Laurence Alexander with the Jefferies Chemicals team. It's my pleasure to introduce the team from Donaldson . We have Tod E. Carpenter, the CEO, Brad Pogalz, Sarika Dhadwal from Investor Relations. Without any further ado, I want to pass it over to you. Just remember, go forward, don't go backwards.
Yeah. Thanks, Laurence. With me today are Sarika Dhadwal, she is our Director of Investor Relations, Brad Pogalz, he is our Chief Financial Officer, and Richard Lewis, who will be here momentarily, is our Chief Operating Officer. Forward-looking statement, to please all the lawyers in the world, clearly is in our deck. I do want to remind everyone that we did report earnings here just last week, and consequently, everything that I do say will be up to date. That's really good news. Five points I want you to walk away from with is Donaldson Company is a leader in filtration within all of the end markets that we serve. We have a history of solving complex customer problems, therefore, best-in-class technology. We are helping our customers meet their environmental expectations through the solutions that we do provide.
We have a clear, strategic, and balanced growth strategy for the company, and we continue our progression toward our Life Sciences market segment. Here we are. We were founded in 1915. We are a 110-year-old company, about 14,000 employees. In the lower left, you will see two operating, our model, if you will. First fit is about 32% of the company revenue, and aftermarket is 68%. You think about our particular model across our entire business, it is proprietary razors to sell razor blades. You can see in our three segments, Mobile Solutions about 60%, 30% in industrial, and 8%-10% within our Life Sciences-based business. Updating the revenue and the adjusted EPS numbers shown below, as of our fiscal 2025 ending, which did end on July 31st. Our new fiscal year started August 1st. You can see, almost $3.7 billion is our revenue and $3.68.
You can see the growth through the last four years. Every number within our revenue and EPS is a record for Donaldson Company. We continue to grow well through the cycle. Important, on the patent line, I told you we are proprietary razors to sell razor blades. We now have over 3,000 active patents between our Investor Day in April of 2019 and our Investor Day in April of 2023. Donaldson was granted a patent on average somewhere in the world every day. We're serious about being a technology leader. We continue to invest in R&D and press our strategy forward. We are 44%- 45% U.S. and Canada, roughly 30% in Europe, Middle East, Africa, 10% in Latin America, and 15%- 20% in Asia Pacific.
Very importantly, in this time of tariffs, it's important to note that 75% of everything that Donaldson manufactures is manufactured within the region that it is consumed, which gives us that natural protection, if you will, against so much of the tariff conversation of today. Here is our guide as of last week. Sales, we look to be a $3.8 billion company. You can see the growth rate there on our adjusted operating margin. It would be a record at 16.4%. We're very proud of the fact that over four years we'll have come from roughly 14.5%- 16.5%. We always look to expand our operating margin on growing sales. That's just a belief of ours, a core belief. We have done that quite nicely, as you see here on the chart over the last four years. Our adjusted EPS centers on $4, up from $3.68.
The incremental margin within that plan is roughly 40%. Really strong incremental margin for what we have just guided to the external world. We are a filtration leader. Here are our competitive advantages. Clearly a long history in filtration leadership. We've been doing this 110 years. We continue to broaden the company, expand it within to new end markets, all on the strong technology foundation. We're the leader in advanced filtration because of that technology innovation that we have and that we continue to invest in. We have a high aftermarket retention rate. As I said earlier on the slide, 68% of our revenue is now aftermarket parts, and so you can really emphasize that razor to sell razor blade model. We have deep customer relationships in our strategies, particularly within the industrial segment.
Really, I'll speak to that in a little bit, drive us to get even deeper with the customers and more intimate with them. Diversified businesses of global sales, which even though we have a number of our end markets that have headwinds today, construction, mining, agriculture, first fit, over-the-road trucks, all of those particular end markets have headwinds. The strength of our diversified portfolio still saw our company grow last year in spite of that. We have best-in-class operations. We're very, very proud of the year that our operations team just turned in. We are back to customer delivery rates, even stronger than pre-pandemic. Think of 95% on-time delivery to customer request date when they want it, when they want the product. That's what our company is performing to, across a broad base of portfolios.
