Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our best wishes to all of you for your continued safety as we progress through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. During today's review, we will be making forward-looking statements, projections, and/or references to non-GAAP measures, and investors are reminded to refer to the caption "Forward-Looking Statements" in our Form 10-K, filed for the year ended December 31st, 2020, and in subsequent filings. We have included brief bios on each of today's presenters in your materials, and each will be introduced as the program is handed over to them. We have a full agenda for you this morning. It's been a couple of years since we've had an investor presentation, so we're looking forward to this today, and I hope you are as well. We'll first review global beverage, then we'll review transit.
Thomas A. Kelly will take us through financials, and early on in the presentation, John M. Rost is going to discuss our efforts to promote and further discuss the inherent sustainability advantages of metal packaging. Turning to slide nine, we have recast the company's sales profile by region and product line to account on a pro forma basis for the recently announced sale of the company's European tinplate businesses. The company will have 45% of its sales base in North America, with 65% of global sales and 75% of global EBITDA being generated by our beverage businesses. After the sale of the European assets, we still maintain a very diverse business, both geographically and product-wise. Our global beverage can business maintains leading market positions in many global markets, including some of the fastest-growing developing markets. As every global Crown associate knows, it is always safety first.
We remain committed to safety as well as environmental stewardship and have dedicated significant human assets to the continued development of these initiatives. Dr. John Rost will provide a thorough review of our sustainability efforts in a few minutes. We like to say we're fortunate to work in the packaging space. Regardless of what's going on in the world, people need to eat and drink, and they need to move things around safely and securely. It's this consistency of demand that has allowed Crown to operate for 129 years, from the invention of the bottle cap in 1892 through two world wars until today. While there are many challenges to be faced over that long a time period, Crown has made tremendous progress over the last 20 years, and we remain confident in our future prospects. Turning to slide 11, 2020 was a record year for the company.
We commercialized significant new global beverage can capacity, and we recorded 4% global beverage and 7% global food can unit volume growth during the year. Importantly, we converted this growth into record earnings and free cash flow, allowing us to reduce our leverage to less than 4x . None of this would have been possible without the dedicated and highly performing associates throughout our global operations. We again want to express our continued appreciation to our employees and partners, whose commitment continues to be instrumental to our success. Our outlook for the future is also strong, and we're off to a great start. We achieved record results in the 2021 Q1 at $1.83 per share.
We initiated and paid our first dividend in more than 20 years during the Q1 , and we have announced additional capacity expansion projects for the company's beverage can businesses globally as we continue our multi-year program to commercialize new capacity to support our customers' growing brands. Beverage cans made from infinitely recyclable aluminum are the increasingly preferred package choice of our customers and consumers alike, and we expect Crown will realize 10% unit volume growth this year. Proceeds from the recently announced sale of the European assets will be used to reduce debt levels, continue investing for beverage can growth, and to also buy back common shares under a recent board-approved $1.5 billion share repurchase authorization. Briefly reviewing the financial performance on slide 13 reflects the positive momentum we have built over the last number of years.
Importantly, as we have said before, we have been able to rapidly capture greater earnings and cash flow from the increased demand across our businesses. After the sale of the European assets, we maintain two large global franchise businesses, beverage and transit packaging, each of which have scale and unparalleled global reach. It certainly is an exciting time to be in packaging. Demand is high, we are growing. Importantly, we'll say it again, we are converting this growth into higher earnings and free cash flow. Dr. John Rost will now review Crown's efforts with regard to sustainability and the undeniable benefits of metal packaging. Dr. Rost?
Thank you, Tim. Hello, I'm John Rost, Crown's Head of Sustainability, Regulatory, and Health and Safety. Today, I'm excited to present to you the journey that Crown has been on with regards to sustainability. Crown was founded on the principles of sustainability with the invention of the Crown cork, the whole function of which was to offer protection to packed product. Today, packaging, and in particular, packaging waste, gets a lot of attention. It's always important to remind everyone that there's a purpose to packaging that is rooted in sustainability, the protection of food and beverage products packed in that packaging. In almost every case, the food and beverage contained in packaging has a much higher carbon footprint, requires more water and other resources to grow or formulate, and generally has a much higher environmental impact. Packaging plays a vital role in sustainability.
Now that we've established that packaging is vital to sustainability through its product protection, which packaging material is best? The answer is undeniably metal. What makes metal packaging the best? Metal packaging performs the best in locking out oxygen and light that can degrade the product, but it's also the best at locking in freshness as well as being shatter-proof. Metal also performs the best in most of the traditional sustainability metrics. The aluminum beverage can is the most recycled drink package in the world, with a global average recycling rate of 69%, and as high as 98% in countries like Brazil. Despite its strength and protection, it is one of the lightest drinks packages, and the cube efficiency of the can allows for them to be stacked high in pallets, reducing impact across the value chain from warehouse storage to transportation.
Cans, the most circular packaging solution. What do we mean when we say circular? Circularity is defined by the ability to return to the point of origin. For packaging, it means the ability of that package to be used, returned, recycled, and then returned to the market as another package. In that regard, the aluminum beverage can is the model for circularity. First, the aluminum beverage can, once returned in the recycling bin, can be back on the shelf as another can in as little as 60 days. Also, the aluminum beverage can is infinitely recyclable mono-material, which means a can can be another can over and over again with no loss of quality, and the can from a recycling perspective is only made from aluminum. This is regardless of decoration, embossing, or other finishes, and cans have 360 degrees of surface for decorations for our customers.
The decoration and finish has no impact on recyclability, which means there's no labels, so the decoration of the can will be removed in the aluminum recycling process. The can also utilizes stay-on tabs so that all parts of the packaging stays with the can to be recycled. The can is also easy to collect, sort, and recycle. The aluminum beverage can is recognized as the model for recycling. Aluminum beverage cans also have the highest value of recyclate of all drinks packaging. My next slide will demonstrate this point as well. Aluminum beverage cans are continuously light-weighted, with today's typical 12-ounce can weighing around or below 10 g per can. Cans also have superior outlook as far as supply chain efficiency with great cube efficiency, which is good for both warehouse storage and transportation efficiency.
It's also lightweight to transport, so it reduces transport cost, as well as high stackability due to the immense strength of filled beverage cans for improved storage and transport flexibility. As I said on my previous slides, aluminum cans have by far the highest value per package in the recycling stream. In fact, its value of aluminum that subsidizes curbside recycling in many communities. What makes UBCs or used beverage cans so valuable is the fact that recycled aluminum is identical to virgin material, meaning that there's no loss of property during recycling, and it's infinitely recyclable. Secondly, recycled aluminum has a dramatic energy savings compared to manufacturing virgin aluminum. That makes UBCs a highly sought-after recyclate. Recycled PET, for example, is often more expensive than virgin material and is difficult to work with because of its reduced physical properties.
Recycled PET or rPET has no physical or economic value being recycled and used again in drinks containers other than to meet government or customer mandates for certain recycled content in the bottles. The infinitely recyclable nature of aluminum, along with the economic value of using recycled material in new aluminum beer and beverage cans, is why cans have the highest recycled content of all drinks packaging. In the U.S., there's over 70% recycled content aluminum can compared to 23% in glass bottles, less than 6% in plastic bottles, and virtually none or zero in cartons. Metal is the top circular material of choice, with 75% of aluminum ever produced still in use today. To summarize, cans have the highest recycling rate of all drinks packaging, cans have the highest recycling content of all drinks packaging, and using recycled aluminum in cans makes good economic and environmental sense.
Unlike aluminum, most plastic recycling markets are only traded to fulfill mandates of governments and brands. Without these drivers, these markets would have no value on their own. I'd like to move on to speaking directly about Crown's sustainability initiatives. Five years ago, we established our first set of sustainability goals. We set goals of reducing energy and greenhouse gases. Our goal was to reduce GHGs by 10% per billion standard units and 5% energy reduction goal per billion standard units, all to be achieved by the end of 2020. I am proud to report that we achieved both of our goals. Not only did we achieve a 5% energy reduction compared to 2015, we reduced our GHG emissions per billion standard units by over 24%.
Specifically, we achieved greater than 13% absolute reduction in GHG, all while increasing our production by over 13% as well, an accomplishment that we are very proud of. As we transition from our 2020 goals into the next decade, we established our next sustainability initiative called Twenty by 30. The Twenty by 30 program lays out 20 goals to be achieved by 2030 or sooner. Crown's Twenty by 30 program is based on our most material issues, as identified by our ongoing materiality assessments, which involve all key stakeholders. Twenty by 30 also supports many of the sustainable development goals and complement many of our key customers' own sustainability initiatives. All of our divisions and businesses are responsible for meeting the goals of the program through specific KPIs.
With Twenty by 30, we've expanded our sustainability goals to include material topics that are considered the most relevant to our stakeholders today. Twentyby 30 builds upon Crown's ambitious climate strategy and includes a full suite of key sustainability topics, including water efficiency, circularity and waste, diversity and inclusion, safety, and responsible chemical management and sourcing. Our climate strategy has evolved into including reduction targets across Scope 1, 2, and 3. Our targets, approved by the Science Based Targets initiative, are in line with the SBTI's 1.5 degree Celsius global warming goal. We are also RE100 members and committed to procuring 100% renewable electricity by 2050, if not sooner. With multiple renewable projects coming online, 33% of our total electricity consumed last year was made from renewable sources, which exceeds our goal of 30% renewable electricity by the end of 2030 for our RE100 commitment.
Today, our beverage operations use 100% renewable electricity in the U.S. and the U.K., soon to be followed by Mexico. We hope to announce even more projects for renewables in the very near future. It is estimated that 50% of the world's population will live in areas experiencing water stress by 2050. Crown recognizes water as a key emerging issue for not only our customers' operations, but also our employees and the world overall. We are committed to protecting water as a resource by meeting all local water quality standards and by improving water efficiency in our operations. Our first goal around water is to reduce the water used in our operations 20% by the year 2025. We will achieve this goal through better monitoring, using water more efficiently, and focusing on recycling more water back into our operations. Our second goal's importance was only highlighted by the pandemic.
We will ensure that every employee has access to safe water for drinking and hygiene while on the job. Third, and as noted by our recent and first SASB disclosure, we had no wastewater fines last year, and with a strong waste and chemical management program, we expect to maintain this standard. Last, we hope to be able to share within a year our first water replenishment project to support our efforts to replenish 100% of the water consumed from high-risk watersheds. Moving on to circularity. The optimum circularity pillar of our Twenty by 30 program is a key way to reduce the impact of our products, not only for our own footprint, but also for those of our customers. Crown is working to achieve a zero waste to landfill goal globally by 2030.
As of November 2020, I can report that 100% of Crown's beverage can plants in Brazil are zero waste to landfill. We also have global efforts with our suppliers and industry partners to improve the recycling content and recycling rate of our products. We will be able to report more on those initiatives in the following months and years. Crown's strength in engineering and design is also being put forward towards our 10% lightweighting efforts for all of our can lines to be achieved by 2030. Lastly, Crown's Transit Division has committed to improving the recycled content an additional 10% for its global plastic strapping lines. Recycled aluminum material produces 95% less emissions than virgin aluminum on average. Increased recycling rates and thus recyclate available to use in making new cans is crucial to reducing our impact of our products.
