All right. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us for the management presentation. My name is Max Mock, and I'm the research analyst here at William Blair, who covers Charles River. We're pleased to be joined this morning by CFO Flavia Pease. Before we get into the presentation, I have to mention two things. First, the breakout session will be held in Maher on the second floor immediately following this presentation. Second, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at www.williamblair.com. Again, very pleased to have Charles River with us here today. With that, I'll turn it over to Flavia.
Thank you, Max. Good morning, everyone. Thanks again for hosting us. I'm Flavia Pease, as Max indicated. I'm the CFO of Charles River, and it's great to be back at the Blair Conference. I was here a couple of years ago. We are going to quickly flash our safe harbor and RAGG statement. Just give it a second, and then we'll get into the presentation. For those of you who might be new to Charles River, let me ground you on who we are. We are the leader in the preclinical contract research space. In that, we help our clients accelerate their biomedical research and therapeutic innovation. We work alongside them from the discovery and early stage development all the way through the safe manufacture of their lifesaving therapies. We play a very critical role in the drug development space.
Last year, we had sales of $4 billion. As you can see here, we have a significant presence and a scale that we believe is a source of competitive advantage. That scale materializes in several ways, whether it is the more than 2,500 colleagues that we have with advanced degrees, the 130 facilities that we operate across 20 countries in the world, or the breadth of our client base with over 2,000 biopharma clients in North America. This level of scale is something that makes us unique in terms of how we compete. It does translate into results. When you think about it, we were part of more than 80% of the drugs that were approved by the FDA in the last five years. We really play a critical role.
It is one of the things that we are most proud of and aligns very nicely with our mission of creating healthier lives. Here you can see sort of where we operate. As I said, our presence spans the research and drug development continuum. We think that in addition to the scale that I talked about, the distinguishing feature of Charles River is this unique and scientifically differentiated portfolio of nonclinical capabilities that we bring to bear. We operate across three segments, which I will deep dive through the presentation to help you understand better what they do and the long-term growth prospects of each of them. Just at a high level, our research models and services business is a one-stop shop for high-quality research models and services.
In here, what we do is we help scientists enable them to discover new molecules with our research models and the services that we provide them. Our discovery and safety assessment business is the we are the largest partner for outsourced drug discovery and nonclinical development. We help get preclinical success to advance to the clinic. The last segment of our business is the manufacturing solutions, where we provide process development, clinical to commercial manufacturing, and lot release testing. Last year, that $4 billion of revenue was split, with the majority of it coming from our DSA segment. About 60% of our revenues is in DSA. The business had a challenging year with declining sales. We'll talk a little bit more about what's happening in the market. The other two segments each are about 20% of our revenues.
All three businesses operate with healthy margins ranging from 23.7%- 27.4%. Talked a little bit about how the demand environment has been constrained over the last probably 18 months, 24 months. When you look at a five-year period, we have proven to have resilient financial performance, albeit a bit of a margin compression over the last couple of years. We have grown revenue from a CAGR perspective, 8% between 2020 and 2024. EPS grew a little bit slower in this period at 6%. We are a business that generates pretty healthy cash flows as well. Free cash flow grew at 7% CAGR for that same period. About a month ago, we had our first quarter earnings call and announced our first quarter results. Just as a reminder, we delivered organic revenue decline of 1.8%. Margin did expand 60 basis points.
EPS grew 3% despite that revenue headwind. At that time, we also updated and raised our guidance for the year, which we are just reaffirming here. There is no change from what we communicated a month ago. For the full year, we are expecting organic revenue to decline between 4.5% and 2.5%. Non-GAAP operating margin will be down between 20 and 50 basis points. Non-GAAP EPS is forecasted to be between $9.30 and $9.80. I have been talking a little bit about this sort of challenging demand environment that we have all been experiencing. If you think about it, it started as early as 2022 with biotech funding going through an adjustment and normalization post-COVID that put pressure, especially in our biotech client base. We also started to experience, if we go back a couple of years, high inflation, interest rates raised.
You fast forward to last year, where pharma went through a pipeline reprioritization or right-sizing, which also created demand headwinds for us. You fast forward to now, which we have additional macro storm clouds, whether it's tariffs, whether it is NIH potential reductions, FDA staffing reductions as well. The whole healthcare and life science space has been pressure over the last probably two to three years. I think when you take a step back and you think structurally, we are of the belief that nothing fundamentally changed in the sense that there's still a lot of medical needs to be solved, a lot of diseases to be cured. This industry has shown the power of new modalities and the ability to address these diseases and sometimes cure it. When that happens, it still offers a compelling return for investors.
We believe that we're in a little bit of a speed bump period right now, but that structurally, this is still an attractive space. Against that backdrop, we continue to be focused on advancing our strategic agenda. In that, our priorities are to promote innovation to strengthen that portfolio of differentiated preclinical capabilities that I alluded to earlier. That innovation can come either organically or inorganically through M&A. We're focused on adjacencies, spaces where we already have some presence and can leverage our capabilities. Also looking at some new adjacencies, like we'll talk a little bit about NAMs or these new alternative methods or approaches that were a lot of focus over our last earnings call. Another priority for us in our strategic agenda is to continue to champion technology to enhance speed and efficiency.
