From Donaldson, sorry, filtration, pure play, to my direct left, CEO Tod Carpenter, who is, I think this is what, year 10 of his CEO.
10th in April.
Yeah, there you go, and Brad Pogalz to his left, who a longtime Donaldson employee who was just elevated to CFO in the last couple of months.
Yep.
So good. We have a lot of good stuff to talk about, just given the diversity of the business and the markets. But I think before we get into that, maybe go over to you, Tod, just to kind of give a lay of the land, help the crowd kind of understand what Donaldson's story is about.
Yeah, let me just throw some slides at you to introduce more of our story and what our company is about. First, I want obviously to remind everyone about Safe Harbor. We did just report earnings last week, so it's pretty fresh information that we'll be able to talk about relative to numbers and be able to really be transparent about any questions that you may have. So five key points that I want you to take away that describe our company. So first, we are a leader in filtration in all the markets that we serve. Our strategy is to be a technology-led filtration company. We invent cool things. I often say I should kind of wear a black turtleneck, but yeah, that gig has been taken. We really bring new technology forward to all of our end markets within the filtration spaces.
We are best in class from a technology standpoint of view. Our solutions enable the more greener, modern economy. I'll give you a couple of examples in the presentation a bit later. We have a clear, balanced, strategic growth plan through investing back into the company organically as well as inorganically. And we recently opened up a Life Sciences reporting segment, the third segment in our company, where we believe we have differentiating technology, disruptive technology into bioprocessing spaces that over time we will press forward. So those are the five takeaways that I'd like you to have out of the presentation. Let's dive in a little deeper. Specifically, we are a 110-year-old company. Everything you see down here in the lower right over the last four years are records. We have been on a record run of revenue, a record run of EPS.
Our company down on the lower left looks like this. If we talk about first fit and new products, we will be 35%. So think of that. Our model, since we're technology-led, is to be proprietary razors to sell razor blades in the filtration market, 65% replacement. Geographically, I'll show you on the next slide, but our reporting segments are here, 62% on medium heavy-duty diesel engines, on-road, construction, agriculture, mining, and long-haul trucks. Industrial, a vast array of industrial applications, everything from weld fumes to any kind of particulate chip that you may have within your manufacturing process to mist. So we'll collect particulates, for example, anything from Lexan window dust, wood chips, weld fumes to gold dust for Tiffany. That's the full array that we have within applications. And in Mobile Solutions, construction, agriculture, mining, long-haul trucks, and then within Life Sciences, specifically, we have our smallest filters.
Everything that's technologically built out of a polymer or a membrane-based is in that space. So things like disk drive, food and beverage, as well as specific life sciences-based applications, and I'll talk a little bit further on the next slide. One thing that is very important on this is you see our patent portfolio. We currently have 3,000 open patents. Between our investors' day of 2019 and our Investor Day of April 2023, on average, somewhere in the world, Donaldson Company was granted a patent every day. We're serious about being the technology leader in our spaces, and we continue to invest R&D in order to be able to keep that leadership position. Geographically, we are 44% in the U.S. and Canada, 28% Europe, 10% Latin America, 17% APAC. APAC has actually subsided over the last couple of years into the high teens.
Clearly, it's a China type of an effect for us. It will come back over time. You see our largest end markets here showing the diversity of our company. Importantly, within these, the first fit will be the dark blue color, and that replacement part within that end market will be the lighter blue. Now, it's important in today's environment that you also understand that 75% of what we manufacture is consumed within region. So we do not, for example, export out of China into the United States. We build in China for China. We also build in China for Japan, but we don't cross all the way back into the United States, okay? So that's very, very important in this tariff backdrop of what takes place today.
What we do have, though, is we do have Mexico to the United States type of products, but for Donaldson Company, the United States is still a net exporter, and so that we have some natural hedges to some of the activities going on, and so that's the strength of our business model. Again, 75% built within region all across the world with other 65 manufacturing plants where everywhere that the customer wants us to be. You see here is our recent performance over years. Everything you're looking at are records. We expect with the guidance that we just gave out last week that it will be more records this year, so you see the trajectory that we have in F25 will be in the $3.6 billion. We'll have an operating margin of about 15.8%, expanding 40 basis points this year.
We fully expect to expand another 40 basis points next year, and our adjusted EPS will be $3.64, giving us good incremental margins. On average, we'll look to get incremental margins of between 20 and 25. On an up cycle, we'll get into the 30s. But just generally, over the cycle, we'll be about 20%-25% incremental margin. Again, records across the board, records every year on all these major metrics. If you look at our company and you try to understand, okay, look a little deeper, what's the strategic advantages that we do have? We have a long history of being in the filtration industry. Frank Donaldson started this company 110 years ago in the agricultural markets with putting a filter that he made in his garage for Bull Tractor, that company, Bull Tractor.
