All right, everyone. Welcome everyone here in Muscle Shoals, and to all of you that are able to join by video conference. I am Jason Hershiser, Director of Investor Relations for Constellium. Before we get started, for those in the room, a couple of notes on safety. In case of fire, the alarms will sound, directing everyone to evacuate the building. The emergency exits are the front doors of the building, and the side doors are near the restrooms. In case of a tornado warnin, please go to the shelter, which is the center portion of the ballroom. Now for a few opening comments. A copy of today's presentation is available on our website at Constellium.com. I'd like to encourage everyone to visit the company's website and take a look at our recent filings.
Today's call includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements include statements regarding the company's anticipated financial and operating performance, future events, and expectations, and may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For a summary of specific risk factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the items presented under the heading Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 20-F. All information in this presentation is as of the date of the presentation. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. In addition, today's presentation includes information regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Please see the reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures attached in today's slide presentation, which supplement our IFRS disclosures. Turning to slide three now. Over the next three hours, you will hear presentations from our CEO, Jean-Marc Germain, our CFO, Peter Matt, as well as each of our three business unit leaders. There will be Q and A sessions at the end of each BU presentation, and Jean-Marc and Peter will also take questions at the end. When we get to the Q and A sessions, for those in the room, please raise your hand to ask a question and we will distribute microphones. For those joining online, you can ask questions by submitting them in the Q and A box on your screens. The Constellium panelists will see your questions in the room, but they will not be visible to others in the room or others online.
After the final Q and A session, we will break for lunch. For those here in person, Chris Smith, our Muscle Shoals plant manager, will take you through an overview of the plant and our safety protocols for the plant tour. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Without further ado, I will turn it over to Jean-Marc Germain.
Thank you. Thank you, Jason, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, for those of you who made it to Muscle Shoals, and welcome to everybody on the webcast. As we noted before, we are very excited about what's happening at Constellium. You will hear a lot of great things today, but I want to make sure to leave you with the key messages right from the beginning. We are a very diversified business with business units that all benefit from secular, durable, sustainability-driven growth trends. We have been good at executing on our strategy. If you were expecting a new strategy for the future, you'll be disappointed.
We're going to continue to execute on our strategy, but it's working as evidenced by our track record. At the moment, what we are seeing is very exciting opportunities to invest in our business. Now that we have the means to do so, this is how we're gonna tweak our strategy and build a growth aspect to Constellium as well. Given this, we will moderately increase capital expenditures, but we will not do that at the expense of free cash flow generation, and we will not do that at the expense of our leverage target, which remains at the 2.5 times level in the near to medium term. We see an attractive path forward for us to build a better business and grow while maintaining these priorities around deleveraging.
We are issuing today new long-term guidance of Adjusted EBITDA in excess of EUR 800 million, and we believe our future free cash flow generation can be around EUR 300 million per annum. Finally, we are very pleased to announce an ambitious set of sustainability targets. We've been working on them for many, many years and it's really a good thing we're able to put together a long-term trajectory for our business. It's something that our customers want, and it's something where we are well placed to deliver. Before I start with the business itself, I wanna talk about safety, which is our top priority. You will realize that all the more so for those of you who are going to join us on the tour of the plant.
These are very heavy processes, equipment, and danger is around you when you walk in our plants. At the same time, we work to make our plants and our operations very safe for our people. Since 2015, we have reduced our recordable case rate to the level of 1.8, 1.9. I'll remind you that these are European standards, so that's per million hours. In the U.S., we typically report per 200,000 hours. Those numbers may seem a little bit abstract. You'll see how much better we are compared to the average of our peers in the U.S. or in Europe. If you think of it, if you've got an 80-year life expectancy, it's about 700,000 hours that we are going to live, each of us.
Having, you know, 1.9 accidents over the course of 1 million hours means actually that it is something like 3-5 times safer to work in our plants than it is to live our private lives outside of our plants. That said, we want to continue to improve, and we've set a target of 1.5 for 2025. We're good at doing it. You know, the example you have on the right is right here in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where when the company purchased Muscle Shoals from the prior owner, the recordable rate the first year we really measured it was around 4.3 accidents per million hours, and now we're at 1.6.
That's a good example of the fact that at Constellium we believe in safety, and when we get our sights and our focus on working on something, we do achieve results. I'm very proud of the performance of the team here in Muscle Shoals throughout the company. It's a battle that we need to fight every day, and we cannot take it for granted. Before I move to the business aspect of the presentation, I think I must address the current affairs in the world and especially the Russia-Ukraine crisis. We've had quite a few questions about what is the impact of the crisis. I mean, I want to first start to say that this is a horrific tragedy that's unfolding in front of our eyes.
I want to focus here on, you know, what does it mean for our business in a very factual manner. First of all, we don't have much of a business in Russia or Ukraine. It's EUR 10 million, I think, of sales maximum in 2021, so nothing really to be talking about. We have two main areas of potential impact in terms of our supply chain. We buy about 3%-4% of what we need in terms of metal from Russian suppliers. These are not sanctioned.
Today, I mean, you'll remember that we had already a dry run of that in 2018 when there were sanctions against Deripaska and Rusal, so where we had to reshuffle our supply chains and all that to continue to operate while not buying Russian metal. We know what to do if that happens. In this context today, where the markets are very strong and the aluminum market is very tight, it is going to be difficult to replace those inputs into our business. But it's a manageable amount of sales. The other big impact potentially is energy, and we see that energy prices have shot through the roof in Europe.
We are hedged to a large extent, but should that continue, that will put a drag on our costs as over time the hedges mature. We do see these two areas of risk, and there may be some other smaller areas of risk, but we believe we can manage them. Now, I want to call your attention that we are in a business where there's plenty of offsets, right? If you think of, you know, what happens if we cannot buy Russian metal, well, plenty of other people won't be able to buy Russian metal. The markets will be tighter. Prices will go up, both for our finished goods, but also for the scrap price.
Ultimately what we lose in sales we may gain in profit on every sale we make on the other area. We are not overly worried with the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and we are worried about what's happening to the people in Ukraine for sure, but not so much to our business. With that, I'll jump right in and many of you know us quite well, but for those who don't know us just a few facts and figures. We're a diversified company. We're fabricating value-added metal products, aluminum products. We only do aluminum. We've got 12,000 employees throughout the globe, 29 manufacturing facilities. We've got three business units. Last year, we shipped 1.6 million tons of products.
That's EUR 6.2 billion of revenue and EUR 581 million of Adjusted EBITDA, which is the best number ever for Constellium, despite the fact that two of our main markets, aerospace and automotive, are not exactly performing at their best. We introduced today two new metrics, and Peter Matt, our CFO, will be talking about them shortly. I guess a lot of you know about this concept of value-added revenue, which is basically the value added we bring, we add to the metal that we buy. Our Adjusted EBITDA margin to value-added revenue stands at 25.7%, which we're very proud of and again, in the context of two of our very contributive markets, aerospace and automotive, being not in top shape.
Our free cash flow generation was EUR 135 million last year, and our leverage is coming down reasonably fast at 3.5 times at the end of 2021. Our business, as I mentioned, is organized in three business units. First one is P&ARP, Packaging and Automotive Rolled Products, EUR 3.7 billion in revenue. We make sheet products, and Peter Basten will be talking more about it. He's the head of P&ARP. And the main market there obviously are packaging and automotive, and we've got a number of specialty niches as well that complement this offering of flat products. Second business we'll be talking about, Automotive Structures and Industry. Philippe Hoffmann leads it.
At EUR 1.4 billion of revenue, we are making products that are long products, so they are based on extrusions of aluminum, and then we sell the extrusions or we fabricate further the extrusion closer to what would be a final shape or a final structure that gets on a car, for instance, like a crash management system or a battery box. Finally, last but not least, our Aerospace and Transportation business led by Ingrid Jörg here, EUR 1.1 billion of revenue, clearly very much impacted by the pandemic, and we make plate and sheet products. Over there. What we'll be visiting today, Muscle Shoals belongs, as all of you know, to the Packaging and Automotive Rolled Products business.
Talking about our different markets, we've got three main markets: packaging, automotive, aerospace, which we complement with a number of niche markets to best optimize our mills. All of these markets are growing for different reasons. Clearly two of them, automotive and aerospace, are recovering from the COVID pandemic, but all of these four markets have fundamentally sustainability-driven growth trends. If you think of packaging, the main product that we see over there is a beverage can, which is gaining share against plastics every day. We're seeing more and more categories of beverages moving to packaging.
The main reason for that is the infinite recyclability of aluminum and the overall superior CO2 emission footprint of the product, and the fact that aluminum cans don't get thrown away in most of the world, except in the U.S., where we can do better on the recycle rate still. We you know, plastic gets thrown away because it's not easy to recycle much more, and you read much more about the pollution of plastics in addition to the CO2 benefits of aluminum. Very strong growth there, which has lots of legs to it, and we're looking at this market overall to grow 4%-5% per year durably. Automotive continues to grow.
It's growing as a consequence of the recovery from the pandemic, but also the increase in penetration of aluminum. Aluminum is lighter than steel, and as fuel efficiency norms improve and as electric vehicles, you know, get bigger and bigger in size and in market share, there is more need for more aluminum in cars, which is excellent for us. Aerospace is growing as a result of the recovery from the pandemic at 6% of sales in 2021. It used to be 13%-14% of our sales, and that's just a reflection of the fact that, you know, the build rates went down 30%-50% between before COVID and after COVID.
Finally, the other specialties are growing at a lower rate, but when you kind of GDP-like. As you think of it, those specialties are a lot of them subject to the same trend of lightweighting. A lot of these applications are in you know moving vehicles or transportation or and essentially anything that moves, there is a benefit to anything that moves being lighter. So that's these are our markets. Interesting growth ahead of us and for fundamental reasons, right? We're not here, there's an element of playing the cycle, but that's not the core element of our strategy, and that's not the core trend on which we're making our plans in the future. Maybe just to highlight a little bit more why aluminum is a material of choice for the future.
I mean, 13 is the atomic number in the periodic table, for those of you who have chemistry memories. The first thing to understand is it's a strong material. I mean, it is a third lighter than steel, but it can be made just as strong by putting more aluminum than you would just on a ton per ton basis. Virtually any product that is made out of steel can be made out of aluminum, and you typically get a weight saving of 40%-50%, depending on what part you use. Now, obviously, aluminum is more expensive, so it's all a matter of how much value do you put to a lighter product.
We're seeing that value being higher and higher as, you know, the economy progresses towards, you know, lightweighting and saving energy. You know, you see that especially in automotive, where obviously for if you got an internal combustion engine, having a lighter car translates immediately into savings of fuel. But for electric vehicles, if you have a lighter car, you have more range. And therefore, you need less weight in battery for the same range, and therefore you have more range. And that virtuous positive loop kind of gets reinforced. As well, aluminum is infinitely recyclable without loss of property, and that's something also important to understand in a real circular economy and something that I think we are not even fully recognizing in the way we do life cycle analysis.
If you take aluminum, it takes about 5% of the energy needed in the first place to make it, to recycle it. If you look at steel, it's 20%. In a real circular economy where things get recycled many times, you get the benefit more and more over time. When you do a life cycle analysis today in terms of emissions, you look at one cycle. In a circular economy, there should be several cycles. Every time you do that, you only use 5% of the energy compared to 20% in steel. There is a compounding effect that is not yet factored in in the way we look at things.
For all these reasons, the attributes of aluminum and the fact that it fits very well in the circular economy, and the fact that the recycling of it is profitable, doesn't need government subsidies, doesn't need any regulatory intervention, it happens. All these make us very bullish about the future for aluminum. Yeah. We see very substantial opportunities for all these reasons for aluminum in packaging and automotive. Peter and Philippe will talk more about it, but we see that consumers prefer more and more sustainable packaging, and this is driving the secular growth opportunities for us. You have seen the can makers, a lot of you follow them as well, invest in new capacity and this new capacity will mean can sheet demand is going up.
In addition, as we make more cans, we need to recycle those cans, and they will be recycled. That creates also an opportunity for us to develop our recycling business. Not only do we get an opportunity on the can sheet side, making more can sheet, but we get an opportunity on the recycling side, building up our capacities in recycling. In automotive, we're seeing the same kind of growth, actually higher in percentage terms, right? We're looking at 4%-5% for cans, 10% for automotive. As I mentioned, it works both in internal combustion engines and battery electric vehicles. An interesting fact is when you look at the battery electric vehicle, they use typically three times more aluminum, sheet and extrusions, than the traditional internal combustion engine vehicle.
Now you may not see that if you look at aluminum content of electric vehicle because in an internal combustion engine, the engine block typically is aluminum. You don't have an engine block anymore since you don't have an internal combustion engine anymore. Overall, it seems like there's not that much more aluminum in a battery electric vehicle, but actually there is much more aluminum, three times more of the aluminum that we make, which we think is a fantastic opportunity for us. That again needs more recycling, so opportunities on the sale side, opportunity on the recycling side. I was mentioning earlier, you know, don't expect a new strategy from us, and I'd like to boil it down to just a few facts. We focus on high value-added products.