In doing that, we hope to drive profitable growth through a more scalable operation. Finally, all of that will be enabled by advancing our purpose-driven culture and ensuring that our colleagues have an opportunity to develop and grow and contribute to that mission that I talked about earlier. Let's double-click now in each of our three segments. The first one, as I said, is our Research Models and Services segment, where we help scientists discover new molecules. This is a space that we have a pretty meaningful, I do not want to call it dominant. The antitrust lawyers might not like that, but a meaningful share of the market of 40%. We are clearly an important player in providing these services. From a products perspective, we produce more than 140 different strains of the most widely used small research models.
In our services business, I think the two highlights would be our CRADL business, which you can think of as a turnkey full-service vivarium rental space. Then our GEMS business, which is genetically engineered models and services, where we provide more sophisticated models. We can turn knock genes in and out to make them a better translational model for scientists. In the research models and services space, geographic proximity is important because you're shipping some of these live models. Our global footprint, again, and the proximity to the biotech hubs is an important competitive advantage. We also have been focused on digitizing that client experience and making it easier to do business with. In terms of the long-term growth drivers in the RMS, we think price has been and will continue to be a tailwind.
Small models are a low-cost but very critical tool to advance drug research. We also benefit from favorable mix as we upgrade to these more complex models that I spoke about that tend to price at a premium. The services business, especially CRADL, is a business model that we think will continue to resonate with clients as it allows them to invest in research and not have to deploy capital and dollars towards infrastructure. It sort of variabilizes that investment. Finally, China has been a good source of growth for us. We have done some geographic expansions there and again, open new markets for our business. The next segment is DSA in discovery and safety assessment. In discovery, we, as the name says, help clients discover and characterize new drug candidates.
We have in vivo and in vitro capabilities across pretty much all the modalities and also cover most of the therapeutic areas with a primary focus in CNS and oncology. In our safety assessment business, we offer a full suite of safety studies required for regulatory submission. We are the leader in both regulated and non-regulated GLP and have capabilities across general and specialty toxicology, bioanalysis, pathology, DMPK, you name it. This is a space where, again, we have almost three times the size of the next second largest competitor. In terms of long-term growth drivers for DSA, we're going to continue enhancing our portfolio of offerings I talked about, both organically and inorganically. Bioanalysis is an example of where we can augment our offerings organically. Some of the NAMs and alternative technologies is maybe a place where we'll look at inorganic opportunities.
There continues to be opportunity for additional outsourcing. Safety is 60% outsourced and discovery is about 30% outsourced. There's no reason safety couldn't get to 80% and that discovery could continue growing. Safety at some point was only 20%, 30%. We have seen this movie, if you will. Finally, we are pretty confident that the demand for global biopharma especially will come back. As they go through these cycles of large LOEs and have to look at their pipelines, they need to refuel that for future growth. We think that that will happen again. You heard me talk a little bit about NAMs. We actually spent quite a bit of our last earnings call providing our perspective on NAMs.
The reason for that was in April, the FDA put forth a press release announcing this goal of accelerating the validation and adoption of what we call new approach methods or NAMs. There was a bit from our perspective of a market overreaction because if you just read the press release at face value, it could lead somebody that is not as familiar with the space to believe that things will completely change in a three to five-year horizon. We wanted to make sure that we share our perspectives with the investor community. We also spend a lot of time talking to clients. On NAMs, first of all, it's important to remind everyone that this is not new. We, as an industry, have been on this journey for decades. The FDA actually first provided some guidance on their strategic intent as early as 2011.
The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 of 2022 was already speaking of the same things that this press release now alluded to. NAMs have been part of the evolution of how we do the work we do for many, many years. They have shown some nice, interesting promise and some scientific advancements that we're going to continue to embrace. At this point, it's important to understand that they're not fully capable of replacing animal studies. When you think that the primary concern of both clients and regulatory agencies is around patient safety, we are confident that nobody's going to put at risk and sacrifice patient safety if you have tools that are not yet capable of replacing the in vivo work that we do.
We think that the way this will evolve is through a more hybrid approach where in discovery, where you're trying to answer some specific questions, NAMs can be a pretty powerful tool. When you start dealing with multi-organ, multi-system interactions or chronic questions that you're trying to answer, NAMs are not capable of doing that. We think that it will be more of a sort of adjunctive or hybrid approach where you're going to be using NAMs in conjunction with animal work. We also want to remind everyone that as this evolution continues, there's nobody better suited to participate and actually lead this journey than us. We don't think of ourselves and our leadership in the preclinical space that is confined to animal models.