Working in partnership with the Can Manufacturers Institute and fellow beverage can manufacturer, Ardagh, we made grants available this year to material recovery facilities, or MRFs, for aluminum can capture, which will ensure used beverage cans are accurately sorted, sold, and recycled. To- date, we have made two grants with the expected extra capture of aluminum of over 540 tons annually. A second round of grants will soon be announced with an additional 450 tons of expected extra aluminum to be captured at those MRFs. We are proud to highlight for you today several of our recent ESG ratings achievements. Those ratings are indicative of the work that we're doing as an organization and underscore our commitment to sustainability. We are particularly honored to receive top scores from Morningstar Sustainalytics. In that assessment, we scored in the top 1.5% out of the over 12,000 global organizations.
In each category, we ranked either negligible or low risk. In our own packaging sector, we ranked first as the number one organization with low ESG risk in the metal and glass packaging sector. We earned exceptionally high marks in our management of ESG risk. That's the part of the score that we control through our management. Another ranking of which we are especially proud is our ranking as the top packaging company in The Wall Street Journal's ranking of top sustainably managed companies. We made The Wall Street Journal's top 10 sustainably managed companies for environmental risk management. Understanding that there's much work to be done by society in the nexus between sustainability and important social issues, we're also pleased to have earned strong marks in social and human capital.
Sustainability innovation is the origin of Crown, as we're also confident in our ability to improve as we work to achieve our lightweighting goal. Just last week, it was announced that we ranked in the 3BL Media's list of 100 Best Corporate Citizens for 2021. In the pillar of climate change, we scored in the top 10 of ranked organizations. We're pleased with these rankings and believe that as we progress in our Twenty by 30 program, we can maintain or improve our score. ISS is another ESG rating of which we are proud of our recognition. We significantly improved our environmental and social ratings while including our strong corporate governance rating. We understand that transparency is tantamount to our credibility in the sustainability arena, and we're glad to be able to share the work we are doing with ISS and other ESG ratings providers.
To close, I want to summarize. Packaging plays a vital role in sustainability due to its protection of food and beverages and extends the shelf life of those products. Metal packaging is the best material for that protection due to its strength. Metal packaging is also the model for circularity, with cans being the most recycled, having the highest recycled content, and being infinitely recyclable. Lastly, Crown's Twenty by 30 program is helping us accelerate sustainability into the next decade. Thank you, and I will turn it back over to Tim.
John, thank you very much. Just briefly before we turn it over to the regional presidents who will discuss beverage, we'll do a quick review of our global beverage, our view of the market. On slide 34, we have presented for you our view of the size and the projected growth in most global markets for beverage cans. There are other significant markets such as sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, Japan, Korea, Australia. However, as we don't do business in those markets, they're not reflected on the slide. Prior to 2019, global beverage can growth rates at only 2%-3% were weighed down by the large North American market, where growth was very low or declining. However, with the North American market experiencing a can renaissance, growth is now comfortably forecasted at 5%+ globally for the next several years.
Importantly, Crown continues to invest for organic growth, as we have done continuously for the last 20 years. Our installed base will approach 97 billion units by the end of 2022, up 21 billion units or 27% from the end of 2019. This capacity figure is based only on projects announced to- date and does include the second lines in Monterrey, Mexico, and Hanoi, Vietnam, which Djalma and Mr. Goh will speak to shortly. For clarity, these figures include the full production rated speeds from the plants once they become operational. Annual actual output capacity is within 5%-8% of the installed capacity until the new lines or plants are through their respective learning curves. Projecting forward to 2025, we will further increase capacity by 15 billion units.
In total, 36 billion units, or close to 50% increase in global capacity between the years 2019 and 2025. A very significant global capacity growth forecasted, although as you will see, much of this already has been announced, is currently operational or is in construction. The regional beverage presidents will take you through their respective markets and opportunities, in total, as we stated earlier, Crown expects at least 10% sales unit volume growth on a global basis in 2021. As we have said, a very exciting time to be in packaging and especially metal packaging. Our customers are growing, they are innovating, and we are confident we can serve their growth needs. We have an excellent global platform, including large positions in some of the most attractive global growth markets.
We manufacture much of the equipment and tooling used in the beverage can making process, and our in-house project teams not only manage, but design engineer the construction of plants and installation equipment as they've been doing for more than 35 years. With that, we're going to turn it over for the regional review of beverage cans, and we'll begin with the Americas Division and Djalma Novaes. Djalma?
Good morning, everyone. I'm Djalma Novaes, Jr., President of Crown Americas Division. Let me go through my slides here. The first slide shows how America's beverage capacity is growing since 2019. Crown is doing its part in the most responsible way, filling existing capacity, debottlenecking plants where possible, and finally, by adding lines to an existing plant or going for a greenfield location. On the right side, you'll see the growth of specialty cans. We gained a lot of share there, which made us adjust the balance of standard size to specialty, depending on the market and customer needs, of course. All Crown growth is planned and always underpinned by long-term customer contracts.
Having its own project and engineering team used to build plants all over the world and the support of CMB, which is a Crown company, the mission of building new plants is accomplished with the new line always improving from the last one built. This is our North America footprint, now showing the Bowling Green plant in Kentucky, which is starting up the first line this week, on time. The second line, also on time, will come in September. We cover Canada with two plants, Calgary and Toronto, but depending on the mix, we also ship cans from the U.S. In the U.S., you can see we cover very well the high can demand dispersion areas like Texas, Southeast, Midwest, Northeast. You see on the right, we have more than 2,000 employees.
I must mention our commitment to safety, which is our top priority and part of the company values. I am glad to report that Crown has continuously improved in this area. By the way, when you see there 1 can ends plant, that this only can ends plant is in Batesville, Mississippi. Moving now to the Mexican footprint. You see in the middle, Guadalajara plant, which is a Crown historic legacy plant, now producing 12-ounce standard and sleek sizes. The plants incorporated when we acquired Empaque in 2015. Toluca is the largest, close to Mexico City, capable of 12 sleek, 16-ounce, and the regular 12 standard.
In the northeast in Monterrey, state of Nuevo León, our newest plant that started in 2016 with one line and now is expanding with a second 1.2 billion capacity line forecasted to start in Q2 2022 and capable of different diameters and sizes. Different than other countries in Americas, Crown also produces glass bottles in Mexico, having a large southern plant in the city of Orizaba, very close down here to Veracruz, and another in the northern part at Meoqui, state of Chihuahua. We have also a huge sand mine producing the silica necessary for the glass business, but this is too much detail. Crown concentrates its ends production in the headquarters plant downtown Monterrey, where we also manufacture Crown closures and our ROPPs, the Roll-On Pilfer-Proof. We go to South America.
It's another area of continuous growth. In Colombia, Crown has one plant producing different sizes and diameters, serving the local market, plus exports to the Caribbean and Latin America. In Brazil, Crown has now six can plants, being the newest plant in Rio Verde, the state of Goiás, that started in Q4 2019. This is one of the best running plants I've seen in my over 30 years of can making. Now we are expanding with a second line, another 1.2 billion capacity with startup in Q4 2021. The construction is advanced and equipment delivery on time. Every plant in Brazil produces all can sizes and diameters. The Brazilians are actually, in Americas, the fastest in size conversion process.
You see here in the northern part of the country, in the Amazon state capital of Manaus, Crown large end manufacturing plant, which capacity will increase to match the can growth. Well, slide 42 is showing a picture of the consolidated growth action plan happening at this moment in North America. The new third line in Toronto, which started in Q1 2020, is now reaching full capacity level. While Nichols third line started up Q2 2020, is gaining momentum on the plant learning curves. This is a large capacity line. It's a 1.6 billion can capacity with 12 body makers firepower in the front end and two independent back ends. This line, like the others in Nichols, they're made to change labels fast. Winchester is our largest end facility with a highly automated process.
Just added a fourth module increasing capacity by 3 billion ends, which is now in full operation. Dayton, Ohio, is another end center being expanded. A new production module will add 3.9 billion capacity by the end of this year. Olympia plant is receiving a third line to increase capacity in the West Coast area, including sleek sizes on the portfolio of that plant. Now you see in this slide, a new greenfield plant in Virginia, not shown on the previous footprint slide. In Henry County, Martinsville plant, a multi-site can facility. It will increase over 125 jobs and has two lines, adding the capacity of 2.4 billion cans per year, starting at Q2 2022. Well, we already mentioned the second line in Monterrey. Monterrey, a city located 140 mi from the U.S. border.
The volume, the capacity is planned for local supply, but as you see, it's also capable to service the U.S. whenever needed. Now I want to show you in Brazil, a greenfield plant in Uberaba, Minas Gerais state, a strategic location for large Crown customers. Just 20 mi to the border of São Paulo, Brazil's most developed state and largest consumer of cans. Of course, the Manaus end plant will match this growth, the one in the north. In Estancia, the plant in the northeast of the country, we did what we call the de bottlenecking project, as we mentioned in the first slide. We are increasing there the capacity on about 300 million cans per year. Slide 45 is showing the Americas region market sizes and the percentage of alcohol product demand. You see Mexico and Brazil are all about the beer market.
Crown is well- positioned in all three areas, and through capacity growth mentioned in previous slides, it is fine adjusting the balance of specialty products. The list of can market growth drivers you see here in bullet points is well known and common to Americas, with some small intensity differences. In general, in Americas, North, Central, or South, there is an increase of new beverage SKUs launched in beverage cans. This is why you see more specific scenarios. In North America, while we believe there will be less pronounced shift in mix of alcohol versus CSD in the long- term. There will continue to be innovations in each category. 12-ounce standard cans continue to hold a large share of market. Many introductions in energy drinks, hard seltzers, and ready-to-drink cocktails will fuel production of various specialty sizes. For example, 12 sleek and 16 standard.
In Mexico, in the middle, this is happening at a slower pace, but the beer market in Mexico in cans shows a steady growth. In Brazil, in the right-hand side, the beer consumption is increasing mostly off-premise. People are buying beer at supermarkets rather than bars, what they call locally, botecinho. Supermarkets is a channel for cans. We saw here three different scenarios, but all three very good for can makers. Brands are supporting the use of cans. Companies are now able to better access consumers through direct retail channels and influential marketing. The environmental concern is also a reality. You see here in this slide, companies like Grupo Petrópolis, the largest privately owned brewery group in Brazil, together with emerging companies in North America like uncertain, Mark Anthony, and also large worldwide brands, all launching different products in different sizes, but all in cans.
Can share in North America beverage launches has increased over 70% in 2020, more than doubling from 30% in just six years. The growth trends in aluminum cans will continue. Innovation in energy drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic seltzers, among others. We continue to monitor emerging topics like still water in cans, as well as the growth in canned wine and other ready-to-drink cocktails. Well, this is our growth strategy. Here you can read important highlights of our strategy. You've seen in previous slides that Crown moves to show a clear action plan to increase capacity when needed in a responsible manner, backed by contract commitments and aligned with customers and market product size demand. The specialty can capacity is more than doubling from 2018- 2022, but has further room as Crown grows market share. That concludes my presentation on Americas Beverage.
I will now hand back to Tom.
Thank you, Djalma Novaes. Good morning. Let's take a short, let's say about three-minute break, and when we return, we'll hear from Ashwini Kotwal, who will take us through our European beverage operations. Thank you. Okay. Welcome back, everyone. We're going to begin again with Ashwini Kotwal, who will review our European beverage operations. Ashwini?