We are not focused on, you know, volume and growing our volumes. We wanna grow our value added. That's very important to understand. We think it's very important to manage the day-to-day well, and I think that what we've demonstrated over the past five years or so shows that we are good at asset utilization, cost management, and capital allocation. We still see some further opportunities, and Peter will talk about it in his presentation. The other thing we do is we try to anticipate what lies ahead and build options around them so that we have favorable outcomes. We don't believe that, you know, there's one way the world is going and, you know, we put all our bets towards that end.
We think that it's important as a company that we look at the fundamentals and that we build a system that can seize the opportunities when they materialize around these, you know, mega trends. Finally, we invest in our people. They are the most valuable resources we have. When we went through COVID, we did need, for instance, to make some tough decisions, but we maintained to the fullest extent we could our people. We resorted to layoffs only, you know, in the extreme, and we really made sure that we didn't, you know, damage the future options of the company by being too rash in our decisions.
I think that has served us well in our ability to bounce back very quickly from the crisis. With that, one word on ESG, and I think you'll see that theme throughout the presentations. We're very committed to a strong ESG profile. That's not something new and a new fad for us. Actually, this company started publishing a sustainability report back in 2012 for 2011 results, right? This is very much embedded in how we think about our business. Just a few things. On the environmental side, we have set external targets in the past.
We did so for the first time in 2015, and today we are going to set new targets for a 2030 horizon around greenhouse gas emissions intensity and increasing our recycled content. We've got also internally many more goals around reducing landfill waste, reducing fugitive emissions, so forth, so on. We have very detailed action plans that support our external and internal targets. We are not publishing long-term targets which are aspirational. We are publishing targets where we've got all the building blocks in sight, and we know what we need to do, both from an operating standpoint and a capital expenditure standpoint, and we bake that into the guidance we're giving you.
On the social side, we think, you know, as I mentioned, safety is very important, and we want to continue being committed to it. We also think that there is a tremendous opportunity for us in this manufacturing world we're in to improve our diversity and bring more women into the workplace, especially in professional and management ranks. We're setting a new target there, and I'll talk about it shortly. You know, when you think of the three objectives I mentioned around greenhouse gas emissions intensity, diversity, and safety, they are baked into the variable compensation for our 2,000 managers throughout the company. We've got targets, and we get paid for all these results. We're very committed to it.
Finally, on the governance side, I mean, we've had, you know, good governance practices, I think, over the past few years. There's one thing that I wanna emphasize. We've got separation of duties between the chairman and the CEO. That is something that's very important to us, and we believe it's very important that the chairman is a powerful person that has, you know, the ability to oversee management and also add their value and insight and counsel to the CEO and the management team. We think it's a very important practice to get these two roles separated. I wanna talk a little bit now about digital and there will be more examples of that in my colleague's presentation. We're living in a world that has a tremendous amount of data.
When you go on the plant tour, you'll see, you know, quite a few of our products, actually, millions and millions worth of it on the shop floor. When you look at them, they look like a coil. It's a coil of metal. There is much more than meets the eye there. To make these products that are going to be shipped to customers, we need to maintain, under very tight tolerances, hundreds of variables, process inputs, product outputs, and all these need to be controlled, archived, and ready for inspection later if there is a quality issue, for instance. They can be used to better understand our process. The amount of data we manage is just incredible.
I mean, our spec sheets are, you know, 10-50 pages long easily, right? They don't even describe everything we're supposed to do for our customers. We have a tremendous amount of data, and our ability to understand that data, make sense of it, allows us to better run our processes, improve our products, understand the performance of our products on our customers' lines, so forth, so on. We're working to harness all this information within Constellium to enhance the safety of our people, the efficiency, the profitability of our business, and we're doing that through digital technology.
What we've done is we've organized, we've got process engineers in all of our plants, obviously, but we've organized a dedicated team within the company that explores and develops applications for Constellium around, you know, safety aspects, around process management, around inspection systems, so forth, so on. This dedicated team works in a network with all our plants around different, you know, projects. They work with our R&D centers, our process engineers in the plant and this central team. We see very significant opportunities through the use of even more sensors, better architecture of data analytics, artificial intelligence, so that we can make sense of all these pools of data and improve our processes. We're already seeing some interesting progress.
Again, the BU presidents will give a few examples, and that's something that we think is going to help us continue to improve our efficiency and expand our margin, our EBITDA-to-VAR margin. Before I summarize you know what lies ahead, I think it's important to remind all of us in terms of what we've accomplished in the past and our track record of execution. We look at you know the four following objectives and how we built our track record. We've seen EBITDA growth at 8% per annum since 2015. We've done that by while being very disciplined around capital expenditure management as we have brought that down over time.
We have put the company after, you know, some growing pains in the territory of substantial strong free cash flow generation, more than EUR 460 million since 2019, and we've done that. As a result, we've deleveraged the company, and we are very committed to our 2.5 times target. This sets very well the foundation for our aspirations, our goals, our objectives, our commitments, actually, for the future. We see some very exciting earnings growth opportunities, as I mentioned, on the horizon for Constellium. First of all, you know, the end market recovery in automotive, aerospace.
Second, we've made a number of investments in that period, where we've invested for growth, and we can harvest some of those investments in TID, the extrusion presses we put in our industry business, in Philippe's business, and then also Automotive Structures. We feel very comfortable we can do that because actually it's happening, and we've shown with some of our large investments, like the CALP lines we did in our, and Peter Basten will comment about it, that we know how to execute on projects. We also have a third leg, which is continuous improvement. I mean, managing the day-to-day very well. We've got more opportunities in recycling.
We have had a program, Horizon 22, on which we reported, and we were ahead of our schedule, and we are reinvigorating this program or projecting it further in the future with the Vision 25 exercise, and Peter Matt will comment on what it means to us. We see reduction in the cost base still possible for us. Then, against the backdrop of these growing markets in our can sheet, and durably growing markets in can sheet and automotive, we see incremental growth investments in packaging, in automotive, and potentially some highly selective M&A to complement our footprint. We think we've built the foundations for a compelling medium-term and long-term growth story, and the market demand is really underpinning that strategy.
We feel very comfortable about the moderate investments we're gonna be making into the future. As we, you know, unfold this strategy over the next few years, I think what's important to understand is what happens to capital allocation and as we think about it. In the past, it was all pretty simple, right? Pay down the debt, reduce leverage. We still wanna reach the 2.5 targets, and we think it's within sight. We will achieve that target, and that will mean gross debt reduction. At the same time, as I mentioned, we've got the ability now that we've got this strong foundation to do that whilst growing, I mean, increasing our growth CapEx by a factor of 2 times, right?
To EUR 150 million per year from the EUR 75 million it used to be in the past, through 2025. Potentially, because M&A happens, you know, not on our calendar, if there are opportunities, we'll seize them. Future, which, you know, will start before 2025, is, we wanna maintain this company in a range of 1.5-2.5 leverage. That means we will continue to invest for growth, EUR 75 million-EUR 150 million. We will continue to look for highly selective M&A, and we will start a program to return capital to shareholders, dividends, share repurchases. We think it's important that we return money to you, our investors.
To wrap it up, we're focusing in terms of long-term vision, we're establishing today our public sustainability targets. As I mentioned, we wanna provide a safe and diverse environment, 1.5 is our recordable case rate target for 2025. We wanna increase the share of women in professional and management roles at Constellium to 25%, which means we need to recruit nearly every new recruit in Constellium, you know, out of every new recruit in Constellium, one in two needs to be a woman. If you've got friends that wanna join us, let them know. We've got great jobs for them. We wanna reduce our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by a factor of about 30%, so that's a target of 3.5 tons of CO2 equivalent per ton shipped.
If you look at the global, you know, average for aluminum, I think we're around 15 tons. This is definitely putting us. We're already at five, right? This is really putting us in the front league. We believe that's very important for the planet. We also believe it's very important for our long-term success financially, because if people are serious about sustainability, at some point, this will be valuable. The CO2 content of our products will be valuable. None of, you know, the premiums that we could command by providing a good product from a CO2 footprint is embedded into any of our guidance, which is upcoming.
While we are talking here about scope one, two, and three, it's very important to us that we do our own homework, that we don't rely on our supply chain to get the benefit of, you know, lower CO2 footprints, products. We are setting also a target for scope one and two emissions, which is really what we control through our operations, of also 30%, so 0.5 tons of CO2 emission versus 0.7 today in 2021. We've got, again, a well laid out plan to achieve this. Finally, we wanna promote the circular economy, be actors in this and allow more recycling, so we will grow our recycled aluminum input to over 750,000 tons by 2026. We believe there's further opportunity on a go-forward basis.
If you think of it, we ship 1.6 million tons of product. That will grow a little bit. We can go much beyond that, and these are profitable investments to make. We believe, you know, beyond 2025, there is plenty of opportunities for us to further expand our recycled footprint. Finally, I wanna, you know, translate all that into a couple of simple numbers to remember. We are reminding you of the guidance we gave in 2022 of Adjusted EBITDA in the EUR 600 million-EUR 620 million range and a free cash flow EUR 150 million. We're at the beginning of April, so I should say now that we are tracking very well.
We are tracking actually better than we thought just a few weeks ago, so we have a strong start to the year, and more to come when we release Q1, but we feel very good about this guidance. For 2025, we set a target of Adjusted EBITDA in excess of EUR 800 million. With that, I would like to introduce the team that's gonna be delivering on this exciting strategy. Our three business unit presidents, Peter Basten runs P&ARP, and he's gonna come on stage very shortly. Philippe Hoffmann, Automotive Structures and Industry. Ingrid Jörg , Aerospace and Transportation. Our CFO, all of you know him, Peter Matt. It's a great team. I'm very honored and humbled to be working with you all, guys.
We've been working together in different capacities for the past six years, and we look forward to a very exciting future. Thank you for your attention. Peter, the stage is yours. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Jean-Marc. Good morning, everybody. My name is Peter Basten. I've been in charge of the P&ARP business unit since 2017. As you know, P&ARP is a global leader in the Packaging and Automotive Rolled Products business. Our footprint is four plants globally, two in Europe, two in North America, of which the Muscle Shoals facility where we are today here is the biggest one. For those of you in the room, you'll have the opportunity for a tour later this afternoon. We've shipped approximately 1.1 million tons of product in 2021, generating approximately EUR 4 billion of revenue last year. Looking at our end markets, what do we do?
We sell can sheets to the beverage can markets, and here we're talking about the body of a can, the end and the lid of a can. We're selling that to customers like Ball, Crown, CANPACK, Coca-Cola, AB, et cetera. Looking at automotive, our second biggest market, here we're doing what we call auto body sheet, ABS, and that is basically aluminum for hoods, doors, roofs, and fenders of cars. We sell that directly to the big automotive OEMs, right? Like Ford, BMW, Stellantis, Audi, and Mercedes. We also have a very nice niche specialty business, specifically in our German plant in Singen, where we do caps and closures for bottles, cosmetics, and also foil stock.
Looking at our track record in terms of execution over the last five years, we're pretty satisfied with the results. We've had a moderate growth in shipments in all those three segments, an average 2% growth per year with automotive being the driver of that with 10% annual compound growth rate. If you look at the bottom of the slide, that has nicely translated into Adjusted EBITDA going up from EUR 200 million in 2017 to EUR 344 million last year. What I find very exciting is we're just at the start. We see tremendous opportunity at P&ARP going forward, and we have basically four strategic priorities. First one is we really want to grow and expand our recycling and casting footprint.
That will start with the execution of our European recycling center that's gonna be built in Neuf-Brisach, France, and Jean-Marc and Peter have talked about that already in the past. But we also see opportunities to further grow our recycling and casting capabilities in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and in Singen, Germany. Second strategic priority is to grow our can sheet volumes. This is a market that is growing tremendously, and we're very well placed to capture that growth. We're gonna do that by continued debottlenecking of our system, but also by a number of focused investments, and I'll be talking about that just a bit later. To that extent, we've set up two big dedicated project teams, one in Europe and one in North America. Third priority is to further execute our sustainability strategy.
Here I'm talking about getting customer closed loops, increasing the recycled content of our products, and also improving the CO2 footprint of our aluminum. Last one is actually the most important one. We cannot do that if we don't have the right people, and we have an excellent team already, but we need a lot more people to execute those plans, and that's why we're doing a lot about training, talent development, and recruitment. In terms of execution, a big part of the EBITDA growth has come from the North American system. Here I'm talking about Muscle Shoals and Bowling Green combined. On the top left, you can see that we've been able to grow Adjusted EBITDA by 25% every year for the last years. How did we do that?
It's been a classic turnaround story, basically, where we've started putting in place very experienced senior leadership with industry knowledge. We've really done a lot of training and developing of our people. Also what was super important at the beginning, especially here in Muscle Shoals, was to build a culture around the importance of safety and the importance of quality. Fourth element was about stabilizing the production system. What I mean here is that Muscle Shoals was historically very much underinvested by the prior ownership, so we had heaps of breakdowns and problems, and we actually started by increasing our maintenance spend to basically improve equipment reliability and stabilize production. All of that has led to a spectacular improvement in our operational KPIs.
If you look at the bottom left of the chart, you can see the recovery of the Muscle Shoals system going up by 3.5 percentage points. That's a lot of millions. Also Bowling Green, which is the automotive CALP line in Kentucky, it's running like a Swiss clock. It's now really a benchmark site with what we call uptime or utilization rates that are the best in the world. They've actually gone up by 20-25 percentage points. Zooming in on the two sites. Muscle Shoals, you might remember what we said and promised in 2018 on the prior Analyst Day.