It's actually rooted in our science and innovation, the understanding of the regulatory landscape and the insights that we can bring to bear to our clients to help enhance their study designs, and then the translational expertise that we have. This is a very fragmented space, and it's primed for a player like Charles River to come in and consolidate and help bring the offering at scale, which is not the case today. So far, the FDA guidance and the pilot that they have announced is supposed to focus on mAbs and more specifically in reducing the duration of chronic NHP studies in mAbs. Just for reference, that type of work for us is about $50 million of our annual sales. In fact, total mAbs is only about 10% of our safety assessment work.
When you think about sort of jumping and assuming that you can translate the NAMs pilots and experience into other modalities, that's going to be a lot harder because small molecules and other more complex biologics, newer modalities, they are less predictable than mAbs. Eighty-five percent of our revenue is in these other spaces. Again, we've been in this journey for a while. Our leadership in actually Three Rs, which stand for replacement, reduction, and refinement, and ethical use of animals in biomedical research is a staple of our history. We've been investing in NAMs for decades. In fact, last year, before all of this FDA announcement came about, we were formalizing our own efforts and investments with our AMAP initiative.
I just have it in this slide, a couple of the examples of our partnerships and investments in this space through computational modeling in our partnership with Valo and the Logica platform, or the acquisition of Retrogenics that focuses on cell microarray technology for off-target screening and toxicity. More broadly, this is our view of the landscape. You can see on the left of the slide what are some of the established applications of NAMs. Again, think of NAMs as there's some in vitro ways to use these technologies, in silico, and then even in vivo ways to, as I said, from a three Rs perspective, to get reduction or refinement of use of animals. You can see that most of the applications, the current applications are in the discovery space, where, as I said, we're trying to answer a specific question.
We have capabilities in all of them. As you move towards the right side of the slide, where you have some emerging opportunities, most of it is still being applied to discovery. When you get to the future exploratory use cases, I think that is where it is a little bit more still science fiction right now in terms of whole body on a chip. These things do not exist yet, and they are not being used today. They are more of a theoretical way to evolve. That is our perspective on NAMs. I want to just wrap up with the last segment, which is our manufacturing solutions business, where we actually have three distinct businesses. The first one is our Microbial Solutions offering, where we are a leader in fast and efficient detection and lot release testing.
We also have a biologics testing business where we do characterization testing and cell bank manufacturing for biologic compounds. The last segment is our CDMO in cell and gene therapy, where we focus on gene modified cell therapy, but we also have some offerings in plasmids and biovectors. From a long-term growth drivers perspective, for microbial, there is a lot of runway for growth there. This type of rapid testing that we offer is only 10% adopted. Most of the LAL testing is still some of the, let's say, older, more traditional testing methods. You can see that as we continue to transition clients into rapid methods, it is a great opportunity for us, given that this model is a bit of a razor-razor blade construct, where you buy our equipment and then you buy the cartridges.
Seventy percent of our revenue in microbial is from that recurring revenue stream of the cartridges. In biologics testing, also attractive long-term growth opportunities as we're going to continue to test and manufacture, especially some of these new advanced modalities. What has been interesting to see is with some of the more recent commitments from pharma companies to bring back manufacturing into the U.S., and I think the last time I counted is over $150 billion. That is also going to offer us, maybe three or four years from now, a great opportunity to help those sites get online and do a lot of the quality testing for them. Also, similar to DSA, we'll look at partnerships and new technologies like next-generation sequencing to augment our portfolio. We have not also been asleep from a margin perspective.
I talked about how margin has eroded for the last couple of years. That is part of, in our business, when you have declining revenue, it is obviously hard to protect margin. We really have taken decisive action to manage through this challenging environment with constrained demand, focusing on enhancing our commercial efforts, aggressively managing our cost structure, and then thinking of how we might allocate capital strategically, maybe in a different way than in the past. As a result of this focus, we saw our capture rate in the proposals in our safety space, for example, increase 300 basis points in 2024 versus 2023 when you look year-over-year average. From a cost perspective, we have implemented right-sizing of our workforce and then restructuring of our footprint that will generate over 5% of cost savings.
Finally, we're balancing our capital allocation with execution of stock repurchases, which we hadn't done in a while. Speaking of capital allocation, we obviously have a balanced approach and continue to optimize our capital deployment. When we think about capital expenditures, we modulated the level of investments that we've done. We also, as I said, reinstated stock repurchases. We'll continue to look at strategic M&A as a priority, but we're obviously mindful to doing that in a way that we maintain reasonable debt levels. To conclude, we're confident that we're going to emerge from this period of softer demand as a stronger and more agile organization. We took these actions to optimize our cost base, to selectively repurchase stock, and to remain disciplined in how we deploy our capital so that we can enhance shareholder value.
Once the demand returns, we believe that this leaner organization, fitter organization that we now are, will be able to capitalize on the increased demand and drive profitable growth and shareholder value in the future. Thank you very much.
All right, thanks, everyone. I know we have a minute or two here, but I think we're going to go ahead and wrap it there and take the group up to the second floor. Again, as a reminder, the breakout will be in Maher. It's on the second floor, breakout room in Maher. We'll see everybody up there in about 10 minutes. Thank you.