That company went bankrupt, but the first customer was Donaldson Company, and it started Donaldson on the road. Ever since then, we have been more and more technologically advanced within filtration. It's how we got our off-road, so construction, mining, agriculture strength within this, and it's also the largest portion of the company. Long history of solving very complex customer problems, which gives us deep customer relationships, and that's true everywhere in the world. We are present in 80 countries exactly to play face-to-face business with all of the customers that we do have. Our solutions enable a greater, more modern technology. I'll give you one example. Last week, we announced that we had won Daimler's new fuel cell long-haul truck platform, and so if you look at our medium heavy-duty diesel engine business, we have the largest install base of any of our competitors in the world.
We take our technology to look to also play into alternative fuels. Within hydrogen, if hydrogen is the solution within fuel cells, what you have to have in diesel fuel as it goes in, you have to take out particulate and water. What you need to do in hydrogen is take out particulate and water. We're already excellent at both of those. But then one more thing, when it comes to fuel cells, you need to have pristine hydrogen. So you need to take out all the chemicals. Not all fuel cells that are out there being developed are the same. Sometimes you need to take out sulfur dioxide, sometimes mercury, other types of chemical elements, et cetera. We have chemical absorption skill sets that come from our disk drive business for decades that we now brought over into this marketplace, gives us a leg up on alternative fuels.
If hydrogen is the winner into the combustion process directly as Cummins is pursuing, then Donaldson Company, it's hard to imagine how big we'll become. Just simply because nothing changes other than the fuel source, and you still need air in that combustion engine, it'll be better for the environment. But then it's the same thing I described to you about your fuel, and you still have movable parts inside that engine. So we'll see what happens in the alternative fuel space, but everything looks positive because we are linked up with all of our customers directly to talk about what those options are. We're a diversified set of businesses. I showed you that. We have a high aftermarket retention, and we have best-in-class operations.
We often will give you your particular order and fulfill it over 95% of the time when you want it, not when we say we can give it to you. That's why we say we have the best-in-class operations. We have three reporting segments. The first is our Mobile Solutions segment. It is the largest. It is the oldest in our company. I've talked enough about that. We are going after alternative fuels. We have really good technology to be able to do that. In our Industrial Solutions, think of that as dust collection is the largest piece. Strategically, what we're doing to drive more aftermarket in that sector is we're connecting all of our machines.
So if you're a maintenance person in making widgets in some kind of a manufacturing shop, we have sensors and personnel that will send you an alert that says, "Hey, go do this to your dust collector. You're going to shut down your manufacturing line." And that's really powerful. It has shown that our aftermarket retention in business has grown significantly over the old way, which is calling someone up and say, "Hey, do you need a filter today?" And so we have deeper relationships. We increased our online amount of machines in the last quarter by 30%. We're between 2,500 and 3,000 machines now connected, and this is around the world, not just in the United States. And we'll look to add about 1,800-2,000 machines per year, really helping us seed and grow that business.
Also, very important with that part of the strategy is our technology works on our competitors' collectors. So we can go and hook theirs up too. And the way this usually works is last week we won one in Europe. I won't say the customer because they don't want to, but they usually says, "Hey, let's try this out on one machine." And this is a large manufacturing plant. And after four weeks, they called it back and said, "Do all of them." That meant 60 dust collectors on that site. They said, "Okay, why are you doing it? I don't want to deal with this stuff. I just want to make widgets, make my problem go away. I want peace of mind." That's exactly what we want. And of course, then we make it very easy to get the replacement parts. That's our industrial strategy.
Our Life Sciences strategy, selling gene therapies are growing, will be disruptive. If you look at one example that we have within our portfolio is that we have membrane chromatography, and I'll specifically talk to that differentiation here on this slide. So our addressable markets within Mobile Solutions is $14 billion, Industrial $15 billion, and now with Life Sciences is $21 billion. You've seen we've done five acquisitions here, and I want to talk about Purilogics. The way you make cell and gene therapies today, if you take a chromatography column, so think of that as a cylinder about five feet tall, maybe three feet in diameter, a solution is full of there, and it has a lot of different milkshake type of stuff in there. It's not that consistency. It's more viscous than that. But what you need is a certain protein out of that mixture.
And so, you take, if anybody, I'm going to be very general about this. We've all played marbles, and you've seen the clear marbles that look like they have cracks in it. Okay? If you shrink that down and put a lot more cracks in, it's called a resin bead. And you pack that column with resin beads, and it absorbs the protein of choice. But it takes a long time. So what our membrane does is it takes all of that solution. You don't need any of those resin beads. And you take it through a cassette. It goes 10 times faster, and it actually collects more of that particular protein than the old-fashioned method. We're in testing now with a third party of that product. We're two or three quarters out in front of us, at the most maybe four quarters before we'll bring that out.