We've really significantly increased our shipments, and starting with automotive, what we've done is increase the auto body segment to now fully supply our Bowling Green facility with cold coils that are produced here in Muscle Shoals. Secondly, here in Muscle Shoals, as I said, we've improved equipment reliability, stability, but it's just the start. This mill is still not very much automated, so when we look at digital and further automation, we see tremendous opportunity to grow capacity here. Bowling Green, you might remember this, that this started out as a joint venture, and we actually purchased the interest of our partner in early 2019. Since then, I mean, the results speak for themselves.
We've been able to turn this around, and it's now generating a positive EUR 30 million of EBITDA last year, despite 68 days of downtime linked to the semiconductor crisis. Now I'd like to say a few words about our end market, starting with can sheet, which is by far the largest market for us, 75%. As Jean-Marc mentioned, here we see on both sides of the Atlantic a very nice growth rate, mid single digit, 4%-5%. The reason for that growth is manifold. We just talked about all the recycling advantages cans have, infinitely recyclable. But also the recycling infrastructure already exists, which is definitely not the case for plastic. Also for brand owners, it's increasingly becoming the packaging of choice because you can actually print the can from bottom to top. It's a huge marketing billboard.
When you have limited shelf space in the supermarket, you know, you can do much more than just a ugly little paper etiquette on a bottle, right? For us, the end consumer, it's a really convenient packaging, which is light and easy to carry home. What I find very exciting is that if you look at all new beverage products being launched in North America, 70% of those are now launched in an aluminum can. What's also pretty cool is that you see now more and more new categories being added to the aluminum can business. It all started out with the energy drinks, you know, the Red Bull, the Monster, then it moves on to sparkling water. Now we see the biggest segment, still water, moving away from plastic to can, and that's a huge market opportunity for us.
To give you a few insights into what our customers are looking for, given the strong demand growth and also given all the things that have happened with trade and tariffs and supply chain disruptions, they are really increasingly looking for local domestic suppliers and to reduce their dependency on imports. Secondly, I'll show that in just a sec, they've announced billions of investments, and they need to secure the metal to run their can plants right? They've been increasingly looking for longer term agreements. When I talk longer term, it's not just a typical five years we have. We're now extending contracts up to the end of the decade in some cases at very much improved terms and conditions. Why are we so confident about this market growth? Well, actually, it's just happening.
Like, our customers have invested and are investing in new can lines, 18 new can plants in total across both sides of the Atlantic. That translates into almost 40 billion new cans being produced. What that means for us, it's about 500-600 KT of additional can sheet demand. To put that into perspective, that is adding 20% to the existing market size over the next few years. From that growth, if you look at supply demand, it's becoming more and more evident that there's a huge supply shortage on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly here in North America. That needs to be filled.
I believe we are very well positioned to capture a big portion of that growth because we're seen by our customers as a premier supplier in terms of product quality, supply chain performance, technical support, and our recycling capabilities, right? What we've been able to do over the last 18 months is contract a big part of our business, over 90% through 2025. As I said, at improved terms and conditions. Here I'm not just talking price, but we've also been able to improve the value of the contract itself in terms of payment term improvements, legal protections, and pass-through clauses. Obviously it provides a lot of stability and visibility for the years to come. Moving to the automotive segment, we also see significant growth here.
On the left-hand side, you can see over 10% annual compound growth rates in both regions. This is coming not just from the recovery of the pandemic, it is, as Jean-Marc alluded to, also coming from the continued need to lightweight. For internal combustion engine cars, this is because of the fuel efficiency, right? You want to have a lighter car. It's also driven by the premium car and SUV segment that are doing very well, and they on average have much more aluminum on them than smaller cars, right? Then the last trend here is the EV segment. Electric vehicles, as we said, they typically have three times more of the aluminum we sell, so sheets and extrusions. Think about it.
You are putting a very heavy battery under a car, and to keep the curb weight the same, you actually need to lightweight and compensate that weight in order to reach the autonomy and the range that you want as the consumer. Last thing that I'm very excited about is, we are a founding member of Alumobility. Basically, what is this? Our customers came to us and asked, "What? How can you help us reduce the barriers to adopt aluminum, especially those that had less experience with using aluminum in their factories." We've set up a system together with another rolling mill and a number of tier one and two suppliers to develop state-of-the-art solutions for our customers. Here, I'm talking about full aluminum doors or even the whole top head of a car in high performance aluminum alloys.
I think with that, we can really grow the pie for everybody. That brings me to an important point that we already made in the Analyst Day in 2018. We see the growth in ABS far outstripping the growth in automotive sales. Higher than the SAAR, just because of this positive substitution away from steel towards aluminum. What does that do in terms of the need for new CALPs? Well, for now, I think we're all fine. We do see increased need to add automotive capacity in the market, post 2025, and particularly in Europe. You know, from our perspective, we'll think about it when we get there if there's sufficient demand and underlying customers that warrant such an investment. A few words about the EV transition.
We already talked about EVs using more aluminum and so how exposed are we to EV? Well, we're pretty much very much exposed. Already now we're selling 45% of our shipments to either EVs or hybrid vehicles, and based on already contracted business, this is gonna go to over 70% by 2025. Where does this aluminum go? Well, it actually goes to the four segments you see on the right-hand side. Obviously, we're still selling aluminum for the doors, the roofs, and the hoods of the car, the outside, but there's new segments. As I said, you need a battery below a car, and this battery is typically in a big battery box or battery enclosure. That one, in many cases, is made out of aluminum sheet or extrusions or both.
Zooming in on the battery, actually, the batteries themselves are in a little box, and it's called the battery housing. Guess what? It's made out of aluminum. Then if you go inside the battery, you need, you know, a cathode and an anode, and the cathode is actually made out of battery foil. The more batteries that are and battery factories that are being built, the more we'll sell aluminum foil stock to that market. Moving on to our two strategic priorities. Recycling and then growth. Starting with recycling, we are very well on track with the execution of our investment in France. That will be a capital envelope of around EUR 130 million, and we will be able to add 130,000 tons of slab casting capacity to our business.
There's three key advantages to this investment you need to think about. The first one is we will substitute externally purchased slabs by internally produced slabs. On the right-hand side, you will see that our self-sufficiency will go up from 60% to 76%. Second advantage is recycling just improves our profitability because we're gonna buy a lot of scrap where we gain a scrap margin, right? Third advantage is the sustainability aspect of it. It will significantly improve the recycled content of our products. That's what our customers are looking for. For can sheet, it will go up by 20-25 percentage points. You see that on the bottom. That will automatically mechanically translate in an improvement of the CO2 footprint of our products by 40-45% on a per ton basis.
I think, you know, where are we? It's all on track. We're getting all the necessary regulatory approvals right now. It will be, you know, produced and engineered in the next few years, and we'll have our first cast end of 2024 and ramping up throughout 2025. Now moving to can sheet growth. We have worked very hard on this for the last couple of months, and we see substantial opportunities to unleash a lot of capacity, both in Europe and North America. If you look at the top hand graph, we are committing to adding 200,000 tons of installed capacity until 2025, with an option to further increase that by another 140 KT until 2030. The beauty here is that this is existing latent capacity in our mills.
We're not gonna invest in one big thing. We can actually do that by a number of smaller and medium-sized investments that are very scalable and modular. Just to visualize what I mean, we can invest in the automation of our rolling mill, so gauge control, flatness controls, so that you have better quality, you can run the mill quicker. Or we can invest in better motors that have more power and more torque. These kinds of things, you know. What's also very interesting, if you just do the math on this, we are saying we are gonna invest EUR 200 million to add 200 KT of capacity. That means EUR 1,000 per marginal ton.
If you compare that to your typical greenfield, that will be 3-5 times more expensive on a per ton basis. This is a very capital efficient way of adding capacity. All of the phase one volumes have already been contracted. They're underpinned by customer contracts we already have. Last point on this slide, it's super important that this growth is followed by similar growth upstream in our recycling casting capacity. The first step obviously is the Neuf-Brisach investment, 130 KT. But as I said, there's more in Muscle Shoals and Singen to follow because then we can keep the same ratio between make and buy of slabs, which is very important.
I think also based on our track record of executing big projects, as you have seen in the last few slides, we're very confident about our ability and teams we have to make this happen. Summing up, I'm very excited about what's ahead for P&ARP. We have a very great team in place. I think good plans to deliver growth for the business and shareholder value. Please take away four items, okay? One is we are benefiting from growth in both can and auto that is secular and really sustainability driven, so the market is growing. Two, we are very well positioned to capture that growth by continued debottlenecking and capital efficient focused investments. Three, the recycling aspect is super important for us, and we're very well on track to execute the Neuf-Brisach investment.
Four, this cannot be done without people, and here we're doing a lot to hire, recruit, and develop our people. We'll have a continued relentless focus on cost control, operational excellence, and capital discipline. With that, I would like to thank you for your attention and open up for questions.
Just a quick reminder, for those in the room, please raise your hand. We'll bring around microphones for questions. Those online, please submit them and we'll ask them as we can.
Hi, it's Dave.
Hi, Dave.
Gagliano from BMO. I just had a question on the can sheet opportunity. Obviously, it's very topical. You flagged about 600,000 tons of demand growth over the next five years, and you flagged that. I think it's five years. You flagged Constellium growing by about 200,000 tons. I was wondering if you could talk about what your analysis shows for the rest of the competitors, you know, how much growth we're seeing on the supply side from others.
Yeah. I think, first of all, the growth we've announced, it's already contracted, right? I think on our side it's secure. We've got it in the bag, and it's all about executing those investments right now. I think the pie is big enough for everybody. What we see is a huge deficit in North America. We see a lot of imports coming from the Middle East. I think it's normal that, you know, other players in the market also grow investments, because customers are looking for domestic supply.
Okay. Just to follow up, you mentioned obviously contracts that have been signed, longer duration and better terms.
Mm-hmm.
Can you give us a little more detail on, you know, what are the average duration? I think it's about five years or something like that. Also, what's the incremental step up in the profitability of those new contracts versus what are rolling off?
Sure. As you say, you know, we typically have five-year agreements. Now they're a bit longer, so it doesn't mean that all those price increase happen all at once, right? They roll in over time. We're very pleased with the contracts we've been able to put in place. I won't specify any particular margins, but we've really worked on not just increasing price, also, as I said, improving the underlying contract terms. Just to give an example, the tolerance of how much a customer can ask for each month is super important for a rolling mill the size of Muscle Shoals where, you know, this is like an aircraft carrier, right? It's producing the same thing every month, so you cannot have swings in demand.
This is just an example of things that in prior ownership wasn't the case. We've worked on literally tolerances, payment terms, scrap buyback clauses, legal protections such as liability caps. Without giving a specific number, it's we're very pleased with the new contracts that will be coming in over the coming years.
Okay. Just last question for me. I apologize. The can you give us a bit of a range or something like that? Is it a 2x increase in profitability versus prior contracts? Is it, you know, 20, 30%? Is it, you know-
I don't think I'm gonna comment on it. I think what I can say is that historically, the can sheet prices did not warrant for us to invest in additional capacity. I think with the current prices, we believe we're finally getting a fair price to debottleneck. I don't think it's a fair enough price for a real greenfield, but I think for us to do those focused investments, we're getting sufficient margin to do that now.
Okay. Thanks.
Over here, please.
Oh, thanks. Morning.
Morning.
I wanted to explore the discussion on the demand for further recycling in green aluminum. Can you talk a little bit more or characterize, like, your customers' appetite for that? Are they paying for it? Are they just asking for it? How do you see that evolving going forward? Is it all customers? Is it some of your customers?
Yeah. It's very much wanted by our customers, but also by us, right? I think the first reason we are doing it is actually that we wanna be less dependent on external metal suppliers. It's, you know, you see that with the current energy prices. There's smelters closing down in Europe because of high energy prices. We don't want to get, you know, metal from faraway places that, as Jean-Marc mentioned, are dirtier on average, right? If we wanna meet our CO2 intensity targets, we can only do that by investing in recycling and casting. Yes, our customers are also looking for it. They would like to have what we call higher recycled content rates, so that's, you know, you can tell an end consumer that this can is, you know, made out of 80% recycled aluminum, for example.
Automotive guys are more looking at the CO2 footprint of the car to say, "Okay, we want 3-5 tons per ton of product we buy until 2030." Different customers are looking for different things, and also different customers are not at the same maturity in terms of their own target setting, but it's definitely clear that it's going in this direction. One point I'd like to make is, I believe it's gonna be a huge positive differentiation for us, because we've historically competed on price, quality, technical support, basically, right? Now, what we're starting to see is that if customers are serious about recycling, they cannot buy from the Middle East or China because they need to meet their targets, right? They have to buy from green suppliers.
I think that in what we call the USP, right, our unique selling proposition, the green aspect of it is gonna be a tremendous factor of differentiation for Constellium.
You're already pretty sold out. The market's already really tight. I get it, but I'm just wondering, do you get paid for it? Like, is there a premium that you can charge on it or something, or are you thinking about that more in the future?
Again, it depends on customers. Some customers, especially in automotive, we have actually started to charge premiums for it, for specific greener alloys.
Yeah.
