Well, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us here in Loveland, Colorado at Hach. We're excited to have everyone here. A special thank you to everyone joining on the webcast. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Matt Gugino, Vice President of Investor Relations here at Danaher. First on the forward-looking statements, I'm not going to read through all these, but I do need to say today's presentation may include forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from these statements. Please refer to the slides for more information. On to the agenda, I think we have a great day for you. First, we're going to show a video introducing the water quality platform. After that, Joakim is going to be on stage to give you an introduction to water quality overall.
We're going to have our operating company presidents give an update on their businesses, ChemTreat, Trojan, and Hach. We'll take a little bit deeper dive in Hach around the initiatives that they've been doing around innovation and commercial execution. Joakim will come up with some closing remarks, and we'll have a Q&A session after that. We'll take a short break after the Q&A session, gather into groups for a Gemba Walk. We'll see the facility here. That will take a little bit over an hour. We'll have lunch starting at 11:35 A.M., and then buses to the airport after that. We'll wrap up about 12:30 P.M. With that, let's watch the video. Thanks, John.
Good morning, everybody. Got a couple of props here that I'm going to share with you a little later, and we'll put those here for now. Thanks for joining us here in Colorado today. We're going to walk you through our wonderful water quality platform. There are a couple of things, I'll start already with a summary of the day that I'd like you to take away from the day. The first point is our position and our business model. In the water cycle, we have positions in highly mission-critical applications that grow a little faster than the rest of the water quality market, and we also have high-margin positions. In terms of positioning, the business model that you're going to learn from us today, you'll see is consistent with all the other Danaher platforms, and that's a theme that'll come back multiple times today.
Secondly, our competitive advantage. You'll learn a lot about what it's built on today, but you'll learn that with what we're doing in innovation and the acceleration of certain things we're doing in innovation is really helping reinforce our competitive advantage. That, in addition with our commercial execution initiatives, as well as our growing presence in high-growth markets, is really helping fuel both competitive advantage and growth. In terms of performance, the third point I'd like you to walk away with is you'll see how we've been able to build compounding returns in this platform over the span of the last 20 years. Actually, in a way that's sort of similar to the story that you'll see in most other Danaher platforms.
You'll see that it's not just about acquisitions, but it's very much about using the Danaher Business System, which is our culture, how we do things, but at the same time, it's also our collection of good and best practices of how to run different aspects of our businesses. Those are the 3 big themes we're going to talk about today. Welcome to Loveland. Let's escalate out and just remind ourselves about Danaher. $20 billion, 4 reporting segments, 5 operating platforms. Businesses that we've built over the years. The 2 older platforms are the 2 that I work with, and of course, we're here to talk about water today. Most of these businesses have considerable recurring pieces to their businesses. For Danaher, about 70% of our revenues come from recurring businesses. All of these platforms, as we call them, have independent standalone operating businesses.
If you see the logos here, they are all in leading positions in their market or growing towards taking leading positions. Many of them are in attractive spaces to start with. That's why we acquired them. Many of them, of course, have made good progress here with the application of the Danaher Business System and the injection of talent that we typically do when we acquire businesses. Great group of businesses here. Our competitive advantage as Danaher, if you think about it, really comes from the fact that we have a consistent business model across these platforms. What do I mean with that? Essentially, all of these businesses start to compete with the placement of an instrument, a device in the customer's facilities. We compete on those devices against other people.
All of our instruments typically use some kind of consumable reagent that our customers use with the instrument to generate the measurement value or whatever outcome it is they're trying to figure out with our solution. Those reagents, those consumables, are things that our customers will purchase through the life cycle of the device that we've placed there, which typically means we end up having 8 to 10-year close relationships with our customers with regular interactions. That kind of intimacy then leads to the opportunity to develop service-based businesses, because as you're in there working with customers, you see what else could we help them with, leveraging our position with the device and the consumables. We venture out into service-based businesses.