Thank you, Tom. I'm Ashwini Kotwal, SVP, Bevcan EMEA, and I'm pleased to share with you an overview of our manufacturing footprint, the business outlook, and our plans in Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. As we have all experienced, since the last year, the world has changed dramatically. In this short period of time, the unpredictability that the pandemic has caused for businesses, society, and human life has been unforeseen. However, despite the immense volatile environment, together with our extremely dedicated team, committed customers, and reliable suppliers, we have been able to work safely, operate efficiently, and effectively serve the needs of beverage can consumers. The tenacity, adaptability, and a can-do spirit of our team and all our partners has been simply remarkable. I would like to thank our team, customers, and suppliers for working cohesively to successfully overcome these challenges. I'll turn over to the first slide.
I'll begin the presentation with an overview of our current production footprint in the region. In U.K., we have two can plants and an end center. In Western Europe, one can plant, which is in France. In Central Eastern Europe, we have one can plant in Slovakia and one end center in Poland. In Southern Europe, we have three can plants in Spain with an end center, one can plant in Italy, two can plants in Greece with an end center, and two can plants in Turkey. In Europe, we are the third biggest player with a market share of 18%. However, as you would note from the map, we have a dominant presence in Southern Europe, where we have around 50% market share and have a sizable presence in U.K., Ireland, with around 29% share of the market.
Iberia and U.K. are the two markets that have shown strong growth in 2021 despite the pandemic. I would also like to highlight that we have a diverse portfolio of cans, with specialty cans contributing to around 57% of our 2020 volume. In Middle East, we have a strong presence with two can plants in Saudi Arabia, which you see at the bottom of the map, one can plant in Jordan, and one in United Arab Emirates, which also has an end center. Besides, we also have a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, which is dedicated end production facility. We are the leaders in Middle East with around 38% share of the can market. In Africa, we have one can plant, which is in Tunisia.
Despite that, we are number two in North and West Africa region with around 26% market share, as we also supply cans into that region in all our plants from Middle East and Southern Europe. We've got 17 plants with 3,500 employees. In the MENA region, we also invested heavily in specialty cans with more than 80% of our sales in the region being in this particular format. In the EMEA region, expectation is of a strong growth in can demand, as the current can-making capacity is rather tight in most of the major markets, creates tremendous opportunities for growth through expanding capacity in a judicious manner. We will therefore continue to expand capacity in the existing plants where possible. In 2020, despite the raging pandemic, in Seville, Spain, we converted two lines from steel to aluminum and did a material speed up.
In 2020, we also invested in speeding up the lines in Italy and Turkey. As these lines ramp up, they will add to our supply capability in 2021. In 2021, we'll also speed up a line in our plant in Slovakia. In Greece, our installed capacity in the two plants is in excess of domestic demand, with available capacity used to support can demand in other regional markets that are not large enough for local can production. To ensure that we have adequate supply of ends to meet the growth in can demand, we will be investing in a new end module in Europe in 2021. In North Africa, in 2021, we'll be enhancing our capacity in the Tunis plant to support growth in the domestic market and for exports to West Africa.
As the region is a net importer of cans, we will continue to support that market with supplies from our plants in Middle East where we have spare capacity. I will now turn over to an overview of the Middle East and Africa market. In the EMEA market overview, in 2020, the can market in Europe and Northwest Africa was around 94 billion cans and is forecasted to grow at 4%-5% annually over the next five years. During this period, we plan to increase our can capacity in the region from 27 billion- 31 billion cans. In Europe in 2020, while the pandemic had its adverse effect on the total consumption of all packaged beverages, yet the overall can demand increased with strong growth, especially in beer segment. This has been due to two key factors.
COVID-19 restrictions led to the off-trade channels, that is home consumption, growing at the expense of on-trade, that is consumption at hotels, restaurants, cafes, and pubs. In 2019, around 84% of soft drinks were sold through off-trade channels, in 2020, the off-trade share increased to 89%. A similar trend was seen in beer. Around 70% of beer was sold through off-trade in 2019, in 2020, the share jumped to around 79%. In the off-trade channels, the share of cans in the pack mix is growing. In the CSD segment, there is a high demand for singles or multi-packs in the off-trade channels where cans score over PET. This has been particularly true in U.K. and Western Europe. In the off-trade channels of the beer segment, cans have a strong consumer preference over glass due to convenience of being lighter and more cube efficient.
The other major factor leading to an impetus in can growth has been the increasing awareness of consumers about the adverse environmental impact of PET bottle waste and growing recognition about the excellent sustainability of metal beverage cans. This has been adequately highlighted by John in his presentation earlier. In Middle East and North Africa and West Africa region, the pandemic had an adverse impact on can demand in 2020 due to the severity of lockdowns and curfews. In Middle East, the can demand was also negatively affected by the collapse of some of the Levant economies, especially Lebanon. Looking ahead, in Europe, the expectation is that the trends that emerged in 2020 will continue to positively impact can growth.
Over the next five years, the can market in Europe is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4%-5%, with the total market reaching around 100 billion cans by 2025. Beyond existing categories, the demand for cans is expected to be provided an impetus due to preference of cans for new drinks that are being introduced. These beverages, as you're well aware, are hard seltzers, non- or low-alcoholic alternatives, flavored enhanced water, RTD iced tea, coffee, et cetera. In U.S., as we are all aware, the growth of these canned beverages, especially hard seltzers, has been exponential over the last few years.
In Europe, while the introduction of hard seltzers by local fillers has been recent, yet most of the leading beer companies as well as Coca-Cola and retailers like M&S and Aldi have launched their variants of hard seltzers in cans with the expectation of replicating the success seen in the U.S. Due to the consumer behavior being altered by pandemic towards more at-home consumption, it is also expected that in the period ahead, as compared to pre-pandemic levels, more beverages will be sold through off-trade channels. According to Euromonitor, in 2020, 85% of soft drinks will be sold through off-trade channels as compared to 84% in 2019. In the beer segment, 72% as compared to 70% in 2019. As people consume more packaged beverages at home, it will provide a boost to the can demand. The other trend that has accelerated during the pandemic is online shopping.
Seeing this change in the purchasing behavior of the consumers, all the major beverage companies are establishing direct routes to consumers through e-commerce. This development too will provide a further fillip to can demand as it is an ideal package for B2C sales. As I highlighted before, the excellent sustainability credentials of cans versus other substrates too will continue to increase can share in the pack mix. The consumer pull and push by the regulators is expected to drive increased use of aluminum cans in place of PET bottles. Finally, the return of tourism to Europe will provide a further boost to the demand for cans, especially in Southern Europe, where can demand has so far been subdued due to travel restrictions. Seeing these strong tailwinds affecting future can demand, beverage companies and co-packers are expanding can filling line capacities.
There has been a spate of new investments in can filling in U.K. and Southern Europe. In Middle East and North and West Africa region, with easing of the pandemic, can demand in 2021 has been rising and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 4% over 2020- 2025. In Middle East, the growth drivers will be the organic growth based on post-COVID economic recovery and increase in export of filled cans to Africa. The return of recreation and religious tourism to the region too will support the growth in can demand. In 2020, 2021, the World Expo in Dubai and 2022 World Cup football in Qatar is expected to provide further acceleration to can demand.
In North and West Africa, besides the organic growth due to return of normalcy post-COVID-19, the demand of cans will also be positively impacted by new filling lines that are being set up, especially in West Africa. In Middle East and North and West Africa region, a factor that has also contributed to growth in can demand is the increasing use by beverage companies of specialty cans in the slim format in sizes ranging from 15 cl to 25 cl. This makes the can more affordable to the consumer, thus increasing demand. Moving on to our growth strategy. We're also working on projects in some other territories in Europe to increase can capacity backed by long-term contracts. The customers are keen to secure adequate supply of cans to support their growth plans in the years ahead.
Therefore, we are seeing contract renewals accelerated and contract durations lengthened to support these projects for additional capacity that we have planned to bring on stream. Announcement of these projects will be made in due course. In addition, we will continue to make operational improvements through speed ups, modernization of our existing plants, and increasing the range of specialty cans. Our strategy in the Middle East is to leverage our strength as the most dependable can maker with a wide footprint to extend existing long-term contracts to preserve our market share and benefit from expected organic growth. The North and West Africa region is an emerging market for cans. Volume growth opportunities exist with new filling lines being installed. Capacity expansion in Tunis will enable us to garner a share of the market growth.
We will continue to take cost of the manufacturing process through lightweighting, lower energy consumption, and supply chain optimization. Beverage companies are looking for premiumization of the package. We will work closely with the customers through our technical center in Wantage and graphic studio in Leicester and Dubai to enhance can graphics through novelty finishes and offer promotional capabilities. An innovation that we have done to enhance the promotional capability of cans allows the use of laser etched DMC unique codes on can ends for marketing campaigns. This innovation, termed Crown Connect, opens the door for traceability and provides brands with a platform to connect and engage with consumers via online and mobile channels, offering unique content and promotional information. Another area that we are focusing on is digital printing of cans.
To conclude, we are looking at a phase of sustained growth in can demand due to several factors that are stacked in favor of cans. We will be making best use of this opportunity to grow our business profitably through a strategy of making judicious investments to enhance capacity, providing product innovations to customers, focusing on costs, and driving the can share of package mix higher by leveraging its sustainability credentials. Thank you. I will now turn over to Hock Huat for a presentation on our Asia Pacific beverage business. Hock, over to you.
Thank you, Ashwini. Welcome everyone across all three continents and to this presentation. This is Hock Huat Goh here. I'm the President of Crown Asia Pacific. For the next few slides, I'm pleased to take you through, giving you an overview of our footprints in this region, our expansion last year and this year, and a review of our two-piece can market in this region, as well as our growth strategy. As you can see in this map, we have 17 plants in this region. It shows the location of beverage plants in Asia. Crown is the largest beverage can maker in Asia. It has the most extensive footprint in Southeast Asia. We have 14 beverage plants in Southeast Asia with 24 can lines, and three plants in China with three can lines. In Southeast Asia, we have facilities in Vietnam.
As you can see that Crown has five plants in the country, covering the whole country. It's a very long country, Vietnam. In the south, we have one plant in Ho Chi Minh City, another one in Dong Nai, and we are constructing a greenfield plant, Bien Hoa. Both plants are near to Ho Chi Minh, and they are using the same international airport. For any person going into Vietnam, basically we fly into the same international airport for the three locations. They're next to one another. We have another plant in the center, Da Nang. That's where APEC was held recently, and the fifth plant in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. In Vietnam, we cover the whole country itself from the north, center, and south. In Cambodia, we have three plants, two in Phnom Penh, the capital city, and one at Sihanoukville, the port.
In Thailand, you can see that we have two plants in Nonthaburi. Nonthaburi is just outside of Bangkok. In Malaysia, our plant is just outside the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. Indonesia shows Karawang. Karawang is just outside of Jakarta, the capital city. In Myanmar, we are located in Yangon, and in Singapore, we have a plant in Singapore. In China, we have three plants. Hefei plant is in the south, Anhui Province, one in central China at Hangzhou, which is near to Shanghai, and another in western China at Luoyang, which is in Sichuan Province. Our multi-plants here in Asia serve as a backup supply to ensure security of supply to our customer. When a customer buys cans from Crown, it's not only from one company but a different location backup.