People have been pursuing this for a couple of decades. We had it in our laboratories, but Purilogics was just ahead of us, so we ended up combining forces. We bought the company. We'll bring that forward. That's our mindset to the bioprocessing activity. We fully expect that to be, over time, a $100 million business. You do have to go upstream, plant those seeds, and let it grow over time. It doesn't hockey stick. But that is how we look at all of those. And within this latest acquisition, Medica, where we bought 49% of the company out of Italy, it brings us hollow fiber membrane. Now, hollow fiber is, if you look at, say, take a McDonald's straw, it'll look like that, but it'll be a smaller inside diameter. And what's really important is the porosity of the wall. Your hair is 10 microns to 15 microns in diameter.
The porosity of that wall has to be 0.2 in order to be able to go forward. Medica brings us that. We can get into bioprocessing with that type of technology now into our portfolio. Again, they were ahead of us. We joined forces. We do have a path to buy the whole company. And so you can see our whole mindset is to be intentional, to be disruptive, to plant seeds for future growth within our Life Sciences sector. Our use of cash in the last three years is $1.4 billion. You can see our priorities for capital allocation within our company are invest back into the company organically, then also inorganically. Then dividends. We have paid a dividend for over 69 years. We are a very proud member of the Dividend Aristocrats Fund, which means we have raised our dividend for over 20 years in a row.
For us, it's more than 20, and that is important for us, and then fourth is share repurchases. We are a very consistent actor on share repurchases. We typically target to buy 1% to offset dilution, but we have been averaging about 2% in recent years, and in this year, we actually said we'll go 2%-3%, just being opportunistic, frankly, and so that's what we're doing. Our balance sheet is very, very strong. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio is 0.6, so you can see we have plenty of dry powder. We're in good shape with respect to that, which means our long-term debt ratio, we'd like to see it be about one, free cash flow about 85%. We have $800 million quickly available to us, which means we are an acquirer of choice. We do have teams that knock on doors every day.
We have a very strong pipeline. It is strategic. It's targeted, and we do look to invest in that kind of activity. Again, going back to the original points, and then we'll open it up for questions. We're a technology leader. We are everywhere that the customer wants us to be. We have deep customer relationships. We have the best technology in the markets that we serve. We enable the greener technology, and we recently won that Daimler platform within fuel cells. And that's just one example. Daimler, if they go all in on fuel cells for long-haul trucks, it'll be with Donaldson Technology. That's what we mean by the enabler of the greener technology. We have a clear strategic balance growth strategy, and I talked about our Life Sciences opportunity. So with that.
That's great, Tod. Thank you. We'll open it up for questions.
Good. Good.
Maybe we'll start on the margin side. I think if you went back, maybe pre-COVID, that was one of the questions I think investors would always have: is the margin's kind of flattened out. I'm curious if there's, obviously, from a mix perspective within mobile, you're benefiting just given the mix between aftermarket versus OE. It seems that maybe, and maybe you can confirm or deny, but maybe a bit more pricing rigor within the company. Would you agree with that in terms of you see that contributing to maybe more?
Yeah, 100%. What happened is COVID was one thing, but that supply chain difficulties coming out of COVID was really more of a factor that really changed the overall behavior of the marketplaces. We have 35% of our engine-based business. Our mobile solutions business is OE-based.
So, I think Caterpillar, John Deere, all the rest of those, Komatsu, Kubota, on and on. And those contracts were more onerous. And so when the supply chain really hit, they had price downs on an annual basis. But of course, everything was disrupted. And so we were able to take that model, throw it completely away, get new contracts where we do not have price downs anymore. And in fact, then institute price increases never before seen in the history of our business model. And now everything is really reset. It's proper. We're not gouging anyone. We still want to have we don't try to maximize our operating margin with those because, again, we're trying to plant proprietary razors to sell razor blades. We do want to make money. We want it to be a fair relationship with our customers.
We're just trying to optimize that overall operating margin, not to maximize it. And we did that very effectively, which really, in a sense, changed the culture of Donaldson Company to give us more of a rigor and a positive environment to go after pricing. And now that's part of who we are. And so we came out of that with a different business model and certainly really rectified that problem.
And maybe within aftermarket on the mobile side, obviously being a very important strategic advantage of the company, it seems share gains have been something you've highlighted more recently. Maybe speak to that in terms of what's driving that, who that's coming from, and kind of the durability of those share gains.
So it's important, again, that proprietary razor thing.
So about 40% of what we sell in our replacement parts is the proprietary products because it takes a while to actually keep seeding that out there. And it's been decades. If you think about this, what we need is for a platform change across ag, construction, mining, or long-haul trucks so we can then introduce new technology. And some of that happens fairly slowly, which is the reason why that is not a higher number. But it has been happening. And as it continues to happen, they institute new technology, and we drive that aftermarket up higher. And so that's part of the original share gain. The next share gain is we did win a large customer. We're very happy to have that business away from a competitor. And we won that customer because, frankly, we have world-class operations.