Yes. In other cases, it's about the fact that, if they want to benefit from lower CO2, they have to give us back their scrap, and we will only take back that scrap if we're getting a good margin on the scrap. In that sense, sometimes it's also in the scrap we buy that actually adds margin to us rather than in the sales price.
Gotcha. One last question. Can you just talk us through the recession risk as you see it for your businesses? Packaging, we always think of as defensive, but if you think about past recessions, how does packaging hold up? The same question for automotive, you know, keeping in mind that there's also the switch to lightweighting. If you could talk through the thinking on that.
Thank you for the question. As you said, can sheet extremely recession resilient. We've actually seen can sheet go up in the pandemic because people stayed at home, at home consumption has gone up, it's been actually a spike in demand. I remember the 2008 and 2010 recession, here also can sheet held up very nicely and here I'm not worried at all. Automotive, I think, you know, we've already been at the bottom. We now started in terms of supplier and semiconductor crisis. Things have stabilized. We don't have so many unexpected customer shutdowns anymore. You know, I think that automotive will grow also based on the penetration I talked about.
You know, unless there's a big major geopolitical crisis, I am very confident about both markets.
I think we have time for one last question.
Yeah. Hi, it's Curt Woodworth with Credit Suisse. You talked about how the 200 KT is somewhat modular between automation, maybe increasing the torque of the motors. Can you just talk about kind of the cadence of that 200 KT? How will that layer in? What's the split between the U.S. and Europe? And then with respect to, you know, talking EUR 320 million-EUR 330 million of investment, how do you see the IRRs relative to the scrap plan versus the debottlenecking? And can you give us any context on what the incremental EBITDA from these investments will look like?
I can. In terms of how it phases in, this is, you know, a compound number for Europe and North America together. It will just literally come in, you know, I wouldn't say linear, but it's coming in, you know, pretty linear over the next few years. It also depends on our ability to execute, right? How quickly do we have the engineers to get investments approved, individual investments? Do we find the people to recruit? But it's, I would say, pretty linear build-up until 2025. In terms of IRR, both investments will have an IRR far above our hurdle rate, actually above 20% IRR, both on the can sheet growth and on the recycling investment in Neuf-Brisach.
Peter Matt will also comment on that a bit later.
All right. Thanks, Peter.
Thank you.
I just want to say we are getting a lot of questions from the online group. We will keep those in the queue, and we'll address those in the longer Q and A session at the end. With that, we'll turn it over to our next presenter, Philippe Hoffmann.
Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Before I begin, I want to introduce myself since this is the first time in front of you. My name is Philippe Hoffmann. I started in Constellium as shop floor engineer close to 30 years ago in one of Peter Basten's rolling plants. I then focused more on aerospace, on extrusion, and I've been leading the AS&I business since late 2020. All this time has been very fast, because I had the chance and the opportunity to drive changes and do what I love. For me, it's all about continuous improvement, performance management, asset optimization. I'm just an entrepreneur. I love developing business, once we can afford it, of course. I'm always impressed by the strong energy, professionalism, and innovation brought by our people here in Constellium. Now let's get back to business.
AS&I is a leader in advanced products and solutions. As you can see on the top left, we are a global player with 19 plants across Europe, North America, and China, with a dedicated R&D center in Brunel University London, North of London. We shipped last year 261,000 tons, generated EUR 1.4 billion of revenue, and all of that fall into EUR 142 million of Adjusted EBITDA. Let's dive into the diversified and exciting business of aluminum extrusion. Some of you may ask, "What is an extrusion?" To start with the basics, extrusions are created by heating a billet, pushing it through a steel die. This creates a product to the exact cross-section of the die pattern.
If you are more familiar with the food business, it is a similar process used for items like pasta, macaroni, penne, spaghett i, and so on. Nevertheless, the extrusion process for aluminum is very flexible and enables us to make complex shapes that meets the needs of our most demanding customer. Speaking about customer, we produce for very exciting markets like automotive, transportation, building, industrial, solar. Diversity. Diversity is key. You can see also some of our blue chip customer on the bottom right, including Ford, BMW, Audi, Bosch, Stadler, SodaStream, just to name a few of them. Now, let us discuss our recent performance as well as our strategic priorities. I want to thank the entire AS&I team for the incredible work done over the past few years, and especially last year. We delivered a historical record shipments, Adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow.
This was despite continuous challenge and COVID and ongoing semiconductor chips crisis. Speaking about team, I firmly believe that people are our number one asset, and we must continue, and we will continue to invest in our talent and grow them. Let's look into the future and our strategic priorities. In Automotive Structures, the path forward is clear. We will improve the return profile and establish the best condition for profitable growth. The team has done a fantastic job over the past three years, but more is to be done. On industry, we will fully utilize the press lines that we have invested to strengthen our leadership position in our targeted niches. Lastly, as Peter mentioned, our constant quest for performance, cost control, capital discipline is fundamental. It's really fundamental for our business.
Those strategic priority are putting us in a great position for the future. The demand for aluminum extrusion for the automotive business is very similar to what you just heard from Peter. It is expected to grow rapidly, as you can see on the left. We're expecting to grow at an annual pace of 11% in North America and 12% in Europe between 2021 and 2025. This is, of course, driven by, first, the demand recovery after COVID and semiconductor shortage. Second, structurally by lightweighting, which is a critical items for our OEMs to reduce their CO2 emissions and increase the range of electric vehicle. The shift to electric vehicle should provide a multiplier effect, as electric vehicle needs specific component like battery boxes or side protections, we have a very high aluminum extrusion content.
AS&I is an expert in metal, and this is one of our key competitive advantage. We are vertically integrated. We have experience up and down the value chain, from casting to extruding to downstream processes. We design the global optimal solution for our customer. R&D efforts are going to be crucial to design the next generation of flexible production lines and to help our automotive customer to meet their volumes and performance targets, and for our best-in-class aluminum extrusion to capture our fair share of growth. More to come on that one. Our automotive business, automotive structures business manufactures complex components for OEM across the globe. We are a tier-one supplier to most OEM in North America, in Europe, and also in China. In Automotive Structures, our main competitive advantage is our vertical integration and unique R&D capabilities.
The team has done a fantastic job over the past three years to optimize this platform. We are now implementing a comprehensive approach to maximize the return. For example, first, we're increasing our asset modularity. This means that one machine is capable of producing parts for multiple platforms. Asset modularity reduces our CapEx, FTE needs, and maintenance costs. An example is shown in the picture here on the top right. This line is forming and cutting in our Vigo plant in Spain. This asset can produce parts for up to three vehicles. Second, we are optimizing our plant footprint to increase efficiency. This helps us to increase our sales per square meter and reduce our acquired capital investments for land and buildings, which does not generate a lot of EBITDA. Third, we are ramping our operational excellence system that optimizes our equipment and cost performance.
You can see there two of our key metrics on the bottom right. Overall equipment efficiency improved from 70% in 2020 to 74% in 2021. Staff required to operate declined in our North American business from over 600 people down to 400 at the end of 2021. In one final example, we are using digital twins to optimize the equipment design and facilitate monitoring and predictive maintenance. This is more than just a simulator. It is a real duplicate of the physical equipment using the programming and sensor of the real line. All those efforts are making Automotive Structures plants safer, more efficient, more reliable, and at the end of the day, more profitable. You will see the full impact of that once the semiconductor shortage will be over. Now, let's have a look into our AS&I business. Let's first discuss the market.
The European market is a very, very large market, and we are a niche player. While the market is expecting a growth at GDP, we will focus on pockets of higher growth, higher profitable growth. Our strategy is to focus on innovative and tailored solution. We have a very diversified portfolio of highly contributive products. Where possible, we leverage our unique capabilities. For example, we have very large presses. We are extremely well suited for rail, for the rail industry, and in this market, in this industry, we are number one. Same for hard alloys. This is the way we think about business. We need to be the best, able to create value to our customer, and of course, get great compensation for it.
In recent years, we made the strategic decision to invest in three new presses to support growth in automotive and other markets. Each of those three presses is performing at or above our internal expectation, and we are now really harvesting the EBITDA benefit. Next, I would like to highlight the world-class performance of our industry asset. Our strong performance is driven by the collaboration and best practice sharing between our technical and operating team. Just two examples. One measure of performance is the average technical downtime, a metric measuring the breakdown and maintenance stoppage. Our technical downtime is already below the market benchmark of 6%. We already decided to set an internal goal of 4%, 2 points below the industry benchmark. Guess what? After a couple of months, third of our extrusion presses are already there.
On the same topic, if you visit one of our plants, and you are welcome to do so, you will be surprised to see how operators are using our latest reliability apps to share and manage all the technical information regarding their assets. If they have a phone in their hand, it doesn't mean they are chatting. They are just looking at what's going on in the equipment. In a nutshell, the successful execution of our technical strategy boosted by our strong operational performance and excellent technical support dropped all the way down to the bottom line. As you can see, the increase of our Adjusted EBITDA per ton is incredible. I'm proud of the team. The team is really excited to drive more and more improvement over time and beat again and again all those historical records. Now let's focus on our best-in-class R&D platform.
Our R&D center in Brunel is a state-of-the-art center with full-scale prototyping capabilities. Almost all our project are co-funded with our customer, and our expenses are largely funded by the U.K. government. We use our knowledge about recycling, casting, extruding, downstream manufacturing to help our customer to solve their problem, which can be very complex. Most, you take the full benefit of using aluminum and aluminum extrusion, of course. Let me provide you some few examples. First, as illustrated in the top right slide, we are working with major OEM on battery box design. The objective is to design lighter solution that had fewer parts, require much less capital, and provide greater flexibility, as battery design or technology can change very, very fast. Second, we are also researching ways to reduce the CO2 footprint of our products.
The best way is to stop buying high CO2 content billet from smelter, and instead cast our billet ourselves using scrap from the market. Sounds easy, but it's not, because you need to cope with the chemistry and the shape. Look at the picture on the bottom right, the shape of the scrap. Not everybody can use that, right? Which leads me to the third example, the development of the next generation of lightweighting alloy. Those alloys will provide the same technical properties, but will allow higher recycled content and increase the value we bring by reducing the embedded CO2 in our products. Those projects are really exciting and will be a strong contributor to our future success. Now, review our attractive growth potential. Our main financial objectives are standing on two legs, deliver profitable growth in Automotive Structures and to selectively grow in Industry.
In Automotive Structures, I expect to benefit from the recovery of the automotive demand. In addition, highly selective new project investment may add moderate but highly profitable growth. In industry, we will complete the ramp-up of recent investment and continue to optimize our portfolio. Hereby, I expect AS&I to be a meaningful driver of Adjusted EBITDA growth as we increase volume by over 35,000 tons and of course continue to drive high efficiency, best-in-class cost discipline, thanks to our continuous improvement programs. Over longer run, there are substantial opportunities for incremental investments of attractive returns. This potentially includes additional expansion investments and, as you can imagine, investment in recycling and casting capabilities, none of which are in the 2025 guidance. Well, I really enjoyed sharing that with you. It's all about harvesting seriously and preparing the best seeds to plant and harvest even more.
First, on our existing footprint. On automotive, our best-in-class operational excellence will deliver their full effect with the upcoming market rebound. On top of it, the electrification trend will boost our automotive opportunities. Second, on industry, we want to stay at the top of the game, taking full benefit of our operational excellence system and of course from the recent state-of-the-art investment we did. We not only optimize our production mix, we also position ourselves to be able to grab attractive opportunities to create value even more for us, of course, and for our customers. Our third growth lever is R&D and innovation. We have a unique value proposition. We're helping our customers to solve their challenging problems and developing their new solutions and as a result, grow along with them. Now, we are entrepreneurs, and we need to create opportunities and looking ahead of our plans.
I believe that in this context, recycling and casting investments have the potential to really strengthen our platform in the future. Lower cost, higher recycled content, state-of-the-art CO2 footprint, together with our strong operational performance, give me the confidence that we can deliver attractive return if we proceed with those projects. Last but not least, we will make our foundation even stronger and continue our strong focus on people, cost, operational excellence, and capital discipline. This is our DNA. Overall, the whole team and I are really excited to harvest great return and generate new projects. We know that the future is in our hands, and it will be great. Now I open it to questions.
All right. Let's start with questions in the room. If anyone has a question, please raise your hand.
I see a question over there.
Hi. It's Curt Woodworth with Credit Suisse. You know, in the past, I think in 2019, there were some challenges with respect to ramping some of the new plants in AS&I, and you took nominations down, I think, quite significantly in the past couple years. Are you now in a position where you feel like operationally a lot of that's been fixed? I believe at one point you were doing well over a billion of nominations. You know, can you kinda talk to the pipeline, the opportunity set, you know, going forward? You know, if we look at the bar chart you provided, it looks like the automotive extrusion number really has been pretty flat since 2017. You know, do you think you can start to grow in line with, y ou know, kind of above the SAAR rate that you outlined. Thanks.
Yeah. There are several questions in what you just said. First, operationally, I think we did a great job there. I think the plan has stabilized. We get good feedback from our customer. They come back to us, they talk to us, they came with new ideas. The relationship we have with them, especially looking forward with new generation of products, is really going in the right direction. Operationally here, I think we have great future things out there. We changed leadership, and I can tell you're welcome in any of our plants. You will see the people are really happy working there. Productivity is there. They're all happy to give us the extra mile and start new equipments. That's clear. On running after growth, I think we want a selective growth. We want to use and leverage our competitive advantage.