For example, in our Mobile Solutions aftermarket, if you order the part before noon, we'll ship it to you same day. We've been doing that for decades. That is not new at Donaldson Company, and we are back to that type of turnaround and taking care of our customers today. These are our strong advantages that we have within our model, and that we're very proud of. We have three reporting segments: Mobile Solutions, Industrial Solutions, and Life Sciences. Within our Mobile Solutions segment, we have been growing in our aftermarket-based products. We have proprietary technology on air and liquid, which really drives our aftermarket growth. We are heavily involved with all the OE-based, with alternative fuel-based applications. We continue to win on those type of situations around the globe. We have won things from fuel cells to hydrogen-based combustion engines, et cetera.
We have really good growth opportunities within Mobile Solutions. Within Industrial Solutions, we are connecting our products on the largest piece of industrial. If you think about that, we sell a proprietary first fit system. Then we sell our aftermarket products, but we connect that first base system. When you get a new dust collector for Donaldson Company, when you plug it in, it will have a bunch of sensors on it. The maintenance people really don't know a tremendous amount on how to make that dust collector work. They just want to make whatever product their factory produces, and they don't want it to go down. Things such as, we have a thing called a hopper. It's really, think of it as a garbage pail. You're collecting all of this particulate.
Our people will send them an alert to the maintenance person's telephone to say, "Hey, go take out the garbage," or it's going to ingest into their system, shut down their manufacturing process, and then they'll be shut down from actually making money for three to four hours while they clean that all and reset it. Instead, we'll give them an alert, and it's a highly technical way to do that that is actually patented now, and they love that. When we do connect our industrial-based products, it's been proven that we sell as many as three times to four times more aftermarket replacement parts, getting that deeper and more intimate customer relationship, and it's proved out tremendously successful. We'll look to expand the connectivity of our Industrial Solutions by roughly 30% within this fiscal year.
In our Life Sciences-based businesses, it has elongated a bit more than we would have liked to when we went into this particular segment because the overall end market really found a lot of headwind and pressure within the last two to three years. It's expanded a little bit more than we wanted to, but we do still very much like the market. We have differentiated products that we're bringing out. We have a little bit more development to go in that particular segment, but a lot of growth opportunities within that. We'll look to grow that mid-single digits this year and continue to expand that here in years to come. Use of cash, it's important that this slide hasn't changed in decades. It's organic investment, so invest back into the company to help the company grow. It's buy companies, do M&A, those are the first two priorities of cash.
The next one is paid dividends. We are a very proud member of the Dividend Aristocrats Fund. We have increased our dividend now for 30 years. Last year, we increased it by 11%. We're a proud member of that. Dividends are very important to us. Then share repurchases is our fourth priority. You can see the usages of cash over the last three years where we invested $1.6 billion across the particular cycle. Our net debt/EBITDA ratio stands today at about 0.7. We like to run the company at about 1. We have a very strong balance sheet giving us a lot of strategic opportunities for ourselves. Our free cash flow is roughly about 85%. We like to run the company. That's what we guided to yet again this year. We have more than $700 million available to us in order to really do strategic acquisitions.
That gives us flexibility and agility to be an acquirer of choice based upon the strength of our balance sheet. You can see within that second priority, which is to do M&A within our company portfolio, we look to execute that just simply because of the strength of the corporation. Again, just closing before I open for questions, we are the leader in filtration of all of the markets that we serve. We do have best-in-class technology. I can get very geeky with you and talk about the cool things that we have in laboratories, but I'll save you that for another day. We do help our customers achieve their sustainability and environmental-based targets. We have a very clear and strategic, balanced growth plan, with our capital priorities of investing back into the company organically and doing M&As. Those are our two primary growth levers.
We are continuing our progress and still really like the Life Sciences market. With that, that is a very quick summary of our company. We can open the floor for questions.
If you think about the end markets that have been more challenging, like ag, heavy-duty truck, pharma, Life Sciences, where are you seeing shifts in behavior that may imply a change in trend? Where are you actually seeing kind of optimism, even if it's not yet shifts in behavior?