This eliminates the risk of supply from only one location, and it serves as a contingency plan for our customer. None of our competitors in this region has an extensive network and backup supplies as we do. We offer different can sizes to match the requirement from our customers, mainly standard, specialty, coverlet sleeve, and different sizes, different kinds of height, and sizes. In Asia Pacific, we have 17 beverage plants, and we have roughly 3,000 employees. Here we have deep talents and experience. Crown has been operating in this region for many years. It's almost 80- 100 years. Yeah. Continue to the next slide. We are bringing you through what we have done in 2020 as well as in 2021. We review our increase our capacity in response to the demand in the region.
The ongoing expansion, we're adding production lines and new facilities in year 2020 as well as this year, 2021. In Q1 2020, we added a new line in Dong Nai, which is in Vietnam. To serve the growing demand of our customers, we are adding a new line in Hanoi. This line is expected to be operational in Q4 2021. In Q3 2020, we put in a greenfield facility, in effect, a new plant in Nonthaburi, Thailand. In Q3 2021, in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, in collaboration with our customer, we are building one greenfield facility. This construction is ongoing, and we expect commercial production in Q3 this year. This will be our most green plant in Asia. I'm sure you heard about COVID-19, as our colleague has said, in Europe, in Asia as well.
Despite all this restriction of traveling, I'm very proud to say that we continue to meet targets, be it a new plant in Nonthaburi, be it the new lines that we put in. These are all, even now, right now in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, we continue to be on schedule despite the travel restriction they imposed in some of these countries. On the next slide is a market review overview. Asia Pacific market is about close to $69 billion in 2020. The breakdown is about Southeast Asia, $35 billion, and China, $44 billion. The forecast that we have is for 7% for Southeast Asia for the next five years, CAGR, and 4% for China. The growth in Southeast Asia is driven largely by green packaging movement, which favor beverage cans over glass and plastic alternatives.
We are similar to other parts of the world that the green movement is on. In some developing countries in Southeast Asia, glass and plastic bottles are also commonly used for other purposes. Like, for example, storing kerosene, making this harmful for humans. You can see that's why some of it is not recyclable. The infrastructure in certain countries are still not good, making returnable packaging difficult. In addition, rising income and a young population obviously enable the increasing consumption trends. In Southeast Asia, for example, the GDP growth is expected to be strong, around 8%. Southeast Asia population is relatively young. 60% is below the age of 35 years old. We also have a customer who has significant existing filling capacity to support the growth, particularly in alcohol. In this part of the world, can is also viewed as a premium packaging.
With the increasing income and affluence in this region, we expect can to be a preferred packaging. The other thing is that in this region, retail space is usually not big in some countries, and stackability becomes important, and that's where aluminum can is a big advantage. Retailer would not like to waste space on storing returnable bottles. I think the next slide, I will talk about the growth strategy for Crown in Asia. Here, we are going to maintain our leading leadership across the region, the Southeast Asia. First is that we are part of a global company, and our advanced technology and capability will be much better than our competitor throughout continued investment. We are focused on retaining and growing market share with key existing customers, and we have a strong mix of global, regional, and local brands.
As we mentioned earlier, we have been in this region for a long time. We have strong relationship with the regional players as well, the local regional players. We will continue to explore potential market for export and also to keep on increasing our capacity and addition of new line, be the new line or be a new plant when feasible. We have strategically pursued any acquisition opportunity in this region because many of our competitors are small players, but they are in their own domestic market. Crown is a trusted brand, and we provide world-class quality in beverage can to all our customers. With this, I will conclude my presentation on Asia Pacific. I'll hand over the presentation to Robert H. Bourque, Jr., President of Transit Packaging. Bourque, please.
Thank you, Hock. Good morning, everyone. I am Robert Bourque, the President of Signode, the transit packaging division of Crown. I would also like to echo the sentiments of my colleagues as we thank our employees around the world for their continued efforts and commitment to customers, to the company, as we continue to weather the storm of the global pandemic. Signode is a leader in the industrial packaging space. Our scale, combined with the breadth of products, services, and capabilities we bring to our customers, is unique, as is the insight and full end-of-line solutions we can provide to create value for our customers. Our footprint is global. We operate from over 80 manufacturing sites across 23 countries, which enables our more than 9,000 employees to sell just about every part of the globe.
We have a global scale with local presence, and we point you to the profile with revenues approaching $2.4 billion, a strong EBITDA margin, 15.5%, all combined with minimal CapEx requirements coming to 2% or less of revenue in a year. At the bottom of the page, you'll see what we call our solutions matrix. This is how we go to market. You can see across a host of various segments of business, we can supply many different products, services, integration capabilities, and automation. Here's our business split by product, geography, and end market. You can see we have our automation and packaging technologies business, what we call APT. The rest we combine into what we call industrial solutions. These are all of the other, let's say, consumable products and things that exist in our business.
Geography, we're about 50% in the Americas, rest of world covering the other parts of those. All areas growing substantially and have very good trajectories as we go forward. You can see in the end markets distribution is our third- party distribution is our largest single segment, as we call it. Metal is about 20%, growing food and beverage and a whole host of other industries and segments is how we compete. We have a comprehensive portfolio of products and services which enable us to partner with and offer solutions to our customers. It includes a full range of strapping, wrapping, and protective solutions for use in a broad array of applications and end markets. We're able to combine these products with our extensive portfolio of equipment and tools to deliver significant value to our customers.
We're also well-positioned to help our customers drive increased operational efficiency through our automated, semi-automated, and robotic equipment solutions. All of this, coupled with our high-margin aftermarket services, mean we are creating a stickiness with our customers that makes us a valued partner for their business. A great benefit of our business is that our products are used all over the world by a huge set of customers in very diverse end markets. Note that we've got sales in just about every part of the globe. This means that our business is very resilient, and I think you've seen that in our results. A couple of points on this slide. Highly diversified customer base. Over 40,000 individual customers we service. You can see, not one of our customers is more than 2% of sales. In fact, it's far less than that. Diversity in the end markets and geographies.
No single industry reliance. We are not beholden to any one market and its ups and downs. That helps us mitigate any risks in a country, in a product line, in a segment, any type of category. Also helped us perform very well during the pandemic of the last year. You can also see service provided on a global basis, but via close customer proximity. Again, a global scale with a local presence. It's this resiliency that fuels our outstanding free cash flow generation and enables us to fund Crown growth and return capital to shareholders. As many of you know, Signode was built through a series of acquisitions but never integrated and run as a cohesive whole.
We've been hard at work since Crown bought the business in 2018 to bring the business together as one Signode in order to harness our combined global scale and portfolio breadth to drive operational efficiency and strategic clarity so that we're able to deliver truly unique value to our customers. We have been, in essence, integrating 65+ independent businesses simultaneously. The first major step in driving strategic clarity was rebranding under the Signode master brand name in 2019. This enabled us to build a unifying brand message that resonates with our customers, "Our expertise frees your expertise," and allows us to bring our full offerings to market in a cohesive way. Over the past couple of years, we've also been working on transformational market-facing and operational improvements. We've streamlined our sales teams around the world and are empowering them to bring the full value of our portfolio to our customers.
We've integrated our manufacturing operations to drive consistent processes and quality standards. We re-established R&D teams to reinvigorate our innovation pipeline. We've established product management teams to drive coherent product strategy, and we're supporting all of these with changes with IT systems that allows us to work seamlessly across our division and better serve our customers. Global CRM, global HRIS, automated quality systems, and ERP consolidations, to name a few. Crown's strength in manufacturing operations and quality is being leveraged globally. Our teams at Signode and Crown are working together to improve our operations, and because of this, we're able to significantly reduce the time needed to effect change. We're positioning our business to be able to react quickly to customer needs and to capture value at a global scale and reinforce a leadership position that is unique in our industry.
These types of transformational changes can only happen under strategic ownership. They don't happen overnight. The benefits are, and will continue to be, substantial. Everyone in Crown understands this and is partnering with us to make it happen. I mentioned our unique leadership position on previous slides. Here's how we think about some of the elements of that position. Attractive long-term industry growth. Strong growth tailwinds in select categories: e-commerce, pharma, consumer product goods. Comprehensive suite of products and solutions. A full portfolio. We take things from the front to the back end of line. We give our customers an integrated, complete transit solution so that product that they produce in their location arrives safely at its destination and intact, full high-quality product delivery. Exceptional free cash flow generation.
The diversity of the product and offerings gives us a very resilient platform, truly sustainable, and our limited maintenance CapEx, along with flexible growth CapEx, allows us to continue generating significant cash flow that we return back to the company. Our organic growth plan. We have many organic growth through our recent investments in our core businesses. We're focused on innovation, and we continue to have the product and market diversity to give us continued avenues for growth. We, frankly, because of our positioning, can see things that others do not see coming. I think it's best summed up as saying, no one else does everything we do everywhere we do it. With the steps we're taking to transform our business, we're able to hit on all growth cylinders. Our growth options are another source of our resiliency.
By bringing our commercial teams together, we're better able to drive focus on growing segments and optimize our efforts to serve our customers across those segments. We call it our bullseye chart, and it aligns how we allocate resources and manage our growth efforts. What is bullseye? It's the options and categories we just spoke about: e-commerce, pharmaceutical, CPG, automation, aftermarket services, all very high-value growing businesses. We think innovation is critical to continuing to create value. Always been an innovator in the transit space. We have over 1,400 patents, with another 250 currently pending around the world. Within our APT platform, we have an industry-leading vitality index of over 20%, defined as sales from products launched in the last five years. We take an outside-in approach when we're developing new products, meaning we listen to the voice of customer.
We have teams established through our R&D group, through our APT engineering group, through our product management groups, where we are collecting the needs and wants of customers and bringing those to fruition. This approach has allowed us to create a one Signode approach to market, where our teams are cohesive, and we have one voice to customer as well. We find that this is giving us the best way to approach our market and to deliver value. Our unified go-to-market strategy allows us to better harness deep customer insights that are then translated into our innovation pipeline by our product managers and R&D teams, as I stated. This is another area where Crown is helping to set the stage for success. We are plugging into and leveraging Crown's world-class technology and R&D team. This has positioned us to dramatically increase the pace of innovation across our portfolio.
Just like the rest of the company, we view sustainability as a critical component of our success. We're excited about what we're bringing to the Crown Twenty by 30 program. As you can see, of almost 95% of raw materials in Signode are made from 100% post-consumer or post-industrial recycled resources. Our plant in Florence uses over 40 million pounds of PET packaging recycled to produce strap, most of it being curbside from the local community. The paper products that we use are all materials that would otherwise go to waste if we weren't turning those into angle board products, into honeycomb products, and all the other multitude of things that we make. Our protective packaging Edge products uses 100% recycled plastic. You can see we're taking credit cards, we're taking detergent bottles, we're taking shampoo bottles, we're taking toothpaste tubes, post-consumer resin.
We're taking all of these things and turning it into useful, valuable products for our customers. We're also working very strongly on closed-loop recycling programs. In North America, we have a program to return plastic strap, grind it up, reuse it, put it back out into products. We're working on those same areas in Europe and Asia as well to help improve our sustainability and continue to help drive the bottom line. We're convinced Signode has an outstanding value proposition. We have a unique global scale and portfolio breadth that no one else in the industry has. We have created a foundation for long-term growth through our one Signode transformation. We've said we have an extremely resilient business, exceptional free cash flow with multifaceted growth options. We're well-positioned across multiple segments, our bullseye. We are creating, identifying, and continuing to find new and meaningful two-way synergies with the Crown.
