. I think $400 million-$450 million is a range, and it's going to depend on opportunities that we think create and give value in the future.
All right. Scott?
Thanks. A couple of questions on Signode. When you look at the simplifications taking place in the business over the years, it looks like you've really hit sourcing and manufacturing, but maybe SG&A is another area of cost reduction on a go-forward basis. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. When I look at the portfolio, Protective Solutions, I think, was a $600 million business. Admittedly, I didn't quite understand the strategic fit of that business, and a lot of those businesses are being sold, converting businesses for 10, 11 times EBITDA. I was just wondering, I know you just bought this overall business, but maybe that's a place for a divestiture on a go-forward basis.
Lastly, for Ron, you mentioned the revenue cyclicality, but can you talk about what the EBITDA cyclicality maybe is for Signode in a normalized 5%-10% volume recession? Thanks.
I'll start with the first point, SG&A. I'm going to let Ron take the SG&A, but on the manufacturing side, I think you talk to anybody in the can business, you talk to Joe Cummons at Signode, there's always improvements we can make in manufacturing. Part of the process of continuous improvement is continually improve on the manufacturing floor, make sure everybody in the factory is fully engaged, and they have full support above them. We talked about it earlier that we need not to waste any money above the factory floor, and that's incumbent upon us, and Ron can take the SG&A question. I think with respect to Protective, I'm speaking fast because I want to make sure everybody gets their questions in. With respect to Protective, yeah, it's a $600 million business. It probably was only $350 million 10 years ago.
This is a business that Signode has grown via a couple small acquisitions and largely organically, we think it creates, again, exceptional value. There's very little capital required in this business. On average, I'll bet you the EBITDA margin is right in line with the overall Signode EBITDA margin. It's not like making beverage cans. It's a pretty easy business to run. The moat in this business is the scale and the service, the proximity to customers and our ability to serve, especially when you consider the proportion of freight as a proportion of the overall delivered cost. We have great advantage here, and the value is quite good. I'm not sure that trading a business and paying tax at an 11x multiple generates any real long-term value. We're not a private equity shop that buys a company and then sells a company.
I think the purpose behind this was to buy a franchise business that had clear leadership and had a large, stable cash flow and had a manufacturing environment that we believed we could operate in and had requirements were such that we didn't believe that cash flow was in jeopardy, and this is just one of those businesses. I would say that probably not motivated to sell that business. It's a business we believe we can continue to grow, and it fits in the strategy of if you make something and you need to ship something, whether it's to a warehouse or to consumer, you need to use products like Signode makes. You just can't get away from it. Protective fits into that, whether it's on the back end of strap or it's combined with the equipment offering. It's part of the total offering to the customer.
I'll let Ron take the rest of that question.
First of all, on the recession question, I think I kind of answered it earlier. In a 5%-10% down revenue recession, our normal variable margins are 30%. We think we could do better than that from a decremental perspective. It was 22% decremental in 2009. A lot of that gets to the SG&A question around what kind of leverage can we pull just on an ongoing basis as part of our overall initiative here to make the business more cost-effective. Could you pull some of those quicker in a recession? Maybe. As I think about the opportunities in SG&A, it really starts with, in ITW, all the businesses, including Signode, were run on a very decentralized basis. When we say decentralized, we mean decentralized. They have their own ERP system, their own back office, their own sales force.
At one point, the Signode business, before the recession, had 150 business units. It was down to 100 business units when we separated from ITW. We're now down to 80 business units. Part of that, it's a lot of small business units. Some of them are $20 million. There's a lot of singles here. There's not a grand plan that would say, we got one big SG&A initiative, and it's going to save tens of millions of dollars. It's a lot of small singles. Every place where we have an opportunity to put some things together, we'll do that. As an example, we started looking at the ERP systems. We've got 80 different ERP systems. That's one of the things that will help us get at this SG&A footprint.
Once we commonize an ERP system, we can also combine back offices. We're in the process now of implementing a common ERP system at certain businesses in Europe and certain businesses in the U.S. There is a five-year roadmap where if we wanted to, we could gradually add more and more units onto this and pull out SG&A cost. For instance, one of the units we're doing it at in the U.S. is our big strap business. As a result of that, we're combining our metal strap business that served the metals industry, Fleetwood, with the regular Signode business. As a result, we're going to combine the back office. We've already gone down from two controllers to one controller. It's those kinds of opportunities that we have in front of us, and there's a lot of them.
It's a matter of really just working through and prioritizing what are the best opportunities to reduce the SG&A footprint.
Gabe?
Yep.
Gabe Hajde, Wells Fargo. Just real quick, you mentioned the customer loss that equated to about 1%, but it sounded like it was able to be replaced, I don't want to say easily, but without us noticing on the outside. The question really is, I'd be inclined to think that customers are motivated to deal with more of a longer-term owner as opposed to maybe private equity. Can you just talk about some of the customer conversations that you're having with some of the bigger customers?
Yeah. Obviously you know well in the food and beverage space who the Crown customers are, and we've talked a lot about those today. Those are Signode customers as well. What we're finding is, look, we can say, we can come in and we can provide you a primary package. Guess what? We can do all the secondary and transit packaging behind it as well, help within their process as far as taking goods out to customers. Again, as we mentioned, we've had leadership management meetings between the Signode people and the Crown people to identify what those opportunities are. We found ideas going both directions. A Crown customer said, "Hey, this is something that maybe Signode we can start to bring in some of the things that we're doing there," as well as Signode having customers and making introductions for Crown as well.