The deeper we get into our customers' workflows with the service-based businesses, we typically realize, in almost all of these businesses, that there is somewhere along the line going to be a software play to try and automate, perhaps, certain things that we are doing in our services or certain things that our customers are doing. Obviously then that leads to the fact that you now have access to more data because the software is automating some kind of process. You're getting access to what is actually happening in our customers' operations. Over this journey here, which all of these businesses essentially are at different stages of, you become more and more intimate with your customer and you learn how to play different games. A device game, a consumables game, a service game, software game, and ultimately, more of a digital and a data game.
That what I just described, that is the core business of Danaher. We then apply that in different industry verticals, as you see here in our platforms. When you come to the Danaher Business System, which I'll talk to a little bit more later, amongst other things, it's a collection of best practices that we've codified and documented. Of course, we've done that in terms of how do you drive growth in a device business? How do you run a consumables business, service businesses, and so on. When I talk about our competitive advantage is actually based on this business model that we have and how we run that playbook with DBS, but also with talent.
When we develop leaders in one platform or one operating company and they learn how to play these games that I was just describing, obviously, we can take capable leaders and put them in other businesses, even though the end market vertical may be different, right? Because the game at its essence that we play is very similar. Great collection of businesses here that we built over the years. What is this Danaher Business System? I know some of you are very familiar with it, others maybe a little less so. Let me explain it. On the one hand, it's our culture. It's how we as people work together. We assess people for it when we hire them. It's our culture, it's how we do things.
On the other hand, it is a collection of best practices, tools that we've documented over the years so that we can train people on it. Of course, once we document it, we can then see how we can improve it. If I start with the cultural piece, and maybe if you look at the left-hand side here, this is an image that we use with our employees around the world to explain who we are and why we do what we do. I'll start with what we call our values, our core values. Starts with the best team wins. Our philosophy is, make sure we have the best people on the team that can work together very well.
We're very thorough about the kinds of people we bring onto our team, and we talked over dinner last night about how we assess leaders that we bring onto the team. We teach these teams, we make sure they understand this, the second value, that customers talk, we listen, that we are only here to serve customers, find new ways to serve them so we can continue winning. We teach them third value, that at Danaher, Kaizen is our way of life. Kaizen is a Japanese term for continuous improvement. We teach our people that in order to help our customers better and better, we have to fundamentally always be looking at ways to improve our business, but also we have to make sure we ourselves continue to improve ourselves. I am still a student of leadership. I'm trying to become a better leader every day.
It's a fundamental piece of our culture. When it comes to improving businesses, you've got to have some key metrics to aspire to, right? Some of those key metrics that we teach people about are in the middle here. Quality, delivery, cost, all things that matter to customers who we serve with mission-critical things, right? Things have got to work, and we've got to get them to them at the right point in time at an attractive cost. Of course, innovation. We've got to keep on moving the needle for our customers so that they can get better. We can help them improve their businesses. In particular, this topic of innovation, we highlight in our next core value, which is innovation defines our future.
Many of our businesses operate in spaces where there are still significant unmet needs, or we have great opportunities to accelerate the speed of innovation or the scope of innovation. We'll talk a little bit more about that here later today. In doing all of that, of course, we teach our people that the reason we can continue to invest in our businesses is because we've been able to generate compounding returns over the years for our shareholders. We make that very clear to our people. Those are some of the values, the culture that we try to teach in Danaher. All that's sort of built also on our foundation of what we call our shared purpose here of realizing life's potential within the spaces that we play. That's the cultural element of DBS.
The tools on the right-hand side, think of this as a collection of a library of great tools, within growth, how you drive growth, how do you leverage marketing to drum up, find more customers? How do you improve your sales force activities or service activities, or how do you accelerate innovation? That within the growth category there are a number of tools that are developed not by some consulting company, but they're developed in our businesses. Somebody in particular in Hach, they've done a lot of great work within innovation over the years. We've codified, documented the good things that they do here, and then we teach a lot of the other businesses around the group. Lean, this is where DBS started 25 years ago, so maybe more in the factory.