I think it's best summed up by saying at the end of the day, it's all packaging. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Tom Kelly, our CFO.
Thank you, Bourque. Good morning. I'll take a few minutes before our Q&A session to review some historical and projected financial information. 2021 is off to an excellent start as we continue to deliver strong results across all segments and execute on our strategic and capital allocation review. To recap, in April, we signed an agreement to sell our European tinplate business at a full and attractive valuation. We expect the transaction to close in the Q3 this year and reduce pro forma leverage to just below 3x before considering any buybacks. Our LTM EBITDA through the end of the Q1 at $1.92 billion was up $245 million or 15% from the comparable prior period. At the midpoint of our 2021 full-year guidance, our full-year EPS CAGR is 12%, and that is without buybacks.
We've averaged about $1.2 billion in cash from operations over the last four years. Our first priority for capital allocation is to invest and grow the business where we have opportunities to realize appropriate returns. As an example of how our growth capital has paid off, we summarize the Americas beverage segment results for 2018 through projected 2021. Over that period, we project EBITDA for the segment to increase by more than $300 million or close to 60%. This improvement is due to a combination of focused capital spending, excellent project execution led by our in-house teams, rapid startup to minimize efficiencies and quickly get cans to the market, and disciplined negotiations with customers to ensure we are fairly compensated for these investments.
Our experience with plant startups and the fact that we build much of the equipment used to manufacture beverage cans allows us to quickly and efficiently capitalize on opportunities as they arise. You can see the result of that in Americas Beverage. After investing in the business, as we have communicated, we are committed to returning capital. The combination of free cash flow and increasing EBITDA provides ample capacity to repurchase shares and maintain leverage within the target range of 3x-3.5x . In February of this year, we announced the authorization to repurchase up to $1.5 billion of shares through 2023. Also in the Q1 , we initiated a quarterly dividend. Looking forward, we plan to continue to invest in beverage can growth.
We expect to benefit from the recovery of the transit business as industrial production increases, volumes return, and cost reduction efforts materialize. We plan to return capital now that our leverage has been reduced. With these opportunities ahead of us and our confidence in our ability to execute, we are targeting to achieve adjusted EBITDA of approximately $2.5 billion by the end of 2025. That concludes our slide presentation for today. Let's take about a three-f ive-minute break and return for a Q&A session. Thank you.
[Break]
Welcome back, everyone. We are ready to begin the question- and- answer session. For those asking questions, we ask that you limit yourself to two questions so we can get to as many of you as possible. Operator?
Thank you. Our first question today comes from the line of George Staphos of Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the presentation today. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to, as a point of reference, make sure that we captured whatever was new in your capacity relative to prior announcements. It sounded like Hanoi number three was a new line, but were there any other previously unannounced capacity expansions in this presentation relative to the past, if you could enumerate them?
George, the only new capacity that we've announced today is the second line in Monterrey.
Okay.
It's the second line in Hanoi.
Okay. Thank you. My other question would be, you went through a number of things that you think differentiate Crown versus your peers. You mentioned the ability to bring capacity online on time, on budget. Looking forward, what do you think is going to most differentiate Crown and allow you to continue to drop through profitability equivalent to or at a greater rate than in the past? If you were in our seat, kind of the gorilla in the room, over the last couple of days, the stock reacted pretty violently to a new entrance announcement of a can plant in the U.S. If you were in our seats, would there be a certain number of new entrants, new capacity expansions that would, in your view, change the model as you think about Crown on a going forward basis? Thanks very much.
Okay. The first part of that question, George. Listen, I think if you look at our performance over the last several years, at some point, somebody or you must recognize that as we've commercialized new capacity, we've been able to bring it up on time, certainly within budget. We haven't exceeded the capital budgets. We've been able to convert that to earnings and cash flow fairly rapidly. We're not asking you to believe that it's going to come in 18 months or 24 months, we're not giving you reasons for why it hasn't happened. I think from that standpoint, I think a lot of that has to do with the in-house teams that we have.
Again, a lot of it has to do with the markets that we're in and how careful we have been to put the capacity in when we have commitments from customers. How do I address the second part of your question? I think the role of sell-side equity analysts is to take a position, and certainly one fellow took a position yesterday. I don't think I agree with him, but he's entitled to his opinion. I have a lot of respect for him. He's hopefully on the call. We can talk about it when he comes up. I think, when you look at the prospect of this new entrant adding perhaps 3 billion cans, which is not fully commercialized until the end of 2023 or into 2024. By that time, that 3 billion cans makes up 2%- 2.5% of the overall market.
In a market that is significantly undersupplied now, it's remarkable to me that between Crown and the other two large publicly traded beverage can companies, you all decided to wipe a few billion dollars of market cap off of us. I think it's pretty much a large overreaction if you had to ask me, so.
Yeah. Tim, I wasn't trying to single out anybody, and I was really asking more from a theoretical standpoint. Does there come a point when you're in our seat, forgetting about buy side, sell- side, where we need to start thinking about the model for Crown changing? That's all I was getting at.
George, I understand that. I guess that's hard to answer. What I could tell you is that as we have, and I think we've been fairly consistent to say that we feel really good about our prospects looking out over the next three years. We don't see anything that's going to change the upward momentum of our prospects over the next three years. I think from where you sit, unless you start to see some miraculous product introduction from the other substrate, which takes away its deserved negative green view, that cans are going to continue to be preferred by the customers and consumers, and we're going to continue to grow.
Absent the continuation of growth, if you start to see growth flatten out or you start to see growth at rates that are far below the capacity that's projected to come online, then maybe you take a different view. You've heard from us, and you've heard from others that the market is significantly undersupplied, especially in North America right now, to the tune of perhaps somewhere between 6 and 10 billion units. That's going to take a long time for the industry to commercialize 6 and 10 billion units, and then on top of that, you've got growth each year. The other thing I'd point out is you're dealing with only one market that we're in. We're dealing with North America. We still have many other markets, Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, South America, that are growing.
The last thing I would say is the company that announced new capacity the other day, well, they've entered Brazil, and they've built another plant in Brazil. They have two plants in Brazil, and they've had no impact on demand nor impact on pricing in the Brazilian market for the three incumbent producers. We're all desperately trying to get as much capacity in to serve customers in Brazil, despite their entry in Brazil. As I said, I think you guys have a role. I respect your role. I just happen to disagree with the position that was taken the other day.
All right. Well, I'll turn it over. Thank you, Tim.
Thank you, George.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Pettinari of Citi.
Good morning, thanks for all the detail. For the production capacity forecast that you shared that go out to 2025, is it possible to say how much of that is based on conversations or hard contracts with customers versus more of a general growth forecast that you might make? If you could just talk about the visibility that you have into can demand maybe in the sort of 2024, 2025 period in those out years.
What I will say is that capacity that we're showing through the end of 2022 is tied to firm contracts. For 2023 through 2025, I'm going to be a little careful what I say here, but much of that will be tied to detailed discussions or recent contracts sold that we're not yet ready to disclose for competitive reasons. I think we feel very confident. Our capacity growth rate, as you can see, is lower from 2023- 2025 than 2019- 2022 which, to your second part of your question, you think about 2024, 2025 timeframe, we're just not there yet. I think as we get closer to that, I think that capacity growth rate has room to grow. Perhaps, will it grow to the same rate as the 2019- 2022? I don't know, but it certainly has room to grow.
Okay. That's very helpful. Just following up on George's question, in terms of the two lines that were kind of announced today are new to us, does that impact CapEx at all in 2021?
No.
Okay, great. I'll turn it over.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ghansham Panjabi of RW Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks so much. Hey, guys. I guess back to North America, which is where all the acceleration growth is relative to the 2018 baseline. Clearly, hard seltzers have been part of that, along with a couple of other categories. As you kind of think out through 2025, just based on conversations with your customers, what new categories do you think will drive the incremental growth of the industry over that timeline?
I think hard seltzers are going to continue to expand. Even when we get back to on-premise consumption, you can imagine if you're in a bar, most of the beer in bar is either bottle or draft, and mixed drinks are clearly not in a package. Any replacement of those in a bar scenario is going to be with a can for seltzers. I think if you look at the sparkling water, I think over time, we're going to see sparkling water in cans take share from flat water in PET for a couple of reasons. One, people like flavor, people like carbonation, and people don't like pollution. Beyond that, I think you're going to see a continuation of new products being introduced in the ready-to-drink coffee and tea area, to mention a couple.
Back to your comment, Tim, on the other substrates. There's been a fair amount of focus on the chemical side to propagate chemical recycling. You see commercialization of capacity across from the major suppliers. You're seeing the glass container industry look at creating basically specialty glass containers, just like the success you saw with specialty cans. How do you think those two dynamics kind of play out over the next few years relative to this window you've had with exceptional commercialization opportunities? Part of it is also category-led, like hard seltzers, for example. Just a question for Tom Kelly on specific to the Q2 . Any update on relative to your previous guidance on EPS for the quarter? Thanks.
Ike, gotcha. It's a good question. I think the answer is whether it's chemical recycling and/or other specialty containers, whether it be in glass or other packages. I do think the glass guys have an opportunity to perhaps maintain or grow their unit volume. They may lose share, there is a shortage of containers generally in certain markets. They will have an opportunity to at least fill their lines. I don't think that for the next, what, three or four years, that we're overly concerned with chemical recycling or specialty glass impeding on the cans' ability to gain share, because somebody has to pay for all that, and all of which you described or alluded to is exceptionally expensive. They're not to the point where they can make it economically feasible unless customers and consumers are willing to subsidize that for a long time in the future.
I don't think we're too concerned with the window that you described that opened up for us. I don't think we see that closing in the near- term.
Gotcha, on EPS, we are not providing any updates to the Q2 today.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question from the line of Arun Viswanathan from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Good morning, and I hope you're all doing well. I guess, first off, maybe I can just try to ask this question a little bit differently. Obviously, there has been a lot of capacity announcements. You mentioned the deficit of the shortfall, maybe 6 billion-10 billion cans in North America. Could you just describe how that evolves and maybe over the next three, four years when do you expect that we'll be in a balanced position in North America? How are we actually providing those shipments today? Do you see the import side kind of reducing over the next couple of years as new capacity comes on? How does that impact your profitability in march towards that $2.5 billion of EBITDA? Thanks.
Yeah, Ike. We built a factory, a two-line factory in Nichols, New York in 2016. I think, as we said at the time, that was probably the first new beverage can factory built in North America in over 20 years. Over that time, with declining or flat volumes, the industry has taken out significant capacity. Fast-forward to the back end of 2018, beginning of 2019, you start getting this incredible tailwind of new product introductions in a number of the categories we talked about, coupled with a very large customer response to their consumers with regards to sustainability and the environment, and really fueling new product introductions being heavily weighted towards the can as opposed to other substrates.
I think we, Bourque, even with all the capacity announced, I think we're still a couple of years away end of 2023, at least into 2024, before we think the North American market is in balance. If we even catch up to be in balance by then, it depends on the rate of growth in North America. Our customers, even with the new capacity we're putting in and the agreements we're making tied to that new capacity, our customers still believe they want more cans than we can provide. We're going to have fewer opportunities for imports into North America from other markets. We talked about last year, there was the COVID-19 situation, especially in the Q2 in Mexico and Brazil, allowed a lot of those cans to come north. That doesn't exist this year.