If it's specific products with alloys which are recyclable, which alloys with higher strengths, with a strong recycled content or a design that adds value to us or the customer, yeah, we will go there. We don't chase top line, we chase bottom line. I don't know if that answers your questions.
Maybe just on the nomination side. Yes, we were tracking at EUR 1 billion a while ago. We have moderated that quite a bit, right? We think what we want to do is, and to your point on, you know, the profitability of the auto structures business, it's been impacted also by COVID and the chip shortage and all that. All the great improvements in the operations which you see in the EBITDA per ton, right, is still being dragged down by the semiconductor shortages and all that, right? We've got number of down days in 2021, which is still very high. When we get back to normal and the vehicles we're on, the platforms we're on, you'll see an increase.
There is the further growth that Philippe was mentioning.
Like Peter said, the asset is running like a Swiss clock.
All right, Philippe, maybe we'll take a question from the online group. Philippe, what kind of recycling investments are you considering in your AS&I business, and how many tons could that be as an opportunity?
I cannot give you big figure, right? What we look for is, of course, to grab the cheapest alloy scrap available in the market and turn it into our state-of-the-art components, right? The chance we have is our existing alloy portfolio is already very well and above market scrap-friendly. We can already grab some scrap that competitor cannot grab and put into our product, right? What we now look for is to put a recycling and casting center close to where the cheap scrap is in order to transform that into a casting center. Just remember that already today, we cast half of our needs, right? What we plan to do now is to extend that, because we still buy billets, and focus it as much as we can to the markets that are really asking for it, right?
Typically the automotive markets, right? It's a decent size.
I just want to add that if you compare to a recycle center for sheet like SADF, right? Like Peter Basten was talking about, extrusions are smaller, right? So you're talking of a maybe a third or fourth of the size of it, right? Number one. Number two, as Philippe was mentioning, this is not in our guidance for 2025, right? These are further opportunities that we may decide to trigger sooner, in which case we will have the benefit sooner, but it is not in our guidance.
We do believe there is a need for, as Philippe Hoffmann was mentioning, for more casting and recycling in Automotive Structures and Industry, which is going to help us further increase our margins on a go-forward basis, but again, not included in the guidance.
That's the model we want to go, starting in Europe and the U.S. to follow. Remember, we have a two-step thinking. Short term, we harvest and we prepare the future. You know, we prepare projects. That's the way we think, right? So that once we are ready, we can fire.
All right. Let's take one more question from online, and then we'll take our break. Philippe, you talked about reviewing select additional press investments that are not in your 2025 guidance. Can you talk about what the gating factors are as you review those investments?
Well, at this stage, we think about new presses because our customers are asking for it, right? They're knocking at our door to say, "Well, we know we like your product. We like your niche products, whether it is in hard alloys or in automotive." They want us to invest because there are, in those niche products, there is not enough capacity in the market, right? We speak about hard alloys for SodaStream. We speak about hard alloys for some automotive, very well suited, ultra-precision alloys. Here we sell the metal. There is also a huge demand linked to the automotive business for side protection. Side protection is an area where aluminum has a very strong position. Even if it's a steel frame, they use aluminum because of ability to absorb the energy with light weighting.
Remember, a battery is, can be 500 kilograms. It's a heavy thing. You carry a heavy thing behind you, right? You want to do everything you can to make it as light as possible and as flexible, because I would not say that the battery is changing like a cell phone, but the technology is changing, so people will try to accommodate the change in the design of the battery with the box that goes with it, right.
All right. Thank you, Philippe.
Okay. See your choices later. Have a great break.
All right, we'll take a short break now. For those in the room, I just wanna put out a quick reminder, there are high school students testing in the building, so please be quiet in the hallways as much as possible. For those in the room and online, we will start back up in about 12 minutes, at 9:45 A.M. Central Time sharp. Thank you. Al l right, if everyone could find their seats, we'll get started back up here. Our next presenter up is Ingrid Jörg.
Thank you, Jason. Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. I'm Ingrid Jörg . I'm the head of Aerospace and Transportation based in Switzerland, Zurich. I'm with the company for roughly six years by now, and I have more than 20 years of experience in the aluminum industry in different companies and different segments of the market. I think you'll be glad to hear something different than automotive now. It's time now to fly a little bit, make you dream about space and visiting all those planets out there. If you tend to be a billionaire, I think it's feasible in today's world. If not, maybe you have to queue at the end, right? Joking aside, we are a global leader in Aerospace. We have very solid positions in our transportation industry and defense business.
We have six plants worldwide, one of which is located in the U.S. in West Virginia. It's in Ravenswood, West Virginia. The other plants are located in France and in Switzerland in Europe. We make plate, sheet, and extrusions. We make wing skins, pre-machined parts, and we do closed-loop recycling with our customers. Many different products. A very wide portfolio of products that we make. We are 3,400 people. We used to be around 4,000 people, but given the COVID pandemic, we reduced our headcount to 3,400. We ship 206,000 tons, generated EUR 1.1 billion of revenue, and we serve a very wide end markets.
You see on the top, aviation, that is certainly the biggest part of our market, commercial aviation with customers like Airbus and Boeing, of course, the two big OEMs. We also supply business and regional jets. Particularly the business jet market has seen quite some growth in the recent years. Space applications. We have many different space programs. You would see customers like NASA, like Blue Origin or SpaceX, and also the Ariane rocket in Europe with MT Aerospace. We are also supplying in the TID side, defense material. This is a plate product that is basically there to armor the land defense vehicles. All kinds of industrial applications, truck and trailer and leisure boats, particularly in the U.S. market.
Typical customers would be Utility, Ryerson, Nexans France, where we have a 100% supply share. Many, many interesting products and many, many different customers in the portfolio. As you all know, aerospace has been quite heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Aerospace and air travel basically came to a halt, and is since then recovering, and I get back to that a little bit. What you can see in 2021 is that we managed through a crisis where we had a big drop in our aerospace business to keep growing our TID business to partially offset the loss of aerospace. This is also reflected in the EBITDA numbers that you see for the years of 2020 and 2021. In terms of strategic priorities, they haven't really changed.
We are going to maintain our leadership position in aerospace. We are present in all Aerospace OEMs globally. We supply all of them with a wide variety of products. We strengthen our TID position, and we want to continue to do this through the aerospace recovery that has just started. Particularly the North American transportation market is very, very important for us, and I'll get back to this a little bit later in the presentation. We are working very much on developing innovative solutions that allow our customers to grow profitable and also allow us to increase our margins. I wanna give you an example of this. We are selling semi-finished products in general, like sheet and plate, but we have moved a lot into pre-machined parts.
For example, we are making cockpit frames for a single-aisle plane, whereby we ship only 10% of the material and keep the rest and recycle fully, and the customer is getting less material but at a higher value add. We have many examples of those. We started to do this also in the defense industry, and it has been very well received by our customers. Of course, needless to say, rigorous cost and capital discipline. If you're very battered by a COVID crisis and 50% of your market disappears, of course, cost control and cost reduction becomes very, very important. We haven't only been doing this during the crisis. We started well ahead of the crisis to work on structural cost improvements in our plants, both in terms of variable cost and fixed cost.
Last but not least, continue to build our safety culture and invest in our people. You may have heard about labor shortages, particularly in the aerospace market, and now as we are ramping back up production, we see the benefit of having worked for years on developing our people and succession planning. We're doing actually quite well so far in re-manning our plants and putting back the resources that we need to cope with the demand change. As I talked about, the last two years have been quite complicated for us. In preparation, or let's say in advance of the crisis that has happened, 2017 to 2019 have been very important years for us. In these years, we really worked on the performance of our business. We have improved a lot our quality.
We've improved a lot the service to our customers, and a testimony to that is the award that we received from Airbus in 2020 as best performer in the industry. This was a really nice recognition of an intensive job that was done in the plants. Also, we signed many OEM contracts, amongst which very important ones. We signed a contract with Airbus, who is our largest customer in the portfolio, and it's a 10-year contract, and it covers all different products that we make, the entire product portfolio that we actually have. We have never signed a 10-year contract in the history of our company, so it was really a great achievement and gives us an excellent base for the next 10 years to continue to grow our business with this customer.
We also invested in our Ravenswood coil production. This really helped to diversify our business and helped us through the crisis aerospace situation. We've gained improved capabilities as well as incremental capacity with very limited CapEx. It has helped us to gain access to new segments in the market, and I'll come back later to this. Now turning to 2020, 2021, a period of course, we aggressively cut costs to counter the weak aerospace demand. We took advantage of the rebound in transportation, which happened in the second half of 2020, and we see very strong demand in our industrial markets both in Europe as well as in the U.S., which helped a lot.
Putting all those measures together, and really capturing and seizing the opportunity on the industrial side, we have been quite pleased with the results that we achieved. We at 42% of aerospace shipments versus 2016, we achieved practically similar results. I think the work we have done in the last years today serves us as a very important foundation for future growth as the aerospace market comes back and recovers. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the aerospace market itself. I think most of you are very familiar with that market. We know that passenger traffic has been improving a lot, particularly in the U.S., but it is still down 50% versus 2019.
The driver behind recovery in aerospace is clearly the short distance travel, domestic travel, and this has been creating new demand or increased demand, particularly for single aisle planes. I think you've all seen, Airbus has been very adamant about increasing build rates for single aisle. They have put out very important targets. There's a huge increase in 2022 and 2023 projected. Of course, beyond that, there's a wish to continue to grow to a rate of 75 planes per month, which would be an absolute record and far above the levels of pre-COVID. International travel remains quite complicated. Many routes are closed still, with much less traffic than before.
We do not expect this market to return to pre-COVID levels before 2025, 2026 earliest. Of course, this is difficult for airline companies, but in terms of production rates, for us, it is not as important because we are more focused on the short-term planes. On the positive side, I think we can say that the freight market has been very dynamic. We see 10%-20% growth versus pre-COVID levels, which is actually leading to new launches. I guess you may have heard that A350 from Airbus will launch a freighter version. The plane is currently under development, and it's a very interesting platform for us because we have a lot of high value and proprietary technology on this plane, so we're very pleased with this situation.
Also, conversions from passenger to freight are going to double over the next 10 years versus the past several years due to this increase in freight that is expected to continue. I think all in all together, we see that we have substantial leverage to recovery in aerospace, and our strategy is clearly to remain in the leadership position that we're having today. Now aerospace is very cyclical, as we all know. Before we went into the COVID crisis, we were going through a super cycle of more than eight years. I think it's the longest super cycle in history of aerospace, aviation. Why is it that we like our aerospace business if it's giving us all this headache during the downturns?
Clearly, it's a market that has attractive growth rates, and it has attractive growth rates for a very long period of time because passengers will continue to grow. There are so many people today who have not been flying yet, and they will want to fly one day. Particularly Asia is a market with substantial growth rates going forward. We know it's very, very difficult to make aerospace products and to make them in a good quality with a good performance and at good cost. It's also extremely difficult to replicate the production base, the assets for an aerospace facility. It's very high investment if you start a new plant today, and it takes years and years to gain aerospace qualifications. It's clearly a high barrier to entry into this business. It has the best margins across our company.
I guess our CFO will agree to this as well. He's smiling, yes. Contribution margin of an aerospace product is 3 times higher than a TID product. We are very proud of this, and this is due to the fact that we have a very, very wide portfolio of products, with a lot of proprietary technology, that our customers value and are willing to pay for. As I talked a little bit before, we do a lot of pre-machining. We are focusing more and more on closed loop recycling. We want to preserve the value of the metal in the supply chain. That is very important and continues to be more and starts to be more important for our customers.
As they are challenged also to reduce CO2 emissions, they are more and more interested in recycled content as well. Last but not least, but very important is we have a very innovative alloy portfolio. We are working in active collaboration with all major OEMs to develop new products for the future aircraft platforms that we expect not to come before 2035. This is a very long-term business, and it's important to continue to work on this right now because it takes five to 10 years for an alloy to develop and to really be put on a plane so that actually the material is flying. We're very proud of this. Now let me turn to TID. TID also serves a quite diverse set of end markets.
It's largely tied to transportation and capital goods, and the demand is growing with GDP. What we see short-term is a very strong demand profile, and this is due to two things mainly. First of all, we see an onshoring of our supply chains. We see that in the U.S., we see it in Europe, and this is certainly due to the global disruptions, freight costs, availability of containers. All these kinds of things are really helping people to refocus and buy local production instead of importing from China. We also have trade actions in place in both continents. We have anti-dumping and countervailing duties in place in the U.S. against Chinese products. We have the Section 232 tariffs.
In Europe, we have anti-dumping duties against Chinese FRP, and both of those measures are going to be in place probably for the next five years, and we expect after that will be prolonged. The trend is positive for TID. It will remain positive for the next five years, and we really want to take advantage of this situation in the market, and we have been able to take advantage of the strong market performance. Now I come back a little bit to the diversification story. Of course, TID is absolutely necessary for us. It's a beautiful product. It's very diverse, so when one market is down, another one is up. This helps a lot in the combination with an aerospace market. Two-thirds of our products are for commercial transportation, one-third for industrial and defense applications.