If you look at the U.S., which is our biggest region, it also happens to be the most mixed region for us. You'll see our first fit vehicles, so construction, mining, ag, on-road, all down within that particular region, a little bit more life in the ag market within the last quarter. Staying in the U.S., the industrial segment is CapEx-based projects, still very good. We are still receiving quite a few quotes there. Industrial, we're very comfortable with the progress that we have there. Switching over to Europe, Europe is actually the most stable region that we have. We see pretty broad-based aftermarket growth. The first fit cycles are starting to show a little bit more life, more broadly, than the U.S. If you go to Latin America, it is easily the most troubled market. It's pulled back everywhere in aftermarket as well as within the first fit vehicles.
Doesn't really matter the country. They're all very careful. It is the smallest part of Donaldson Company at roughly 10% of our revenue. Asia Pacific, we have seen a little bit of life in China that really drives the Asia Pacific region on the first fit side. We saw some bump within the off-road sector and the on-road sector in China within the quarter. Does that really mean that we can call it and say, "Hey, China's starting to come back?" We're going to be a little bit more careful about that. It's a little bit tough to say directionally where China really heads. It's more of a point than anything that you can discern and start to draw lines to. We are pretty happy with the fact that it feels like we've troughed there, and the aftermarket continues to go quite well. You step back from all that.
It's a fairly complex story, but it shows the power of the portfolio of Donaldson Company with that much mix, and yet Donaldson Company grew mid-single digits within the quarter. That's what we talk about by diversifying the corporation. We stand ready when construction, mining, and agriculture do come back globally. Those markets do not come back by, say, 5% mid-single digits. If you go back to history, the last time that we were in this type of a position, those markets come back by double digits, and it's not 10%. It's more like 15%- 25% on an annual basis. When they come back, they come roaring back. We stand poised to take advantage of that when we do see that occur. We do expect that to occur here, looking forward. Even with that as the obvious headwind for our company, we continue to grow.
This year, we guided additional growth of the company to $3.8 billion and a record EPS at $4.
One area that's been doing well is aerospace and defense. Can you dissect a little bit how you're thinking about the growth over, say, the next five, seven years? How much of that is long-cycle projects where you're in qualification of new applications that would be launched? How much of it is response to shorter choppiness, geopolitical needs?
Yeah, so aerospace and defense specifically. Aerospace and defense is kind of an interesting story right now. You have to overlay the choppiness within that a little less from the external, after, external market-based components or influences, more to the supply chain portion of things. While we have gotten ourselves into a fantastic position within the supply chain of the rest of the company, with A&D it's different because we don't get to control that. We get told where we have to buy some particular components, and to get a second qualification of a particular part is not allowed. We have to grind it out a little bit. That makes us very lumpy. You see that within the results of last fiscal year, quarter by quarter, it will continue that way.
There are a handful of parts, we call them the golden screw now, that when we get that, we could actually ship. It's more of that than the external influences, the end mark of A&D, and what will continue to cause us to be more lumpy. We also have some programs, some multi-decade programs now coming to end of life. We'll have a little bit of pressure from that in this coming year, but we also have new programs coming on. You go net net within all of those dynamics. Aerospace and defense is a little bit more difficult because of the supply chain to really forecast going forward. We do put it as more of a flat-based outlook year over year.
Can you talk a little bit about the levers you've pulled to improve Donaldson since 2023? What do you have left to do, say, through 2030? That is company, you know, on the internal side that changes kind of the visible. If you think about kind of the way you've outgrown the end markets, a lot of that was internal initiatives. Can you flesh out kind of what's left to get, what's left on the checklist?
Yeah, that's a whole basket of items. There's not really one big lever that we pulled in order to expand our operating margin the way we have. It's a host of things. It's, for example, footprint optimization that we talk about on the call where we currently are shutting down two manufacturing plants, one in our aerospace and defense business, one in our industrial-based business, one in California, one in England. We have a couple more footprint optimization programs, projects, looking forward, that will help us gain some more efficiency. It's that, it's also, post the redesign of the organization, now putting it into verticals. We used to be four regional-based type of companies. Europe, the Middle East, Africa, United States, Latin America, and Asia Pacific were all like four Donaldson Companies.
Now we went to verticals, and three years on from that type of an organization structure, for the first time in our 110-year history, we are now gaining more efficiency out of that. You see that within our operating expense control, year over year, where we just are now leveraging more appropriately those type of business processes for efficiency and speed. You'll see a little bit more tightening of the belt there. That's really more by design and tweaks of the organization structure. You'll see more of that. We have more opportunity going forward. It's also within the supply chain disruptions that we all experienced. We went to our first fit customers, and it was time to reset the relationships, and we wanted a more fair and balanced relationship with our customers. We were able to achieve better pricing.