We have a little bit of excess capacity in our Middle Eastern footprint, although some of the Middle Eastern plants cannot make alcohol cans, so they're only able to support the North American market with non-alcohol cans. There's still going to be a shortage of cans in North America, and at least the customer is wanting more. Arun Viswanathan, I think we're at least two and a half, three years away before I would consider we're going to get back to balance.
Okay. Thanks.
Yeah.
As a follow-up, maybe I could just ask on capital allocation. You laid out a plan to get to $2.5 billion of EBITDA. How should we think about free cash flow in that period? Where do you see CapEx kind of trending over the next several years? When you are making these capital allocation decisions, what's kind of the optimal leverage that you have in mind? Would you be able to flex that lower or higher? If you would maybe can just give us your priorities on how you're looking at capital allocations here. Thanks.
Yeah. I think we targeted $900 million this year. The number could be similar next year. We've got a lot of tremendous growth opportunities. We will announce new capacity globally sometime later this year that will begin to be built late this year or next year. I think the hope is that I have no problem saying this. The hope is that we spend $900 million next year and the year after. The hope is that the growth opportunities remain as tremendous as they are right now, and we spend money, what happens is the base of EBITDA gets bigger, and so the cash flow naturally grows even with similar CapEx numbers. I think looking at capital allocation, I think given the current portfolio of assets we have now and the cash flow we generate from the portfolio, 3x-3.5x Is a reasonable leverage target.
I think if you shrink the portfolio and you shrink the cash flow that's generated in an organization because the portfolio is different, then you have to reconsider a different comfort level for a range of leverage.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Wilde of Bank of Montreal. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning, Tim. Good morning, Tom.
Here he is, the black hat. How you doing, Mark?
I'm all right. How are things in Philly?
Excellent.
Okay. I have a couple questions. One, if we go back several years ago, Tim, you used to talk about sort of wanting like a three-legged stool. I'm just curious, you and the peers are seeming to move toward more just a dedicated focus on beverage cans. Can you just talk with us about how you think about the portfolio, maybe the tensions between being very specialized and continuing to maintain some type of packaging diversity?
Yeah. Listen, I think you go back to late 2016, 2017, early 2018, I don't think as we sat there then, somebody might want to say that they saw this coming. Well, good for them. I don't think anybody saw this coming as rapidly and as deep as it came. I think when we talk about a three-legged stool, we understood we had three large businesses which generated a lot of cash flow. Now, the beverage business was generating much more cash flow at that point because it had much lower capital requirements. We now have a two-legged stool with one business generating a tremendous amount of cash flow, the beverage business generating a tremendous amount of growth, and chewing up a lot of the cash that's generated in its capital expansion. We're okay with that.
Growth is fine as long as you get earnings and cash flow growth, which we are getting from the business. I can't speak to what the others are doing. The thesis among many investors and some of the analysts is that the greatest product to ever hit the shelf is the beverage can, and we should be all focused on beverage cans only. Beverage cans are a great product. They always have been a great product, and I think they always will be a great product. The mix in all of that is demand and the demand capacity curve and what it does to pricing. Right now, it's quite healthy for the beverage can producers.
I do believe there's always room in a portfolio for a business which generates a tremendous amount of cash flow that requires very little capital, that makes mid-teen EBITDA margins, and it fuels the return of capital to shareholders. We've got some smaller tin plate businesses now in North America, post the sale of Europe, but I'd describe it as a two-legged stool at this point.
Okay, that's fair. For follow- on, Tim, I wonder if you could just talk with us about the North American beverage can recycling rate, which I think is about 50%, and just how you think about your role, if any, in trying to boost that recycling rate. Is there anything that Crown can be doing proactively, or do you really need to leave that to the beverage companies in your view?
Listen, I think the aluminum companies, I think the can companies, and I think the beverage fillers would love to see that be a higher number. We can all, and we all have from time to time, made investments in recycling in various communities. What we need is the population of the U.S. to be much more responsible as it relates to the environment, and that means you don't throw cans away. I don't know how many times I've been on an airplane, they come through and they collect all the cans, and they throw them in the normal trash bag. If you're only recycling 50% of the cans and you know at least 100% can be recycled, what you have in between is apathy or laziness. The one answer is we could do this like Switzerland.
We could have six recycling containers outside your house on the curb, and we could have the recycling police go through, and they could fine you if they go through and they find recyclable materials in the trash. That's what they do in a place like Switzerland. We're probably not going to get to a rate like Brazil. We don't have a poverty situation like Brazil in most parts of our country, and we have a social safety net which allows people not to have to go through other people's trash and landfills to find things that have value, such as aluminum cans. We're going to continue to try with the CMI and with our fellow beverage can companies, and we work with the aluminum companies. It is a disappointing number. Short of taking away people's personal freedoms, how do you go about it? It's pretty disappointing.
I agree with you.
Okay. I'll turn it over. Thanks, Tim.
Thanks, Mark.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kyle White of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks for the presentation. On transit packaging, I believe initially one of the rationales for the acquisition was to leverage it as a platform for growth in M&A. Now that you have integrated that business under one brand, Signode, do you still view it as a platform for inorganic growth, or will the capital be more dedicated to beverage cans going forward?
We spend, as Bourque said in his presentation, Kyle, we spend about 2% of sales a year in capital, and with that, we can target those markets where we want to grow organically. If we wanted to spend another $20 million in capital, we could do that. We are targeting the large majority of the CapEx that we spend a year in beverage right now because that's where the most immediate need is of our customers. Having said that, by not spending the money in transit, we are missing some opportunities, but I don't think we're missing opportunities that we won't be able to take advantage of in a couple of years, whether that's organically or inorganically. I think Bourque's presentation, hopefully what you see is a business that has global scale and global reach, and we have a lot of technology, and it's very well diversified.
Really, there's not another transit company globally that can compete with us. I think we may miss an opportunity here or there. Some of those opportunities go to private equity. We would always have those available to us in the future. Even if they're not, there's another opportunity that's out there. We don't feel any pressing need to have to do anything right now in transit other than run the business better than it was run by the owners before us, continue to generate cash, and service the customers.
Got it. Tom, on the $2.5 billion EBITDA target for 2025, I know it might be a difficult to answer, but how much of that earnings growth is kind of already known in terms of contracts signed or about to be signed with capacity coming online versus some other growth that may be a little bit more unknown at this point? Should we expect that earnings growth to be kind of gradual or front or back-loaded? Thanks.
Yeah. As Tim said earlier, obviously the further you get out, 2024 and 2025, we don't necessarily have contracts for all that because the volume isn't here yet. We have more confidence in the earlier years. It's a pretty steady buildup. You can only put in so much capacity at a time. The market's only going to grow so much at a time. It's fairly steady to get through to the 2025 numbers.
Thanks. I'll turn it over.
Thanks, Kyle.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Neel Kumar of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my question, thanks for the presentation. In terms of the customer commitments you're locking up for your new capacity, do you see risk that customers could potentially over-project demand to secure supply just given the sold-out environment? In that type of scenario, can you just discuss what type of contractual provisions you have in place to protect your downside? I mean, in general, if you find the demand is not materializing as you currently expect, how far in advance do you delay or cancel capacity plans?
I think the first part of your question or the statement you were making is that's always possible, and that has happened from time to time, where customers having been shorted cans or having been on allocation or not getting all the cans they needed at one point start to over-project. We're pretty careful. Actually, I don't want to get into the contract specifics. I'm sorry. I would say that we are careful to ensure two things, that we don't over-allocate cans to somebody who's giving us a forecast that's much higher than we believe it should be at the detriment of other customers. I'll say it like that. As we build capacity, we always look. You make a number of decisions whenever you're managing a business or a particular line of business, and all your decisions can be right for all the right reasons.
Then you step back, and you look at it, and you say, "Does it make sense, and is that the right overall decision?" We do that, and there are times when we'll have a real frank discussion among ourselves, and we say, "Do we really believe that forecast?" If we don't believe that forecast, regardless of what the customer is telling us, while we may want to build capacity because we know we're going to need capacity in a region or we're going to need some capability for specialty or otherwise, we may delay the installation or the ordering of the equipment just to push the capacity out. The answer is yes. Uniquely to Crown, which I think is a positive, we do know we're underweight specialty cans, especially in North America.
In the rest of the world, we're at the market or we're overweight the market in all the other markets. In North America, we know we're underweight. We have the good fortune to add capacity to get our weighting back in line to the market and to what our customers want.
Great. That's helpful. Then in terms of your 4%-6% demand assumption for North America, it seems that you expect that to largely come from newer categories. I was curious what that assumes in the more mature categories like beer and carbonated soft drinks, especially given the gains from COVID-19. Can you just help us understand how much of those share gains you would expect to reverse in, effectively, a more normalized environment and the resulting impact to can demand?
There's going to be some of that. I think Ashwini, in his presentation on Europe, I think our view of Europe and the Middle East is that it's going to have no impact. We do believe in Europe. We sold the food can business, but certainly in food cans and in beverage cans, we believe that it has permanently changed consumer behavior. We don't see that having an impact in Europe. In the United States, it's going to have an impact because so many people in Europe want to get back out and go to restaurants and bars and things like that. I think that it's going to be offset by the general growth in the market. While I don't have a number for you, I'll agree there's an impact, but when you net it all out, we're still going to grow.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Josephson of KeyBanc. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Tim and Tom, good morning.
Morning, Adam.
Morning, Tim. Tim, just sticking to North America for a second. You mentioned earlier that we, the analysts, have a job to do, the investors have a job to do. If you're in our seat, at what point would you say, "Okay, this amount of capacity that's been announced over the next, say, five years is probably too much, and it's going to eventually tip the market into oversupply?" Presumably, there's a point at which you would reach that conclusion, right? Whatever your demand forecasts now happen to be. If you were us, how would you think about that? That at some point in any commodity business, there will be oversupply if a sufficient amount of supply is announced. How would you frame that for us?
Well, I would ask you'd first have to tell me how many years out you want to look and how many years out you want to model. If you're looking out two- three years, I would tell you, don't worry about it. If you want to look out five- seven years, well, it's anybody's guess, but five- seven years is a lifetime in the investing world, right? I'd be surprised if most investors are looking at something with a five- seven year view. If you look at it from a two- three year view, I'm not worried at all. We've said this repeatedly for the last 18 months that we feel really good for the next two- three- four years. I do take your point. What I can tell you is that growth is really healthy.
The contracts are a bit more balanced than they have been in the past. Our customers are doing well. We're doing well. We're in a pretty consistent business when it comes to demand. Even the transit business has fairly consistent demand, even with a massive pandemic. We were down a little last year, but not that much, and we're going to bounce back even more this year. It's not like we're operating a cruise line or an airline, right? We know what demand is going to be. Let's assume we all overbuild. What's the worst that happens? Among four companies, we all have one plant too many? It gets down to the responsibility of each of the companies. Can you manage your one plant's excess capacity in the market?
Are you so greedy to fill your one plant up, you're willing to destroy the margins on your base business? That I can't answer for you as to how other people look at it, but Crown is very focused on converting what we do on a daily basis to earnings and cash flow. We're not here for practice, right?