The reason I started with growth is because lean has been part of our journey for a long time, and that's typically where a lot of companies that start with continuous improvement, where they start. You need to understand that we sort of left the factory, or we're still in the factory, but the DBS has grown far beyond operations and already, a good 10, 15 years ago. More recent additions over the last seven, eight years been a series of tools around how we develop our people, how we assess people, how we develop our people, and help them move into more and more significant roles, within the business that they joined or in other businesses. You'll see some examples of that later today. That is DBS.
It's how we do things, our culture, how we work, but it's also codification of best practices and how we cascade those out through the businesses in a very rigorous and disciplined way. You'll see plenty of examples of that later today. That's Danaher. Let's go to water quality. I think water quality is a fantastic business to work in. I kind of sometimes joke and I say, we span a lot of things within water. Here from the city of Loveland, wonderful. All brought here with water quality equipment along the way. This is consumed every day, right? Economy's good or bad, we still drink water, right? If the economy is good or bad, our consumers might buy a little less of this high-end water. They might buy other brands of water, or they'll still consume water.
The way I think about water quality is it's got a very low level of cyclicality for a number of reasons. We'll talk about that during the presentation here. Of course, one of the reasons is that regardless of the economic environment, water is an essential part of human life. We play a big role there in making sure that that water is safe for us to consume and also productive for people who use it in their manufacturing industries. $2.4 billion. Been growing at mid-single digits here. Good clip for quite a while. We expect that to continue. Healthy level of profitability. Water, along with the other business that I work with, the two most profitable platforms in Danaher. The other's, of course, making tremendous progress, and we firmly believe we can continue making progress on that area as well.
You see some of the brand names there. You'll meet the presidents. We'll walk you through what exactly it is we do in great detail. You see here that we have a healthy recurring part of our business, and most of our business is selling direct to customers, which, of course, when you go back to the business model that I talked about, this customer intimacy, selling direct is, of course, an essential piece of not just the water quality model, but the Danaher business model, right? We are a completely global business. Hach is totally global, well-represented in the high-growth markets. The reason you see North America having a big slice of the pie here is that Trojan and ChemTreat are still very North America-oriented businesses, which as far as I'm concerned, is good news. We're working on globalizing those businesses, and we've really got some good runway there.
We've got healthy secular drivers. As you see here, bottom left, operating in a $20 billion market. There are still new regulations now and then being published that some new things that we need to measure help make sure that as the science advances, gives us an opportunity to get into new spaces. Water scarcity, in particular here in the U.S., for those of you who are from California or perhaps even this part of the country, you'll know that that's a very real topic.
If I oversimplify here, our customers are trying to get more out of the water that they have, which means that they need to leverage different technologies, software-based workflow tools to help them become more productive, get more out of the water that they have, and that plays into what we do here at Water Quality. Where do we play in the water cycle? In the top part of this slide, it should really be a circle. To simplify here, we've put it as a linear process here. Water comes from the environment. There's some measurement of it there. It needs to be treated to then be ready for commercial and industrial use, because water is used in many manufacturing industries to cool things, for example. Of course, for us to consume as well as consumers.
The water goes back to some sort of treatment facility, before it perhaps return to the environment, or it's put back into the water distribution system for us to consume. What about our businesses? Where do we play and what positions do we have? As you can see here, Hach, the largest opco in the platform, plays across the entire water cycle. We are really the world leaders in water analytics. What that means is we're able to measure different aspects of water at different points of the water cycle here. We have the broadest offering of instruments across the whole range of the cycle here. ChemTreat is a service and chemical business that really focuses on helping a variety of industries that use water in their manufacturing processes for cooling, for example, and Steve Heier will tell you more about that.
For these industries to really get more out of their manufacturing assets. It's mission-critical work that we do. Essentially these industries cannot run or cannot run effectively enough without the help that ChemTreat provides. ChemTreat is really a know-how-based service business. We transact chemicals, but it's really a know-how-based service business. Trojan is a UV treatment and a membrane filtration business, that we've been able to grow here very, very nicely over the recent couple of years. There's some regulatory things that are really in our favor here, which Steve Bell will talk to you more about. Basically, the adoption of UV, the interest in that is increasing over the world. Our competitive advantage, you could say, is really built on our unique understanding of the applied biology and chemistry of water.