We no longer have price-downs to start the year out within our annual contracts. Those are all gone. Instead of starting every year negative from a pricing standpoint, we have tailwinds on that on an annual basis. It's just a whole host of many different things that our 14,000 employees have really worked incredibly hard at to really drive that leveraging across the organization. What gives us confidence to stand up here today and say it, we really are committed to increasing our operating margin over greater sales.
I just want to unpack one of the comments there about the changing away from the annual price-downs. In other industries, when we've seen companies shift that way, when the customers run into trouble and the company who's being more disciplined on price sticks to the new methodology, you then sort of get a lot of feedback of how the customers are disappointed, out for revenge, kind of feel hurt. There's a range of emotional reactions. This seems like a significant shift for Donaldson Can you give us some sense of what you gave the customers in exchange to sort of get that transition to stick?
Sure. So what did we give them in exchange? Technology and reliance. They can count on us to deliver. They can count on our technology to perform exactly to the difficult application challenge that they give us. Our technology answers that call. They have great comfort when they do business with Donaldson Company knowing that their application is going to be met. We are there, everywhere in the world for them. Remembering that we're in roughly 140 countries, we have between 60 and 70 manufacturing plants. We are global with a local touch. When the customer wants to move product around the world, we're able to do that quickly for them and manufacture it. That 75% within region where the customer consumes it is really a strong advantage for Donaldson Company. That's what we give the customer. Did we experience some of those things that you talked about, Laurence?
Sure, we did. Do we lose some business along the way? Of course we do. We'll lose a project here or there, but that's not new. That's always been going on. An OE will always have you lose a project because, you know, they're not going to get 100% of their business. We would tell you that the environment really has not changed. You know, we're not out to maximize with our first fit partners our operating margin. That's not our goal. We're just trying to optimize it. We're trying to have very fair and balanced relationships with our OEs. I would tell you for the first time in decades, we believe that we have done the work. We're treating them fair and that's where we sit today.
Can you talk a little bit about the work Donaldson has put in over the last several decades to make it a very variable cost structure? How you manage the workforce to accept that, I'm thinking like the furlough programs and so on. How has that model been stressed by the increase in volatility in the last five years?
Yeah, so what I would really point to is the redesign of the company. Consequently, every vertical, every business within the vertical has a top and a bottom line target. You have to grow, you have to deliver bottom line. In the past, it was a bit easy to budget because you would peanut butter spread many things. That used to really frustrate the heck out of us. Now we can be more targeted and people understand, look, if you're in the tougher part of the cycle, you're not going to get CapEx and you're not going to get other opportunities here this year because you're not the best opportunity for Donaldson Company to press and be able to grow. It's just where you are. We have company reviews that are able to let us direct those types of investments now in a much more pointed and better way.
I think our company is faster to react to end market conditions. We also moved the manufacturing plants from a centralized type of one large organization back into the businesses so that the businesses truly control everything in their business. That allows them to flex to the conditions that they're seeing within the cycle of that piece or total vertical. We're just more pointed and quicker. As a result of that, if you're in a particular business and you only had control of, say, 60% of, let's say, the consequence of that result of a business, now you have 100%. It's been easy to get buy-in just simply because everybody wants actually to control their own personal destinies, and it's worked out real well. Is it perfect? You know, we still have some tweaks looking forward to go after, but we're feeling really, really good about the progress.
When you think about the discussion around patents and the frequency of issuing new patents.
Yeah.
Donaldson started off with like PowerCore and then Torit, and then it became a much broader strategy. Is that fully in the numbers now, or is there a lag effect? If there is a lag effect, let's say it's three years, five years, 10 years, should it show up in terms of faster sales growth, higher margins, both? What do you expect the consequence of this patent strategy to be?