In the U.S., we have really been able to gain a leadership position in the different commercial transportation markets, and we have also changed the way how we do business in this market. This used to be more a short-term, spot-driven business, and we have changed the structure from short-term into longer-term contracts. Today, we have roughly 70% of our business contracted for several years ahead versus only 40% in 2018. This allows us to invest in the plant. It allows us to continue to improve those products and work directly with the OEMs to continue to improve and continue to grow and develop new products. We see further opportunity for us in TID. For example, heavy truck, which is part of commercial transportation.
We have almost no market share today, so we are working actively on gaining access to this market. We continue to grow the plate business for technically demanding applications where you need specific alloys, where you need specific mechanical properties that the customers need. As we have a huge experience in aerospace alloys, we're using that a lot in other markets to develop niche products that didn't exist before. Very important, Ravenswood. It's the only U.S. plant in A&T. It's a very important plant, about 1,200 people. It has unique capabilities from an equipment perspective. We have the widest cold mill in the U.S.
We have a very powerful stretcher, a 30-million-pound stretcher, almost unmatched in the industry in terms of products that we can make. We have invested EUR 30 million over the past several years to gain access to more coil transportation markets. We invested in hot mill automation, cold mill, and finishing equipment. We got the new coiler on the hot line. All of this together with process improvements and operational excellence initiatives actually helped us to gain access to a new market, which is TTDB. It's truck trailer dump bodies where you need a good surface quality on the product, and we've gained substantial share in this market from our competition. If we take Ravenswood all together, we see substantial opportunity to continue to grow the business in Ravenswood with almost no CapEx.
We also have an ability to invest in recycling, which is not part of our long-term plan right now, but which we will be doing as we're working also on modernizing our cast house. Overall, I think Ravenswood has been a real success story for us. The plant is obviously focused also on aerospace. We do a lot of aerospace and space products with the unique assets that we're having. Most of the growth in the future is going to come from the transportation coil market. Now if I wanna sum it up, we have significant earnings power. We've been losing a lot of our Aerospace business. We have contracts in place that support the growth of aerospace through the recovery.
We will see continuous growth in the aerospace market short term because of the single-aisle ramp up, and then longer term because the wide body market is continuing to come back, coupled with the freighter market and business and regional jets, which are also improving. Particularly the business jet segment is doing actually quite well at this point in time. In total, we see an opportunity of 60,000-80,000 tons of growth for us, and this, of course, will lead us back to our 219 record performance. We're expecting above EUR 200 million of EBITDA and a guidance of EUR 700-EUR 800 per ton of product shipped for the business unit. I wanna finish with four takeaways for you, things you need to remember. We have substantial earnings leverage in an aerospace recovery.
It's an external factor, and we will just simply because of the contracts in place, benefit from this. The aerospace demand will remain favorable. Of course, the recovery takes long, and it's a bumpy ride. It's not going to happen from one day to another, as the global supply chains need to be put in place again. It is very, very important to understand that long term, this business has infinite growth potential. We continue to grow our TID business, with lots of opportunity in Ravenswood, but also opportunities in Europe, with our specialty plate business. Very important, and all of my colleagues have said it as well, we will not let costs go up again. We are continuing to control our costs because it's very important through all the cycles.
We have a lot of operational excellence initiatives. We've worked a lot on recovery. We've worked a lot on quality, which in turn has all reduced our costs. We've used digitalization to help improve our plants. By doing all of this, in fact, we have continued to develop our people. We've worked a lot on succession planning, on development on people, and it's really very, very important for us to keep this. This is our commitment to our dear investors and our commitment to our customers to continue to do this going forward. With that, I thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.
All right. We'll go ahead and start with questions in the room. You can raise your hands. We have microphones. We have a question over here.
Hi. Thanks for the time. It's Karl Blunden here at Goldman. I'd be interested in your thoughts. There's some excess capacity in aerospace right now across the industry. When you think about market share trends or market share ambitions that you have, how should we think about that?
Yeah. I think theoretically, there's a lot of idle aerospace capacity in the market, but because of the downsizing of everyone. In fact, today in a ramp that we see now, it's stronger in Europe than it is in the U.S. The restocking of the supply chain, there's actually no idle capacity available in the market. As far as I know, neither in the U.S. short term. Certainly, if you think that you go back to pre-COVID levels, all the capacity that exists today will be filled. Also we are sharing our production flow paths with industrial plate markets, defense plate, all kinds of specialty plates, semiconductor, you name it.
As this is shared capacity with aerospace, we see currently that there's no capacity available in the market because these markets are very strong, and I expect them to continue to be quite strong over the next five years.
Thank you.
Question over here. Dave?
Thanks. Dave Gagliano, BMO again. I just wanted to drill down on a couple of numbers that you provided there at the end. I think you said 60,000-80,000 tons of growth by 2025, and margins returning to EUR 700-EUR 800 per ton, also I think by 2025. I don't know if I heard that.
Oh, you think-
My question is, can you just give us a sense as to the cadence of that volume growth and the cadence of when we should expect to see those margins return to EUR 700-EUR 800 per ton?
Yes. Thank you for the question. I think it's quite difficult to predict this because, as you know, the aerospace supply chain is quite, let's say, disorganized at this point in time. It's not going to be a smooth, steady ramp up. I think Europe will ramp up faster than will the U.S., for example, because as you know, with Boeing having all these issues on the MAX and the 787, it will take a little bit more time because there's still excess inventory in the supply chain. What we see in Europe now, there's not much inventory left in the supply chain, and if there's inventory, it's not the right inventory. We see a significant change in demand now in Europe.
I expect that 2022 and 2023 is going to be steady growth, and then in 2024, 2025, we will have to see if the wide body markets will start to pull a little bit. I think you should expect the EUR 700-EUR 800 towards the end of the period that we've been giving you, 2025.
Okay. Just somewhat related, you mentioned the difference between single aisle and wide body. Can you explain Constellium's relative exposure between those two markets?
Yeah. I think, I mean, we are delivering on all platforms today, independent whether it's wide or single aisle or if it's business or regional jets or military jets. We are really on all platforms. For us it doesn't make too much of a difference. Where it makes a difference is on proprietary alloy technology because these are dedicated to certain programs, certain products to certain programs. Overall, our exposure is higher towards the single aisles because that represents today 80% of the overall commercial aviation market.
Okay, thanks.
Question here.
Hi. I wanted to get your perspective. You mentioned freight in your comments, and we know that there's been a significant change in the freight market. Freight rates are up. I would love to get a sense of, like, what is your exposure to that today, and then what do you see it, you know, over the next, you know, three years? Then do you see it as a step change?
I think it very much depends which business we are talking about. We have contracts where we have freight pass-through clauses. I think that's a big chunk of our contracts. Some of our business is spot, where we pass through this cost. Some of our business where we have long-term commitments, we also have long-term commitments with freight, so it's very varied. I think most of the cost increases on freight we will be able to pass through. It's not just a question of cost, it's also a question of availability and lead times to ship material across the different continents.
Oh, I meant like, on the demand side for freight. Are you, were you referring to freight from a cost perspective or freight from a, the cargo market?
No, from a cost perspective. I think one of the reasons why container freight is extremely complicated today. I think it's one of the drivers behind the air freights that are continuing to go up.
Jean-Marc, did you have a comment you wanted to make on that?
No.
You're good? Okay. All right, I think that's all the time we have for Ingrid. Thank you, Ingrid.
Thank you very much.
We'll now turn it over to our last presenter, Peter Matt.
Okay. Well, thank you, Jason. Thank you everyone for joining us. As you know, we always save the best for last, so I'll try to tie this together into something that's comprehensible for everyone. I wanna start with just a quick recap of some of our financial priorities. The first three are really about running a good business. As Jean-Marc showed in his slide recapping our results, I think we feel like we've run a good business. We passed that test. The fourth one, maintaining financial flexibility, in our minds is really about building the optionality to determine our future as we wanna see it, right? I think we've made a lot of progress on that through a lot of the work we've done on the balance sheet and deleveraging.
We're not done yet, but we're well advanced in that initiative. The fifth one, growing the top line, is I think where we are now, where we've been historically fairly measured in the growth that we're taking on, and now we're looking to ramp that up a little bit to take advantage of, number one, a good business, the flexibility to execute on it, and the opportunities to create real value. Today we're gonna introduce, as Jean-Marc noted, two concepts for you. VAR is the first one and ROIC is the second one. VAR is basically our revenues minus our cost of metal. Cost of metal, you should think about aluminum, including all hedging costs, all scrap benefit, all alloy costs and so forth.
We like VAR because we think it's more representative of the real revenues of the company. We also like it because we think it highlights the real margins of the business, which are, you know, significantly better than those derived from gross margin, and we'll show you that in a second. We'll communicate VAR on a quarterly basis going forward at the group level. ROIC, so this is gonna be NOPAT divided by invested capital. It'll be a very simple calculation. You'll be able to track it.
We like this because we think it highlights the returns generated in the business, and as we start to invest more, it becomes a tool to judge us as capital allocators, and we like to put our money where our mouth is, so we wanna be judged in that regard. It also provides a roadmap for continuous improvement. We'll do this annually, and again, we'll reconcile it to our financials for you. Let's look at some operating performance metrics using VAR. On the left-hand side of the chart, you can see the first thing to notice is that our VAR in 2021 is EUR 2.3 billion. That compares to gross revenues of EUR 6.15 billion, right? You can immediately see the significant impact metal has on our top line.
Remember, our business is a pass-through, so hence, we think that makes sense. The next thing to note is that the CAGR has grown at a 3% rate. If we get behind that CAGR, and this is important for the environment that we're in and some of the points that have been made by the business unit presidents, volume and price are positive contributors to that, over this period. Mix is, you know, kind of modestly negative, and that's really given the aerospace impacts on the business, given the downturn that Ingrid talked about. I won't spend any time in the middle chart, but to say that, you know, 8% CAGR over this period, I think is pretty impressive.
Moving to the right chart, I wanna highlight the fact that our Adjusted EBITDA to VAR, or you know, we would call this an Adjusted EBITDA margin, has grown by 700 basis points from 18.7% to 25.7%. At 25.7%, we think that's a very attractive margin relative to other high-quality industrial companies. The other thing I'd note is that we believe over the guidance period that we can further increase that margin. Our balance sheet has significantly improved, and we're in the final stages of our balance sheet repair. We've reduced leverage dramatically, and just to put it in perspective, in 2021, we reduced our gross debt by EUR 262 million, and we reduced factoring by more than EUR 50 million.
If you look at our leverage at the end of 2021, we're 3.4x. If you use the midpoint of the guidance that we have out there, at the end of 2022, we should be 3x. We're making rapid progress in deleveraging the balance sheet. We have no near-term debt maturities, and we have substantial liquidity in the company. I think our last two trips to the capital markets where we did two bonds with three handles, one in the euro market and one in the U.S. dollar market illustrate the excellent access that we have to capital.
We were really proud to be the first ones in our sector to do a sustainability-linked bond, and I think it really kind of reinforces our mantra to put your money where your mouth is, in terms of, standing behind some of the sustainability objectives that we have. 2.5 times remains our medium term objective, but as we said, or as Jean-Marc said, we believe that our free cash flow profile is gonna lead this to drift down into the 1.5-2.5, and that's where we'll sit. We've talked a lot about cost in the past, and I wanna kind of talk about costs a little bit today. I think we're really proud of what we've been able to do.
We demonstrated the ability to flex our costs down in COVID very substantially, as you saw. As we came out of COVID, we managed to control their increase, and that's produced some of the results that you've seen. We're now clearly in a very inflationary environment, and it's challenging, but cost control remains a core focus for us. You know, we've worked hard on our Horizon 22 initiative, where, you know, we talked about the fact that we've secured EUR 75 million of structural cost reductions through the end of 2021. We believe through our Vision 25 initiative that we can take another EUR 50 million out over the period between now and 2025. I wanna emphasize, this is really hard work, and it requires everyone in the company's effort.
I really wanna compliment the business unit presidents because they're cheaper than I am, and that makes it not easy, but makes us more able to get some of these costs out. They've done a fantastic job. I also wanna say that, you know, the good news is that we have pricing power. We said that on the fourth quarter call, and I wanna reiterate that today. We're bringing in new contracts at higher prices. We're able to put inflationary pass-throughs into a number of these contracts, surcharges into a number of these contracts, so we are able to offset the cost pressures. Over the period, as you'll see, we expect to be able to continue to do so.
We do expect the pressures to moderate over time, and, as I said at the beginning, our margins to continue to grow. You've heard from the BU presidents, from each of the BU presidents about how sustainability is impacting their business. This is an important slide for us because if we play this right, this should be a really positive trend for us. I wanna point to three ways in which this can help us. First is growth, the second is lower costs, and the third is compelling investment opportunities. Let's look at growth. Peter talked about, and we'll just use the P&ARP example, but Peter talked about the fact that, in North America, there's 100,000 tons of incremental canned sheet demand as a consequence of the market growth that we're seeing today.
Now, that has really helped us in terms of renegotiating contracts, and Peter talked about this holistically. It's not just about price, it's about the terms and so forth. It's led to improved results, and you'll see those improved results as we, you know, kind of go through this guidance period. That's an example of where, you know, sustainability is really helping us. If you look to the far right of that box, this is something that Jean-Marc mentioned, you can see our CO2 intensity is about a third of the global average. If people are serious about sustainability, this is gonna only amplify the demand for our products, and it's gonna give us more leverage, and it's gonna allow us to generate more attractive financial results. Second, let's talk about lower costs.