And we give that customer right now 99% or better percent on-time delivery. And they haven't had that in quite some time. And so we're very proud of the fact that we could be able to do that. And so when you have a broad-based catalog, you take care of your customers, and then you have that third proprietary element that they can't get anywhere else. We have started to win more share than before in that aftermarket. And you see those, and you win a distributor that's $3 million of the annual business or $4 million of annual business. But we have good momentum on that site, which is the reason why we grew in the last quarter, even though market conditions were a little bit more guarded. In fact, I would say November was a very strange month, off-cycle month, yet we still grew.
The biggest SAM you have is the Life Sciences market. You have your smallest share. Is there just more competition in that market?
No, just because what we did was we wanted to tell you that we're in these other two large reporting segments, and we said, "We're going to continue to put records up on the top, records up on the bottom, but we wanted to tell all the investor community, and here is where we're going to continue to invest," so we broke it out intentionally to say, "Hey, measure us. This is where we're going to go. It's going to take us a while, but this is what we're doing," and continue to tell the stories of our products and let you know how differentiated and, frankly, disruptive in the marketplace we look to be.
Within the Industrial Solutions business, kind of on the front lines in terms of project activity, and there's this notion of potential nearshoring and kind of an industrial renaissance we've talked about for some time in North America. What are you seeing on that side in terms of just the project backlog?
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So I would tell you the reshoring and all that kind of activity in the United States, you hear about it in chips and semiconductors and the rest, but the balance, a little bit overblown. We don't see that capacity expansion in the new plant builds that people say are really happening, etc., not in the previous administration and not yet so in this administration either. We do sell a lot of products that go into new plant builds for industrial production. Industrial production is very important to us.
We have a whole suite of products that would go typically into new manufacturing plant build. And so we would tell you that we haven't seen orders pulled forward in order to say, "Hey, that's really gearing up." It's just a little bit more comfortable right now of, "Hey, let's feel a little bit more of wait and see." And so that's what we're seeing. And to that extent, in our dust collection business, particularly in the U.S., we've seen a little bit of elongation in the quote-to-order cycle because of the uncertainties within the business environment.
What about within all the off-highway customers that you sell to, they continue to kind of push out any production recovery. But when you look in the, are there milestones or metrics that you watch within the aftermarket business that would lead the traditional first fit?
What would a normal cycle look like in terms of?
Yeah, so a normal cycle, we would see if you start to hear about vehicle utilization pickup, clearly, so specifically the MS or the IS. So in MS, it's vehicle utilization. In the industrial side, it's just industrial production. And so when you start to see industrial production pickup or vehicle utilization pickup, then your first fit cycles are going to, your CapEx based on the industrial side and your first fit builds are both going to start to bounce. They'll trail that aftermarket side because people won't initially just start expanding capacity or replacing trucks or even ag equipment with farmers until they feel much more comfortable. And usually, they'll start to get more out of what they have. And when you see the utilization go up, then it's coming.
And with Donaldson Company, if you throw out 2008 to 2012 and say that global mess was not. It was unlike any other recession. A typical recession. When we come out of recession, and I would tell you construction, agriculture, mining, and long-haul trucks are clearly all facing headwind on the first fit side, we don't bounce by 5% in those markets. It's going to be double digits. We've seen it as between 20% and 25%. I don't think it'll be that this time, but it'll certainly be double digits, and we'll leverage all of that.
Got it. Maybe, Brad, one for you, just priorities for the balance sheets. Obviously, I mean, you're closing in on almost net debt free at this point. What are the key initiatives or priorities for you?
Sure. It's a pretty consistent story with us.
We're going to look for the right investments inside the company and then with acquisitions. The net debt closing in, you saw Tod talk about it, the target of one times. We have no intention to run it to zero. I think there's opportunities within the company. Then to the extent that we have capacity, we do share purchase as well. That's kind of the lever within dividend stable, growth for the company, and then share purchase can be the lever.
Got it. The incremental margin target, 20%-24%, usually manufacturing businesses, you see it higher. What constrains that from being more like a 30%, at least in kind of an initial recovery?
I think part of it is in the initial recovery where you'll talk about headwinds from mix. We'll be talking about really strong growth rate from the first fit markets, which tend to have below average margins relative to the company. So that becomes a high-grade problem for us because, of course, we leverage it with the manufacturing. But that becomes a headwind early on in a cycle. Then it settles into a more normal rate.
Got it. Great. I think we're going to end it there. I think we have a breakout downstairs if anyone has follow-up questions.
Thanks, everyone.