Yeah. Here's a way to look at it. About five years ago, we created an organization in our Corporate Technology group where they get up every day to invent new end market type of solutions. You take the balance of our technology capabilities and you try to understand what end market unmet need there is based upon what the capability of the company is, or if we think we can solve that with the technologies that we have, we create a new technology. That particular portion of our company gets up every day and they are held accountable to having a minimum of 10 ideas that they're working on that can all become $100 million businesses for Donaldson . When they do that, it's important to understand that our company doesn't go from 0- 100 in, say, 12 months.
Even when we invent a cool thing, that isn't the way filtration works. It does get to 100, but you do have to grind that out a little bit more as you gain share, etc. We have that revenue now more in front of us. I could tell you we have more than 10. If I pick on just one example, if you allow me a little latitude, Laurence. The number one solvent used in manufacturing GLP-1 drugs, and by any drug, in the world is called acetonitrile. Acetonitrile supply chain comes from China and Western Europe.
Our partner actually boats it from Western Europe, drives it across the country to Torrance, California, uses 2 million L per one chromatography column, and there are thousands of columns in the world, whereby they put 5,000 L into a tanker truck every week, take it down to Mexico and incinerate it because no one's been able to reclaim it. It's very expensive stuff. If you could reclaim it to a 95% purity, you would be in terrific shape. Our group came up with a way that they thought would work. We are with our partner. We now have 17 tests in a row of 99.98% purity. The next step is three more tests, which we're very confident will pass. They will use it to create their drug, their GLP-1 drug, to see if that still works. If it does, then, of course, we'll be in the acetonitrile reclamation business.
That will take some time to build it out. The simple explanation of how we do it is if we filter it, we filter it, we distill it, and we filter it, and all the filters are pretty complex. We do have the patents to be able to do this type of a process. That's an idea that was born out of that group that now we are, where I explained, that we'll look to monetize in our fiscal 2027 and going forward. That's kind of how it works. That's why I say, monetary-wise, it's ahead of us.
With the 40% incremental margins, if you were to have a strong cyclical recovery, it's been a long time since Donaldson has had a triple witching where all the end markets are doing well at the same time. I can see two debates happening. One being people complaining that your margins aren't high enough. The second being, whatever margin improvement that happens from here to there is cyclical and not structural, and therefore you don't get credit for it. How do you think about the next five, seven years in terms of trend structural improvement in margin versus potential cyclical scenarios?
Yeah, thanks for that question, Laurence. When you look at, should we really get to triple witching hour and we really push forward, our story is not going to change. It's exactly what's said in this slide. Every number up here is a record: record EPS, record sales, record adjusted operating margin, and that's the way we'll look at the company. Whether we get triple witching hour, and so therefore we get a little bit of a headwind on our gross margin because the OE will actually make less than the aftermarket, that doesn't mean we need tons of operating expense in order to deliver that. We'll leverage it maybe a little bit different way, and our story will be the same, and that is record, record, record. Just like we've done for the last four years and beyond.
In spite of the headwinds that we've been experiencing, we welcome the fact when they bounce, when they bounce, our company will become $4 billion or greater pretty quickly, we believe, and we'll leverage that just as well.
Lastly, on the innovation side, I think there's kind of this rolling debate in the chemical industry. I know you're not kind of purely a chemical company. This is my pedigree kind of showing, that we're kind of hitting the end of material science innovation and the opportunities are more around process, sort of integrated processes or sensor technology or distributed sensors and analytics that way. As you're thinking about what's driving your evolving value add to your customers, are you seeing a shift in where you're seeing the low-hanging fruit or the best fruit?
I don't agree with the premise that inventions in material science are slowing. It may be the materials themselves that may be slowing, but how you use those materials, what differentiates Donaldson Company is that we patent the actual media-based solution. We have people that know fibers. We create fibers. We have a paper machine in our corporate organization that a lot of companies don't have. We patent our recipes that meet particular applications. We go all down to polymer-based chemistries, for example. We continue to play with those in order to understand the pore structures of those. We understand how you can combine glass with cellulose and all the rest. Those material science principles that really help Donaldson lead in the technology are not going to change. They're a foundation of our company and who we are.
I really don't see that as a limiting factor in any way, shape, or form, particularly as I have going through my head a number of things that we have in laboratories and such. We're excited about the future and the possibility to invent more cool things. You know, we'll keep focused on that.
Okay, that's a good place to close. Thank you very much for the discussion today.
Thanks.