The environmental targets that we have are driving us to revisit our cost structure. That means improving our efficiency, it means reducing our consumption. You can see on the right-hand side, we've got our goal for Scopes 1 and 2, CO2 intensity. When we achieve these goals, excuse me, we will come out of this with lower costs and be a more efficient producer. This will be a good thing for us. Thirdly, compelling investment returns. I'm not gonna say so much about this here because I'm gonna talk more about some of the specific returns in just a second.
What I do wanna say is that if you think about what's happening here is that the demand profile in our markets is leading to better investment opportunities for us, right? When Peter talked about, for example, the fact that we've got can sheet contracts that are now standing behind this, as investors, and we consider ourselves investors, we can be confident that we can generate these returns. The sustainability trend is potentially very exciting for us. You've heard from the businesses also about how we have a number of active investment opportunities. Given the time it takes to put these investment opportunities in place, we gotta build these, this equipment, and these operations, and the timing of the customer needs, we need to start now. We will invest.
We will increase our investment over the next couple of years. What we're proposing to do, as Jean-Marc said, is to double the level of our growth/return-seeking investment to EUR 150 million from EUR 75 million. Together, that means we're talking about EUR 350 million of investment over the next three years. These are highly strategic investments, as I'm about to show you in two examples. They are investments where we believe we can not only help improve our returns, but also contribute meaningful competitive advantage to our businesses. Let's talk about two of the examples. The Neuf-Brisach Recycling Center, Peter, kinda gave you the general outline of that. This, as he said, is a very strategic investment for us.
It, you know, increases customer connectivity, it diversifies our supplier base, it generates good returns, it makes our CO2 footprint lower. We think we can make this investment and generate returns that are in excess of 20% on this. That's, you know, including. This is fully loaded, including the working capital burden that we'll have and so forth. Accretion multiples, and this goes to something that, Curt, you were asking about earlier, that are kind of in the 3-3.5 times. I think that's a pretty compelling investment that we can make. If we go to the can sheet expansion, again, this is a super interesting one because in some way, it's exactly what Peter said in his presentation. It's doing more of what we've been doing. It's debottlenecking.
It's taking advantage of the assets that we have as opposed to, you know, kind of starting afresh. Here, through a series of different investments, we can also generate a 2% or 20% IRR on this. That again incorporates fully loaded for trade working capital and so forth. Here, too, we think we can do this at creation multiples that are in the 3-3.5 times. Again, very compelling and, you know, I think investments that will contribute to our overall ROIC. The last point I wanna make on this slide, and I think this is a really important point, is that we expect to be free cash flow generative through this whole period.
Put another way, we're using a portion of our free cash flow to finance our own growth. This slide is a bit of a retread from our last Analyst Day, and it was so popular that we thought we'd bring it back. For those of you that are on the phone and may not be paying as close attention, pay attention to this one. This is an important one. What we've done on this slide is we've tried to portray the walk from our EUR 581 to our greater than EUR 800 million of Adjusted EBITDA.
We have four blocks on this step, across to the EUR 800 million, and those are meant to be the kind of potential opportunities that add up to or that build us to the EUR 800 million. Let's take those blocks individually and talk about what they are. End market recovery. What we mean here is this is the recovery of the end markets to a 2019 level. Ingrid talked extensively about, you know, the aerospace opportunity. Philippe and Peter talked about the automotive opportunity.
These are really attractive opportunities that just from kind of benefiting from the recovery in the market, we should generate some substantial EBITDA. Market growth and growth investments, this is a combination of having the capacity in place to take advantage of market growth, and that's, you know, Philippe's 35,000-40,000 tons. It's Ingrid on some incremental TID volumes, and it's Peter's 200,000 tons of incremental capacity that we're doing in canned sheet. I do wanna say that when on the canned sheet investment, that we think we can have 200,000 tons in place by 2025, but don't assume we're gonna ship all 200,000 tons in 2025, just as a point of clarification. The third bucket is structural cost reduction and operational improvements. Here, there's positives and negatives in this bucket.
On the positive side, you've got our recycling investment, you've got our Horizon 22 and Vision '25 opportunities. On the negative side, we've got some structural cost headwinds that we'll have as some of these businesses ramp back up. Aerospace. Ingrid's Aerospace business is a, you know, kind of a very good example of that. We believe that we'll have some inflation or some headwinds on the scrap side, and that's embedded in this bucket. Lastly, pricing, this is again, taking the point that I made earlier, this is capturing the fact that we have contractual price increases that we believe over this period will outweigh the inflation that we're experiencing today and expect in the future. That gets us to a number of greater than EUR 800 million of adjusted EBITDA.
Now, the couple things here that I think are really important. Number one, there's a number of things we have not included here. We don't have a CALP line in here. We don't have a green premium, Tim, to get to a question that you were asking about. We've also assumed that we don't have incremental geopolitical risk. We don't have another pandemic. There's not a recession in here. So, this is kind of at normal pressure and temperature. These are the results we hope to generate. Okay. So, you know, as we start to invest more, we felt it was important to add ROIC to our metrics that we're reporting on. Here we think that we have the opportunity to really drive meaningful change.
It's across the current operations, and it's also through some of the investments that we're proposing to make. If we look at the businesses, each business can contribute to this. P&ARP, we talked about the de-bottlenecking, the recycling investments. AS&I, we talked about kind of the selective investments in auto structures, and I love the way Philippe talks about getting more profit, not just more tons out of the business, and obviously cost focus. In A&T, I think we have to all take our hat off to the job Ingrid did on the cost side in A&T, but also to continuing to grow and take advantage of the aerospace recovery and some selective TID investments. There's some really attractive opportunities here.
If you look at where we are today, in 2021, we generated about a 9.8% return on invested capital. We think we can take that number to 12%-15% over, you know, over the future period. If we do that, and you look at this and you say, "If we could get to the high end of that range," again, to make the comparison to the value-added industrial companies, I think we start to compare very favorably, and the valuation of our company looks very cheap. Free cash flow has always been part of our story, and it's gonna continue to remain part of our story. We think this is the great enabler.
We generated over EUR 460 million of free cash flow since 2019, and we have committed to greater than EUR 150 million in 2022, and we believe that the potential here is to generate EUR 300 million-plus of free cash flow in the future. What we've included on the right-hand side of the page are some kind of metrics to help you understand how we would kind of get to these free cash flow numbers. I think it comes down to, you know, durable EBITDA growth and astute management of the working capital and cash items. We'll plan to use the free cash flow that we generate for deleveraging and the incremental investments.
Jean-Marc talked about capital allocation, and I wanna just come back to this on long-term capital allocation. First and foremost, we have to maintain a strong balance sheet, and that's because, as we said at the beginning, this is the enabler. This is what allows us to determine our future. Second, we wanna invest in growth where there are attractive returns, and we're gonna do this in the short term. But as you heard from each of the BU presidents, this goes well beyond the guidance period here. There are a number of things that we can do in this business over time. There's no shortage of investable opportunities, and we're gonna continue to be very disciplined about going after them to bring the value creation to you. Just a word on M&A.
M&A, as we said in the past, is not easy in this space, but we're gonna continue to look at it because where we can buy an asset and save ourselves the time to build the asset at a competitive value, we think that makes sense to do. Of course, returning capital to shareholders, this will become a higher priority as we accomplish our leverage objectives. Bringing this all together, Constellium really offers a super compelling investment for all of you. It's diversified, and our end markets are supported by strong secular growth trends that are linked to sustainability, and we think these are very durable.
Secondly, we have A djusted EBITDA growth in the profile we're presenting in our guidance that is greater than 8%, and we think that we can continue to drive at this level and produce some very attractive returns for you as an investor. Let's just kinda unpack that a little bit in terms of what the business units have talked about today. This means continued execution across our business. It means harvesting the investments that we've made historically, and it means new investments. That incorporates Philippe's 30,000 to 35,000 to 40,000 tons, it incorporates Ingrid's 60,000-80,000 tons, and it incorporates Peter's 200,000 tons. That's over 300,000 tons of opportunity in this company over the relatively near term.
Next point I wanna make is this is a free cash flow machine if we run it the right way, and we think that we can generate around EUR 300 million of free cash flow in the future, and that's going to carry our leverage nicely down to the 2.5 times, and then it's gonna carry us to a place where we can make distributions to shareholders. Lastly, I wanna say that we believe that there's an opportunity to really drive return on invested capital to levels that we haven't seen in the past, certainly in the recent past, and that are very compelling when compared to other high-quality industrial companies and in doing that, I think really drive meaningful value creation for our shareholders.
We know we live in turbulent times, and this is no exception and, but Constellium has shown our ability to weather these times, and we're very confident in the future. I wanna thank everyone for coming, and with that, I'll ask Marc to come up, and we can answer some questions. Thank you.
Okay. Before we open the Q and A session, I wanna introduce a few more members of the executive team that are with us today. We have Vittorio Rossetti , our Chief Digital Officer. Stand up and face the camera. We've got Ludovic Piquier, who is our Chief Technical Officer. Jack Clark, who used to be our Chief Technical Officer, but who is full-time working on debottlenecking our 200,000 tons of capacities in the parts segment. We also have Jeremy Leach over there, who is our General Counsel. With that, I think, Jason, we're ready for questions. I think we are supposed to sit here.
Yeah.
Okay. Carefully.
Let's go ahead.
Safely.
Exactly. Let's go ahead and open it up for the room. Here in the middle.
Great. Thanks. This is Emily Chieng from Goldman Sachs. My first question is just around sort of the alloying material side of the equation. I know last year we had some issues with magnesium. But curious as to what you guys are seeing on to the supply chain of other sort of materials that are required in your production facilities. Anything that could be impacting your production trajectory over the next year or so. Then maybe thinking bigger picture again, you know, the impact of certain supply chain disruptions on your customers' production facilities that could, you know, end up impacting demand for those different end markets there as well.
Yeah. Thanks, Emily. Last year we were quite concerned with magnesium. The concern has largely subsided. We are paying more for magnesium as a consequence of what's happened. It's fully baked into our guidance, both short term and long term. We don't anticipate, you know, prices of those products to go back to pre-pandemic levels. Maybe there will be an upside, maybe not. We'll see. We don't have just yet a burning issue like we had with magnesium back in, you know, six months ago. However, we are monitoring the situation very closely because, you know, experience has taught us that things can happen out of left field at any point in time. We mentioned, you know, Russian metal as a risk, and that's a risk directly to us.
Again, we're in a business where there are many offsetting factors, right? Whatever supply chain disruption could impact us would also impact others. As a consequence, you get in a place where maybe our production capabilities are reduced temporarily, but our ability to raise prices, increase scrap profit as a consequence of that, is also unfolding. It's always important that we think about the impact to our business in terms of a net impact, which tends to be much smaller than a gross impact. I think so far we are, you know, monitoring the situation. We don't see a major disruption, but I remember that as soon as I say that something could happen.
Maybe just to jump in. You also asked about customers. So far, the only place where we've really seen kind of supply chain impacts on the customer base, I'd say are really automotive, right? Everyone else has managed to make things work with obviously some difficulty, but it's really automotive where we're seeing the disruption. And that feels like it's getting better, but you know, it takes two steps forward and then maybe a step back. It's a process.
Yeah. On the customer front, another one that could happen is titanium with Aerospace. We know that most of the titanium comes from Russia. That could. It's a very important part for aircraft manufacturers, so that could slow down the recovery in Aerospace. You know, we're seeing this, the Aerospace recovery happening actually faster than we thought it would. Again, offsetting factor, you know, maybe it gives a little bit more time to the supply chain to adapt, and we are not the guilty ones in slowing down the recovery. We, yeah, plenty of things happening. As Peter said, these are turbulent times, but I think we can navigate them.
Great. That's really helpful. Maybe just one quick one on M&A. You know, what are sort of the end market exposures that you could be targeting or geographic exposures that, you know, you'd be most interested in?
Geographically, we wanna stick to where we are. As you know, we've got significant market shares in most of our markets. We're number one or number two, so that creates some complications. But there may still be some opportunities, you know, of a given mill here or there, which doesn't have too much of an overlap from an antitrust standpoint, that we can, you know, improve, repurpose or whatever. That's, you know, kind of a smaller, kind of nearly tuck-in acquisition. Where I think acquisitions can also play a role is in recycling. You know, it's difficult to find the assets that are really matching what we need. There's no perfect asset.
There are a number of assets that can be available, and that could be a nice fit for us to accelerate our recycling initiatives. The good thing is they come in, you know, with immediate EBITDA as well, as opposed to, you know, taking two, three years to build and ramp up a facility. That's how we think about it. Again, that's not a core plank of our strategy. None of that is embedded in our long-term guidance. We look at it as an option to always evaluate, you know, if something becomes available, evaluate whether it fits in our strategy and whether, you know, how does it compare to an organic investment.
Next question. Timna?
Thanks. Timna Tanners with Wolfe Research. Just to follow up on the capital allocation discussion a little bit further, I think you mentioned, you know, obviously in the final stages of deleveraging gives you opportunities. We already just talked about M&A, but also on buybacks and dividends. Can you talk about how you think about one versus the other and what kind of timing you're thinking about? Like, is there a threshold for a certain deleveraging target before you consider the buybacks or dividends? That'd be great. Thanks.