No, understood, Tim. Just in terms of your guidance, I think it implies about 7% EBITDA CAGR based on consensus for this year through the next four years. What kind of capital do you envision having to spend over that period to generate that growth? Consequently, what are you expecting your returns on that incremental capital to be compared to your existing returns, compared to what you might earn on M&A or what you have earned on M&A in the past, et cetera?
Well, I think in a growing market, if you're spending organic capital, you're going to get much better returns, especially in the initial years, than you will with M&A. In M&A, you drop a pile of money. Basically, you trade a pile of money now for a future cash flow stream, and it takes a period of time to, let's say, earn back the goodwill that you paid for. I would expect not everything we do has returns. They're not all high returns. I would say the new capacity projects are all high returns, and we need those to offset projects that you do that may not have returns at all, like environmental or safety and other things that are absolutely required. I do think to get to $2.5 billion, we're at $900 million this year.
You're going to have to spend at least $600 million a year for the next 2022, 2023, 2024 to get to that. How much more over that I couldn't tell you right now.
Yeah. Thank you, Tim.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Roxland of Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks, guys. I guess returning to the outlook, if we use the 2025 EBITDA projection and your target leverage ratio, you should have a fair amount of cash available to deploy the next five years. I guess how should investors think about the balance between reinvesting that business into growth internally versus returning that cash to shareholders? Related to that, how should we think about how much faster EPS should grow relative to EBITDA over that period?
Yeah, listen, you start with Tom mentioned earlier that I think we've averaged $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion of cash from ops over the last couple of years. Let's assume we stay in that range going forward or that number grows, then from that, you subtract CapEx, and you get your more or less your free cash flow. Then from there, if you're satisfied with your leverage, and theoretically your leverage declines as your EBITDA grows if you don't change the debt number. It's return of capital, right? It's dividend and/or share buybacks. I'll leave M&A to the side because we don't have any plans right now for any significant M&A. There might be some smaller things on the edge, very small. It's dividend and share buyback. With that, with share buyback, you should get greater EPS accretion than you have EBITDA accretion.
Great. That's helpful. Second one, I think you made a comment to an earlier question around target leverage ratio, and that could change a bit if the portfolio was smaller. I guess maybe tying into your earlier strategic review, are you still actively looking at the portfolio construct, or is that kind of frankly lower priority now with the European food can completed?
We still operate a few businesses other than beverage cans globally. I will say that where we sit today it gives us the ability to return significant value to the shareholders by having the transit business. The transit business is a very solid business that has very stable demand and growing demand, generates tremendous cash flow, requires very little capital. It has an EBITDA margin with very little capital invested that's as good or better than most other packaging businesses that I see out there. You're going to see a Q2 operating income number in transit that's 55% or 60% higher than it was in the Q2 last year, it's going to do quite well this year.
I think for the time being, we're going to continue to operate and run the Transit business and utilize the cash flow that it throws off to return to shareholders and fund the beverage cans expansion.
Great. Thanks, Tim.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Phil Ng of Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Tim, what type of return do you expect to achieve from some of these growth investments you're making in North America? Do you have a view what type of return profile a new entrant could achieve with this type of investment? Just want to get some color on your thoughts in terms of competitive advantages for an established guy like yourself versus a new entrant as well.
I think there's three merchant can suppliers. There's a self-supplier. We all have a network. The advantage we have is we have a network. We can supply nationally. Importantly, we can move people around and train people from plant to plant to bring our lines up quickly. I would say the new entrant that you're alluding to has no advantage in North America like they have in Eastern Europe. They've had no advantage in South America. They've had no advantage in the Middle East. You don't see that, but we see that. We're not particularly worried about if they've had a so-called advantage in Eastern Europe. We don't see that translating to North America. They're not going to be hiring Eastern European labor and other subsidies that they get in Eastern Europe to fund their North American expansion.
They're gonna have the same utility contracts and same labor contracts, and they're gonna have to struggle with startup here because they don't have as many local can manufacturers to help from plant to plant. I would expect that a new entrant has lower return hurdles than an existing entrant only because they're trying to get into the market, but also because their startups perhaps take a little longer than ours. We'll leave it at that.
Yeah, that's great color, Tim. In your presentation, you show you're adding about 15% capacity by 2025 in Europe. Is that largely from projects that's been announced already? Are you getting the type of pricing in economic terms you kind of alluded to that you needed to see before you would make a bigger capital investment in the region? Thanks a lot, guys.
You're talking about Europe, Phil?
Yes, Europe specifically. I think in the presentation, you kind of lay out the capacity over the next few years.
Yeah. The capacity growth through 2025 is more back-end loaded in Europe. It may come quicker than what we've laid out for you, but we're not prepared to talk about it yet. As Ashwini said in his prepared remarks, we'll disclose that to you in due course, which is Ashwini being polite. As you know, I'm not very polite. We'll let you know when we want to let you know.
Okay. Those investments would hinge on that type of return profile, and pricing that you kind of alluded to before you would commit, right?
Phil, the goal is to make money, right?
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Candelson of Fulton Tech. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Yes, thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Morning.
Morning. I guess my first question is on the long-term kind of North American market growth expectation of about 5%. I'm just trying to make sure I'm properly kind of framing, understanding what you are including in that growth outlook versus what would remain an opportunity in terms of expected categories that are growing versus substrate shifts that could occur, but are not in the plan. Especially, bottled and sparkling water in cans in the out years is a category that today very little happens in cans, but would remain a pretty big opportunity for you in the industry.
I think sparkling water does happen in cans now, and I think that will continue to grow. There's still significant sparkling water in PET. I do believe that transitions more to can over time. There's very little flat water in cans. I have perhaps a much more conservative view on the conversion of flat water from PET to cans than perhaps some others do. I don't think we need that to grow 5% a year- over- the next couple of years. Just so we're clear, 5% means about 6 billion units per year, which is five high speed can lines per year at full rated production. When you look at it that way, you can see why it will take us two- three- four years to make up the shortfall in the U.S.
That's helpful. Maybe could I ask why you'd be more conservative on that opportunity? Just trying to make sure we understand your lens to market.
On flat water?
Yes.
Well, I think when it comes to flat water, people like the resealability of the plastic bottle, and they like the clarity of the bottle. They like to look through the bottle and see that they're drinking clean, pure, or what appears to be clean and pure water. While we do have resealable options in cans, I don't think we have one where somebody might feel comfortable enough to put it in their Louis Vuitton purse. The other thing is you're talking about flat water here, which has no flavor and has no carbonation. While you may not need a PET bottle, you don't need to buy it in a can. You could buy a container, as so many people now have, little aluminum containers or other types of containers, and fill it with your tap water at home. It may happen. It probably will happen.
My view is it happens a little slower than everybody else would like to believe. As I said, we're not counting on that. We see enough growth in the other markets and the conversion from other materials for some of those other products that we still get the 5% without that.
Okay. That's really helpful. In the $2.5 billion of EBITDA in 2025, I wasn't clear just the contribution in that that's anticipated from maybe the non-bev can businesses Signode and the food aerosol businesses that are left. For Signode specifically, I didn't think I heard a medium term kind of organic revenue growth expectations for that business.
Yeah. Let's say post 2021 for Signode, let's just assume GDP type growth levels. I think 2021 is going to have a huge bounce back from COVID last year. You're going to go from, let's say, roughly $2 billion in revenue in 2020 to maybe we're like $2.4 or a little bit higher this year. That's 20%, but it's not a 20% business. That's a recovery from COVID. I think beyond that, think about GDP, with better drop down to the bottom line. I think that between Signode and the non-beverage businesses between the end of 2021 and 2025, at least a $200 million improvement in EBITDA, if not more. I don't think we're prepared to give you that detail here.
Okay. All right. I appreciate the call. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gabe Hajde of Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Gentlemen, good morning. Thanks for the presentation and details. A quick question, I guess, Tim, on clarifying the utilization comment that you made at the beginning of the presentation. Was it that those lines you typically run 5%- 8% lower than nameplate capacity? The second part of that question is, in 2020, I suspect that due to COVID-19, obviously, you're running lines pretty hard, as well as some of your customers just trying to get stuff on the shelf. Any guess as to how that boost, I guess, production, in 2020 that might leak out of the system over the next, I don't know, 18 months?
On your first question, it's not that we run the lines lower than nameplate rated speeds. What I was trying to say that once the plant is built and it is in commercial operation, that is our rated capacity. It will take 12- 18 months to fully get through learning curve. Until the plant is through learning curve, the annual output is somewhere between 5% and 8% lower than the rated capacity that we have installed. Think of it another way. Let's assume that if by the end of 2025 we don't build any more factories, within 12- 18 months, the annual output will equal that rated number that we've shown you on the slide. If you understand what I just said.
I do. I guess the question is if nameplate is 1.2 billion and you've got changeovers and label changes, et cetera, are you making 1.2 billion units per line or is it something less than that?
We can, depending on how we schedule. It's up to us to do the right production plan and schedule the changeover so we minimize the loss of capacity. The answer is yes, we can get pretty close.
Understood. That's helpful.
Okay.
The second part of the question.
Remind me of the second question. I'm getting old.
No worries. Just the fact that, again, maybe some customers chose to go to 12 lines.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
Yeah. Well, as we said, we supported North America with Mexico and Brazil. That's not going to be available this year. The only market maybe as you look forward 12- 24 months that we might have a little excess capacity would be the Middle East, but it's not a lot. The answer, I think, is no.
It was actually the other way. It was that if you had a certain amount of capacity in the U.S. and you were churning out as many cans as possible, less label changes, et cetera, that you actually got more production than you otherwise would out of your system.
Yeah. Okay. I will agree to that because we did have customers that took their SKUs from 50 down to five. I do not think we are going to see that change this year, and I think by the time that does change, we will get enough capacity installed that it will not have an impact on what we are able to supply. Our capacity numbers that we showed you are rated capacity, so it is marginal. Let us just say it is marginal, the difference.
Fair enough. Something interesting that popped out to me in the presentation was the growth rate of China. It used to be, I think, low double digit, and I believe you showed 4%. Has something changed there, and do you envision that as a risk to other Southeast Asian countries?
I'm going to let Hock Huat Goh, if you're still on, why don't you take that question?
I think China is, as you know, the population. This is Hock Huat here. The population is based on 1.4 billion. The thing here is that our projection is that going forward, their domestic growth is about 4%. It's much lower than what we had before. Likewise, is that Southeast Asia is much more developing country compared to China in terms of that. That's the reason why the growth potential in Southeast Asia is higher.
Thank you.
Maybe the way to just to add on to that is there's 4% on 45 or whatever the number is still significant, and it's as significant as 10% on 20, right? The absolute growth is the same. It's just lower on a percentage basis, and I think what Hock Huat was trying to say is that the Chinese populace and the disposable income can only absorb a certain number of absolute cans in terms of growth every year.
Thank you, Tim.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stefano De Alio of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on beverage cans. You did talk a little bit about how you're thinking about potentially customers overstating capacity, et cetera. I just wanted to get a little bit of understanding with regard to any new product introductions that may actually not succeed. I think recently we saw Coca-Cola, after a very short stint, pulling its energy drink out of the market this year. It lasted less than two years. I think it's essentially in beverage cans. Have you seen any other products that were pulled from the market shortly after they were introduced? Are you taking these type of potential headwinds into consideration for your capacity projections and demand projections?