Those discussions are ongoing. Of course, we have to mention, some of Signode's customers are Crown competitors in that space. Look, you all know we have decades of experience in managing a machinery business that deals with those kinds of customers as well. The advantage from them, the advantage from Signode is we make the best equipment. We make the best materials in this space. If you're not participating with us, then you're behind. You're behind everybody else that is. That's our strategy, and those are the things that we're going to continue to push forward. I think there's, again, a lot of opportunities there, and we're just starting to break the surface on these things and figure out what we don't know.
The more we learn about Signode, the more we're going to be able to do things with Crown as well.
I think, Gabe, just to follow on that question, Bob doesn't want to say it. You guys probably don't need to think real long and hard to think about who the toughest customer to serve is in the food and beverage space globally. That would be the customer, right? I think there are some customers that believe it's their right just to abuse suppliers. I think we and some others, certainly in the can space, are tired of being abused, and we're going to push back. I think we lost $22 million worth of revenue, and the profitability on that account was probably $300,000 or something. Right, Ron? It was nothing. It was an easy customer to walk away from, and they are an easy customer to walk away from everywhere. I wouldn't be overly concerned about that.
The one great thing we found with Signode, there's two things we found with Signode after we bought them. There's three things. The opportunities are much more than we thought. Their ability to recover inflation much quicker than we do in the can business, and their price policy, really positive, really strong, much stronger than we had anticipated, and that's one thing there. I think we have time for one more question, then we're going to end the webcast, and then we're going to grab some lunch. So
Brian?
Thank you. Thanks for all the details on Signode. I did want to follow up on that point just to kind of enlighten us a little bit about the contractual nature of some of the raw material pass-throughs that you've got, or in cases where it isn't contractual, how long do you typically need to recover the margins that you would give up in an inflationary environment?
Sure. Let's let Ron take that.
In the price pass-through, they're primarily focused on the strap and film side. It depends on the region, first of all. It's much more structured in the U.S. and Europe than it would be in certain countries in Asia. In the U.S. and Europe, there's indices for steel, for resin, that are really the benchmark in the industry for both the buy and the sell. In some cases, we have contractual buy and sell, especially with, for instance, the steel mills, because we're buying coils of steel, we're slitting it, we're selling it back to them to wrap the steel. It's a pretty quick, and aligned pass-through mechanism there, and it's contractual. On the resin side, it's a different supplier, obviously, than the end user. We do have some contracts with end users, especially direct customers, where we're selling the strapping directly.
Even where we don't have contracts, it's really become a practice in the industry to pass on raw material costs tied to indices. It's a relatively easy and quick pass-through where you can say, look, this is what the index did. We're going to increase the price X amount. It goes both ways, by the way, as you saw in the revenue numbers. Although some of it's contractual, not all of it is. For the most part, in the developed parts of the world, for resin and steel, we can get the pass-through pretty quickly.
Then just sort of related to that, it looked like over the last four and also 10 years, the sales growth averaged around 2%, the EBITDA growth somewhere around 2.5%. Is that, do you think, representative of the growth going forward, or do you think you can grow a little bit faster than-- I know you're not giving long-term targets today, but do you think that that could be a little bit of a faster growth rate than that?
I think one of the things, and we've talked about it a little bit here, one of the things that we did a couple of years ago, is separate this equipment into a business. That's a real good, higher growth business. Now that we put it all in one group and are focusing the efforts around how do we innovate, how do we go to market, that's going to continue to be a higher and higher percentage, and therefore a higher growth level.
Thank you.
I think we're going to just make some just couple quick closing remarks, then we'll break for lunch and informally, I don't expect to get to eat a lot of lunch. The one thing I would say to that last question that, Brian, you asked is, can you grow a business where you spend no money and make no investment 2%? The answer is yes. That's the business you want to own, fellas, ladies. This is a tremendous business. I know it's not as sexy as beverage cans. I know it's a lot of below the radar businesses. Yes, now beverage cans are sexy, yeah. It's a below to the radar business. It's a lot of niche businesses requiring very little capital. With very little capital and no acquisitions, you can grow a business 2%.
We can grow the beverage can business 2%, we have to spend a lot of money. We have to spend money not only to grow it, we have to spend money to maintain it. A number of you have some of the parts models where you value the beverage can businesses that we own as the most valuable, and you value Food Europe and Signode as the least valuable. I could stand up here all day and tell you you're wrong. You got it upside down. I talked to George last night, the George Staphos Family Trust for little Georgie and Georgette. You want to put a business in the family trust that you're going to feel really good when you're on your deathbed knowing your kids and your grandkids are taken care of? This is the business you want to put in there.
This business just churns it out, and it's necessary for industries all over the world across a variety of products. They have to use these products, and it just generates cash, and it doesn't require cash. I would argue too, you've got your models upside down. That's not to say the beverage can business is not a great business. We know the beverage can business is a great business. It's a very exciting business. This happens to be a great business as well, as does our Food European business. I think with that, we'll close the discussion and the webcast. We'll grab some lunch.
For those of you who are going to the factory, as you get seated for lunch, Tom Fischer's going to make some announcements as to how the busing will work from here to the factory, then from the factory to the airport with your luggage on the same bus you go over on. I think we don't want to miss that. Thank you very much.