Yeah. In terms of the timing, I think we want to have very good visibility on the 2.5 times leverage. I'd anchor ourselves to that. I'd just remind you that when we hit our guidance for this year, we'll be at 3 times by the end of this year, right? We've said in the past, Timna, that we think we can delever by, you know, kind of a half a turn a year. You know, by the time we get through 2023, we should be ready to be seriously thinking about this.
In terms of the sequencing of dividends and share repurchases, again, we haven't really formalized a plan on this, but my suspicion is that we would probably land on the side of starting with a small dividend and then using share repurchases to flex that number up depending on free cash flow generation.
Next question. Dave, in the middle.
Hi. Thanks. I'm just gonna ask a couple of, you know, assumption-type questions embedded in this $800 million target. First of all, if energy prices stay where they are now, you know, can you just frame how much of an impact that would have on that $800 million target in 2025, just so we have a point of reference?
If energy prices stay where they are now? Yeah.
Well, maybe we should say that we hedge our energy prices forward, right, in a staggered fashion, so kind of two, three years out. Think of it as the impact is gradual on us. If you look at the forward curve, the forward curve doesn't show energy prices staying where they are now. As we, you know, take more hedges over time, as we progress down the path, essentially this is what we've baked into our long-term guidance. Now.
But-
So, so.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, the premium, if you were to look at the premium of current energy prices relative to where they were kind of pre the conflict, maybe it's a EUR 20 million or EUR 30 million number per annum, something like that.
Okay. That's helpful just to get a point of reference.
The other thing too is if energy prices stay where they are through 2025, that's gonna impact everybody out there, right? Again, offsetting factor, yes, we'll pay more for our energy, but guess what? Our prices will go up and so will everybody else's. I think fundamentally we've got something here that's kind of baking into kind of current, as Peter was saying, temperature and pressure conditions. And therefore, we, you know, the impact of energy prices ought to be minimal to that guidance.
Okay. Then just on the CapEx, I think it was EUR 350 million a year on average, 2023 to 2025. What's the variability in those numbers? 2023 a peak year. Can you just give us an average number?
Yeah, I think assume it's gonna be pretty flat at EUR 350.
Yeah.
Okay.
We-
I mean.
Yeah.
As Peter was mentioning, and Philippe as well, and Ingrid, I mean these are modular investments, right? We don't have a big ticket item like there's a 100 million that we spend. I mean, even the Neuf-Brisach investment, EUR 130 million is spent over three years. That's the biggest one we have really of, you know, of one nature. All these investments will be, you know, paced in a way where it's reasonably, you know, constant thread of investment in a growth.
Yeah. It goes without saying, Dave, that you know, once we start these investments, we wanna get them done as quickly as we can, right? But there are a lot of hands that bring these together, and we need the people, we need all the equipment in place. If we have an opportunity to accelerate, we will. I think this is our best guess of how it currently unfolds.
Okay, great. Then the last one for me, you gave us the numbers effectively to back into for the A&T segment for, you know, the overall EBITDA target by 2025. Can you just give us embedded in that EUR 800 million, what are the assumptions for the other, you know, the other two businesses, AS&I and PARP?
I think for AS&I, you should assume that it, you know, we've talked about EUR 500 per ton plus, right? That's probably a good Adjusted EBITDA number, and we should improve that over time. I think if you look at I forget the year-end number, but I'd wanna say it was like, you know, kind of 500 and 525 or something like that. It should gradually drift up. P&ARP is probably overall P&ARP, high 300s we should
Mm-hmm.
Drift to, something like that.
Okay. That's obviously EBITDA per ton.
EBITDA per ton. Yeah.
I mean, do you wanna just give us the volumes or the EBITDA? I was actually asking what's the embedded EBITDA.
Oh, yeah.
I know you're not really gonna break it out by segment.
Yeah.
When you give it for two, for one of them.
We're not g-
Okay.
We're not gonna break that out for you, Dave, at this point.
Okay. All right. Thanks.
Remember, you know, part of what we like about this business is what Jean-Marc said. It's like when one side, one piece of the business, gets a little softer, another piece of the business picks up, right? We've made some assumptions on that, but we wouldn't want you to build a model that was too tied to a particular ramp.
Worth a try. Thanks.
We're giving you know, some measure of EBITDA per ton and I think in Peter's projections, you know, 200,000 tons more of capacity by 2025. Not all of it will be sold in 2025. You get a pretty good feel of the EBITDA per ton, the number of tons. I think we're giving you the ballpark estimates with a little bit of computation.
Curt, go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Curt Woodworth with Credit Suisse. You know, so it seems like can sheet is sort of the new ABS, like, hyper-growth market. But in the past, I mean, the ABS market was growing pretty rapidly and you talked about, you know, the need to maybe upgrade some of the mix and contract structure at Bowling Green before you would look to add capacity. On the slide deck, you did mention a potential CALP line, maybe coming down the road. You know, I guess question one is what do you need to see to make that happen? Then two, with respect to the EV, you know, 70, over 70% of the business being EV-centric by 2025 is pretty remarkable. Much higher than I would have anticipated. You know, there's obviously duration to what's going on in the EV.
Just kinda curious to see, you know, how you're thinking about ABS more broadly.
Yeah.
Is the EV transition accretive to your margins? Are they willing to pay maybe more than traditional ICE? Just kinda how you see that market evolving.
Yeah. Curt, 2025 is nearly tomorrow in our business, right? I mean, as Peter was mentioning, 90% of our business is contracted for can sheet through 2025, so we know what we're getting. The history in can sheet relative to ABS is can sheet has become more attractive from a return on invested capital standpoint than ABS is today. That is because of all the dynamic in the demand, the improvements we've had in our contracts, the performance of our plants, and the asset base we have, right?
For us to go bigger in auto body sheet means another CALP line investment, and that other CALP line investment needs also the upstream investment that Peter was describing around, you know, you have to make the feedstock for automotive, and that's the same capacity that is being used, as you know, for can sheet. Today, we have, and that's all about the optionality we have in our business, right? Strategically and tactically. Strategically, it is a better investment for us to make that investment upstream and dedicate it to can sheet than add another CALP line to make more auto body sheet. Over the long term, you know, the 200,000 tons we're talking about by 2025 in Peter's segment, we've got another 140 that we know about, and there may be more actually that we don't know yet about.
That may be used to provide more auto body sheet, but we'll make that decision when the time comes. It's really, I mean, very important for all of you to understand that we live in a business where it is important for us to build constant optionality and be able to choose the best return on investment, be in a place to choose the best return on investments because of the actions we've taken. Our path forward is very clear in that regard. For the next three years, it's gonna be more can sheet, more recycling. Automotive is gonna be around mix management and getting to a place where we get these contracts and the relationships with the customers to the same place as what we're getting with can sheet. Right?
Obviously, riding on the aerospace recovery while maintaining our TID volumes, because Ingrid and the team have done a great job at going straight to the OEMs, you know, deepening the relationship, you know, 70% multi-year contract compared to 40% in the past. That's laying a better foundation for us. So that's really what we're focused on. Then, you know, an auto body sheet investment, I'm sure in the future will be highly profitable. Some of our competitors are making auto body sheet investments. Good for them, and it's good for the market as well. In our case, we're looking at our return on invested capital, how do we get back to you guys the most money we can for the money we're investing in the business?
I think we have a question over here.
Yeah. Emily Chieng at Goldman Sachs. Just on the leverage targets, I appreciate the clarity you provided there in the 1.5-2.5, and appreciate that M&A opportunities are hard to predict and may be small in this market given the regulatory environment. Is there a flex there if you find something really strategically important to go above that 2.5 times threshold when you see something?
Never say never, but I kind of doubt it.
I mean, I would just add, number one, we worked really hard to get the balance sheet back in shape. If we see the opportunity, and to Jean-Marc's point, and we decided to kind of go for it, we'd have to have a very clear plan to get back to the 2.5 times leverage, right? Now the good news is that if you look at what we're saying, what we're saying is that free cash flow is gonna carry us beyond 2.5, right? The more likely scenario is we're sitting there at, you know, 1.75 and we, you know, can buy something that takes us up to, I don't know, 2.75. Well, that's easier, right? Hopefully that gives you a little color.
All right. Maybe we'll take a question from the online group. What are your expectations for the semiconductor recovery timeline in automotive, and how has that changed over the last quarter?
I would say nearly facetiously, it's always one year out. That it's been consistently one year out. We don't have any expectation really. Well, the expectation embedded in our guidance is there is an improvement towards the end of the year in 2022, and by 2025, it's behind us, okay? I, you know, my crystal ball is not very good based on my experience.
Okay. Any other questions in the room? Timna?
Yeah. I just think given the focus on cost inflation, I know earlier you expressed confidence in passing through most costs, but that word most, I just wondered if you can elaborate on are there costs that you aren't able to pass through, and why, and is there a timeframe? In the list of all the things, you know, in costs, which concern you more than others the most?
Yeah. I'll get started and Peter will help me. When we say most, I mean, it's a question of time, right? By 2025, all of it and then some is passed through. Actually, I would say that by 2023, all of it is passed through. We have contractual agreements where we have, we're committed to a fixed price, for instance, and we cannot pass through the inflation embedded, you know, kind of implicitly embedded into the products we make for that specific contract. Now, in other contracts, we can pass through.
In other contracts, well, they're renewing or they're spot sales, and then the inflationary environment is actually putting us in a very good position, 'cause inflation is also a result of supply chain shortages, and we're in a place where our products are in great demand. We can actually pass through more than the cost that the cost increases we are faced with. On balance, when we look at 2022, we do not expect to be able to pass through all the inflation. In 2023, we will have passed through all of it. Actually, if that scenario continues, I think we may have some upside on the pricing further than what we're showing in the bridge, the work that Peter showed on page 64. That's an important one.
We think we can have more upside, but trying to give a bit more color. We're talking small numbers in that category.
In 2023?
Yes. I mean, and especially, I mean, as I mentioned, we're starting the year strong. We're seeing aerospace coming back. We've got good contracts there. Yeah, we think it's a manageable hit to 2022.
The other thing I'd add is just it also depends. One of the things we love about this business is the diversification, and the contracts are no exception, right? You know, depending on the sectors, we can have different ability to pass it through, right? I mean, one sector that's traditionally pretty difficult to pass through costs in is auto, right?
You know, in a lot of the other contracts, for example, many of Peter's contracts in part will have, you know, PPI adjusters. Some of Ingrid's contracts have, you know, kind of PPI adjusters. It really depends, but over time, we feel like we're, you know, we've got kind of a good lever there. Of course, you know, we're always redoing contracts, right? So when you redo, you get a reopener on that. You know, if you look at our big cost buckets, we talked about energy already, and labor, obviously our second-biggest cost bucket is labor, after metal. There, you know, so far the labor increases have been, we call them manageable.
I mean, they're higher than what we've seen in the past, but you know, they're not significantly higher than what we've seen in the past. In the U.S., we do have contractual protections in the form of, you know, multi-year labor agreements. Europe tends to be more, you know, kind of an annual negotiation, so.
I think we have time for one more question.
Thank you. I have a question, you know, just one last question about Russia, not about the primary metal supply at all, more about flat-rolled product. I was wondering, you know, if Russia is a net importer or net exporter of flat-rolled product that you guys produce. Because to the extent they're, let's say, you know, net exporter, and now the rest of Europe doesn't wanna buy from them, then actually that creates a very, you know, tight market, right? For the rest of the suppliers that could supply to
Yeah
To the rest of Europe.
Russia doesn't have a big presence, you know, on the global scale in rolled products, right? Most of what's made there is consumed there. They don't play a big role in the trade flows.
Right. Got it. n the rolled product side.
Got it.
It's on primary that they're big. They're about 6-7% of the world primary production, but they're only 3-4% of our purchases.
Thanks for that. Last one. In 2018, you guys held an investor day. I think back then, you gave an estimate of replacement value of Constellium asset. Back then, I think it was about EUR 9 billion-
Mm-hmm
If my memory is correct. Do you have an updated estimate on that? Just given, you know, CapEx put into the-
Yeah
To the business since then, as well as inflation.
Yeah. Ballpark, maybe a tiny bit more, but I don't think we'd be at EUR 10 billion. Still nine is a good number. Now, I guess if we wanted to build everything all at once now, I mean, with the inflationary pressures, the price of steel and all that, maybe it would be higher, but I don't think that would be a meaningful difference.
Great. Jean-Marc, any final closing comments?
Well, I think it's clear that we are very excited about the future. When I joined the company six years ago, I was very excited for different reasons. Now I'm more excited. I look at a business that's become very strong. You've seen that with our expansion of VAR margin at 700 basis points more over the past six to seven years. This is a very strong foundation for a business that has plenty of opportunities to grow with the recovery of automotive and aerospace, which are still hobbling us now, and with the secular megatrends anchored in sustainability. I think we've got a very compelling growth story, very capital efficient, and that is finally paving the way for nice returns to shareholder in the not too distant future.
With that, thank you very much. Everyone on the video call, thank you for participating today. For those in the room, we've got what is possibly the most exciting part of the day, which is a visit to the plant. Thank you very much, but stay tuned for more instructions. Everybody on the phone and, video conference, thank you so much for your interest in Constellium. Bye-bye.