The answer would be no, because I think the reason why those products get pulled is because they don't do well and because they're being superseded or beaten out by a different product that that customer may have in its portfolio or some other product that another customer or another potential customer might have in the market. These are not huge. Until they've been in the market for a while, the demand for those products or the demand for the cans for those labels are not very high to us or to the can companies until the customer is confident that they're going to do well. The customer doesn't want to buy labels that they don't think they can sell.
All it means is that product didn't do as well as they thought, and they'll replace it with a different product, or they lost out to somebody else in the market. It doesn't change the overall trajectory of the market in the near- term.
Okay, perfect. The other thing, I want to come back to the Transit Packaging business and the automation opportunity. I think a few years ago, you had that subsegment called equipment and tools. It was around 18% of your sales. Now I think you've renamed it, and it's 24%. Can you give us a little bit more color? What has changed there? How has this segment gotten so much higher market share? What is the automation opportunity, especially now with COVID? We've heard from other suppliers of automation equipment that they're being
Yeah. I'll let Bourque answer the second part of the question. How did it get from 18%- 24%? Firstly, automation is just a rebranding of the equipment and tool business we had. We didn't do anything special to get it from 18%- 24%, maybe 1% or 1.5% organically. It's really capturing the automation products and services that we provide in the consumer business and making sure we capture them properly in the automation category. Then Bourque can deal with specific automation things.
I think, let me piggyback on what Tim's saying and help answer both the questions at the same time. That growth that you've seen, part of it is, again, us taking these very independently operating businesses and unifying them under one umbrella with a common management structure, organizational structure, et cetera. That particular part of the growth was just about getting out of our own way, stopping competing against ourselves on projects. We would have customers call us in three different parts of the world for the same solution and get three different answers. We've been able to clean up a lot of those things, and that just fell straight through to the bottom line.
As far as for the future, what we've seen with the pandemic is we've seen a tremendous interest in an automated warehouse solution, a lights out solution, where we can take product off the end of the line on pallets, store it in a warehouse of 40,000 positions, and it's totally lights out. There's been a tremendous interest in that, lower contact. Again, we make various individual pieces of equipment that are industry leading. The automation piece is now we're focused on integrating those things into one cohesive solution for a customer where, quite frankly, again, with limited visibility of individual businesses, it just couldn't have been done. We're getting much, much better at identifying those and taking advantage of those opportunities.
Okay, perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alton Stump of Longo. Your line is open. Go ahead.
Good morning, Tim and Tom. How are you? It's been a while.
Welcome back.
Thank you. Good to be back. I just want to ask about the new product launches. Obviously, been a huge shift towards cans in North America over the last couple of years. Is there any signs of that slowing down, or could that percentage going to cans grow even further in your view in coming years?
Well, I think when you talk about new product introductions, I'm not a marketer. I can sit here and dream up products that might be introduced. I'm not a marketer. I don't really know what consumers' tastes are and what consumers are clamoring for. I do believe that more of them are going to come to cans directly out of the box as to in the past where they might have gone 50/50 or 20/80 cans in another substrate. I think we're going to get a large share of those coming forward. I do think that for products that are out there already, that we're going to continue to gain share in those products, be it sparkling water or otherwise. It looks like people have really embraced sustainability, and they're giving it much more than lip service at this point.
I don't know if I answered your question, but that's probably the best I'm going to do right now.
Yeah. No, thanks. That's very helpful, Tim. I asked about Europe. It's interesting to me, kind of a shift in dynamics where Europe had always been more focused on environment versus North America, and that seems to have kind of flipped in that industry over the last couple of years. Is there any signs or evidence that consumers in Europe are starting to adapt the same type of attitudes towards a can over plastic in particular that we've seen here with a massive shift over the couple years in North America?
Yeah, I think we're starting to see that. The other thing, remember, Europe still has a very large returnable glass market for soft drinks and bottled water, and I think that will change over time as well as more of the market is off-premise, as Ashwini discussed, and more and more pub and shop owners and retailers don't want to deal with returnables. The recycling system is actually quite good in Europe. There is a system in place, and there is value to the aluminum, as John discussed. I think all of what you described has great opportunity in Europe.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ghansham Panjabi of J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning.
Morning.
I was wondering if you can tell me how many line speed ups can you reasonably do in a year? How much capacity can that add? What is involved to do a line speed up? What does it cost? Do you have to take a plant down to do it? How long do you have to take it down for? My second question is, if I heard it correctly, the third Nichols line is, I think it's at 1.6 million units, which is really large. Can any of the new plants have lines that are about that size? What does it entail to build plants and lines of that aspect? Thank you.
You're welcome. The Nichols line is a big line. It has, as John said, 12 body makers. I don't want to say you can make it as big as you want it, but to make them bigger, you just put more equipment in. What we do is we split the back end. We create two back ends. You might want to call it one high speed line or two medium speed lines, depending on how you look at the back end. The front end of the line through the decorator is basically one line, and when you pass the decorator to the back end, you have two back ends, so you run a lot quicker through palletization. What does it take to speed up a line? It depends on the line. It depends on the age of the line.
It depends on the equipment in the line. Sometimes we have lines that the washer or the decorator, the ovens are such that all we have to do is add some more front-end equipment to put more units into the line, and we can handle that. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes you've got to think about changing out the washer or changing out the oven or putting another decorator in to speed up the line. When it only entails putting in an extra couple wall ironers, that's not very expensive. If you have to put in a decorator or change out the oven, that's a little higher. Then if you have to change out the washer, that's a bit more entailed. Changing out the washer means you do take the line down until the washer is brought back up. It's all over the map.
It's certainly to bring on an extra 200 or 300 million cans of capacity a year in a line. In a situation where you don't have to change out equipment, you're just adding equipment. It's not very expensive to do that compared to a new line.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is a follow-up from George Staphos of Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking the follow-on questions. I want to come back to Signode, Tim, you had mentioned that, I'm paraphrasing here, there might be some growth opportunities that you can't necessarily get at right now, but you're not worried about losing them and recognizing there's probably competitive issues here and sort of going through the laundry list of what you're not chasing and what you're not worried. Can you give us a little bit of comfort in terms of why you think you could get at those? If the business accelerated, obviously you're off of a depressed base last year, but tell us if we saw four or 5% or 6% growth out of Signode, given we are seeing a synchronized global recovery, maybe we do see that.
Would the capital have to go beyond what you're projecting, or you think you could still manage that on a going forward basis? I had a quick follow- on.
Yeah. George, let's just frame. I'm going to give you some numbers, but I think we had about $255 million of operating income last year in Signode, and maybe this year it's, let's pick a number, $310 million-$320 million. As we think about the future, let's talk about the percentage growth rate you want off of the 2021 number. Clearly, if the opportunities were there to have growth in the 5%-6% range from our customers and not a GDP type growth rate, then it would require a little bit more capital than
Than $40 million a year. It might require 65 or 70. We do believe we could target that appropriately, to get the quickest returns possible where our customers need them, with a greater focus on consumer products and health and beauty than perhaps the business had in past years.
Okay. Back to Signode. Are you seeing much impact from the trend we've seen over the last 12 months with COVID, a direct-to-consumer purchasing pattern, e-commerce? Is that materially changing the business for Signode or not really just given the diversity? Just a factual question, and I'll turn it over. The $2.5 billion of EBITDA that I think you put at the end of your forecast, that is, I assume, pro forma for the food can, for the European tinplate divestiture , right? That's a big number, but just want to make sure that.
Yes
we were apples to apples. Thanks. Okay.
Hi, George.
On e-commerce?
I'll take your question on e-commerce. We look at e-commerce in two ways. You can talk e-commerce where we sell our products directly to consumers. That could be a future thing that we get involved with, if it seems to make sense for us, and it helps us streamline our channels and the way we go to market. I think maybe what you're referring to is something like the warehouses, the logistics, and those things.
More so, product offering.
Right. We have case erectors and sealers in one of our businesses. I can tell you, one of the largest e-commerce retailers out there, we are the supplier of choice for that machine. We are supplying those machines around the world, Europe, Asia, the Americas, as they continue to grow, because these are very specialized, very easy to interchange, easy to manipulate. As you can imagine, e-commerce has a wide range of packages, boxes, all of those things that you see on people's porches. We can accommodate all those things. We have become a supplier of choice for them. You talk about the distribution of COVID vaccines. If you've seen these in the distribution centers, they're in small boxes. Again, our machines are helping to put those things out into the world.
The big distributors, someone like a McKesson, we're their number one supplier for doing these things. We've had to step up our responses in our product offerings and the delivery of the product, existing product, in order to meet that demand. Yes, we are heavily focused on that. Our stretch wrapping product, stretch film that we're developing and different, let's say, smaller, more individualized pieces of equipment or even hand tools that help those fast-moving e-commerce markets that have such a wide range of packaging types. That's exactly where we're focused.
Thanks very much. Good luck on the quarter, guys.
Thanks, George.
Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Arun Viswanathan, RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. Thanks for taking my follow-up here. Just wanted to ask one more question on beverage cans. When you think about the portfolio, you obviously are making large scale investments here in North America. You've had some line conversions in Europe, previously. Where else do you see kind of opportunities outside of North America? If you were to think about the portfolio as it stands today, are there any areas where you feel that you're under-penetrated, that you envision good growth? Yeah, maybe just address that first. Thanks.
Well, I think, you have our footprints in the three regions, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and the Americas. I think that we firmly believe that Brazil is going to continue to grow. We've got three lines in construction now, right now in Brazil. We'll see what the future brings. You can look at the maps in Europe and North America, and you can see where we have regional holes, if you will. Obviously, we're not just going to build a plant there so we can say we cover that region. We need an anchor customer, and we need a base level of volume to make it make sense to go in a region. I discussed earlier, there were several markets we didn't show on the one slide, be it Sub-Saharan Africa, Korea, Japan.
I don't think we right now have any designs on going into those markets, if that's what you're asking.
Great. Thanks. Maybe just one more last one, which is, M&A, it's not something that we've really discussed here today, but when you purchased Signode, part of the thinking was that maybe could be a platform for future inorganic growth. Is that still a possibility, or how are you thinking about potential inorganic growth opportunities from here?
I think that was the statement that was made then. I think the statement's still applicable. I don't think we're going to do anything for the next couple of years in that regard. The focus is on organic growth in beverage and doing everything we can do to generate as much cash flow from the Signode business to return capital to shareholders and pay for that organic growth in beverage. Having said that, if the environment changes around over the next several years and we're able to demonstrate to you and continue to generate good earnings and cash flow growth in Signode, there always will be opportunities to add to the Signode platform. As I said earlier, if we miss something today, okay, we miss something. There's a whole host of opportunities.
We don't feel encumbered by very few opportunities that we have to take whatever comes along. There's so many opportunities, and we have such a great leading position in all of those markets that if we miss something now, that's okay. We'll either get a chance at it later on if it's PE owned, or we'll buy something else in the future if that's where it takes us in the future. For the time being, there's no plans on any M&A in that regards.
Great. Thanks for all the detail, and good luck.
Thanks. Thank you very much, Arun. I think that was the last question, and before we break, I want to thank everybody for joining us. We'll come back to you in July to discuss the Q2 results, and until then, everybody, stay safe. Bye now.