I think there's no business out there that has the amount of people who are deeply focused on how does the biology and chemistry of water work. That's a common theme across this platform here. The business model, I introduced that to you already, device consumables and so on. Let me talk to you a little bit more about why we see a lower level of cyclicality in our businesses here. A couple of very concrete examples for you here. In the Hach world, we sell an instrument year one, but the revenue stream of the consumables, the reagents over the lifetime of the instrument, as you can see here, typically two to four times the revenue potential of the device up front. The selling price of a single device is a fairly low cost point for all the other things that our customers buy.
Even the individual purchases of the consumables over the years are very small individual amounts. We serve this mission-critical application. Who wants to treat water and have consumers have a water quality issue? Typically, we can count on a very recurring revenue stream here, low cyclicality. ChemTreat, as I said, work with customers for mission-critical applications. If you think about it, if we can't help our customers, they have a downtime event. They need to slow down their plant because things are getting too overheated, and their cooling systems that use water aren't functioning effectively. You could see that the cost of downtime for these factories far exceeds the fee that we take for a year. Mission-critical application and the orders of magnitude of the downside versus the value that we provide, the relationship here is very meaningful.
In terms of regulatory standards, like I said, there are occasionally some new parameters that come out that regulatory bodies want to measure, or there's some new standards around treatment, which is this case here. You can see that we're helped here by more and more customers wanting to adopt some of the technologies that we have, which sort of are irrespective of what the economical climate is. Even back in 2009, for those of you who followed various businesses back then, this water quality group did not shrink. We were still growing at the time. A lot of it has to do with what's on this slide here. What's our journey been over the years? This is really a Danaher journey. Most of our platforms have gone through this kind of journey.
We start with an anchor acquisition. In this case, we started with Hach and Lange, added on ChemTreat and Trojan over the years. Then we improve these businesses leveraging DBS. Then we add on bolt-on acquisitions, which could be product lines, technologies, it could be commercial reach. We've added about more than 25 acquisitions here since the anchor acquisitions. Added about $800 million worth of acquired revenue. You can do the math. We've driven about $1 billion of organic revenue growth by applying some of the approaches we have through DBS. As you can see here, we've moved the gross margin of these businesses up as well, significantly to the mid-50s.
Obviously, for the operating expenses, with the work we're doing to get more out of those expenses, that in combination with the gross margin improvement, gives us a very healthy EBITDA margin level. Again, it's the same story that you've seen play out in other Danaher platforms. Some are at different stages of this journey, but it's really the story of Danaher here. I should have mentioned, the return on investment capital here, of course, is probably a number that we're most proud of. Obviously, the high degree of organic improvement that we've been able to drive over the years has contributed very nicely to that. Let's talk a little bit more about how we win in our marketplace, because we do win, as you can see on the right here. Obviously, some of you follow other players in the space.
I think you're well aware of that. Why do we win? How do we win? I think the foundation is, as I mentioned before, of our competitive advantage, really comes from the fact that we have this unique insight into the applied biology and chemistry of water. We just understand how water works as an entity, if you will. Because of the customer intimacy that we've developed over the years, we also know and understand the kinds of workflows that our customers work with and what are our customers trying to do, and what kind of people do they have, what kind of capabilities do they have, and therefore we build a know-how around how we can help them with more things than perhaps other people that we compete against.
How we bring that to life is, of course, by bringing new products with new technologies to market. You'll hear some examples later today, how we've leveraged DBS to accelerate the rate of innovation, but also increase the scope, if you will, bigger breakthroughs, if you will. Kornelija Zgonc will talk to us about that. The DBS work that we've done, applied DBS in our commercial world as well, has meant that we're able to reach more customers around the world, and we're able to get to them quicker as they raise their hand or identify a need. DBS, coupled with unique domain insights, is really what you should take away here as the main reason for why we win.
If we stay on the innovation side of things, you'll hear about a number of significant innovations today leveraging technologies that we have or newer technologies, and as well as the deep domain insight that we have. It's not always about the water utilities or water treatment plants and so on. A couple of examples here. The Hach example here is an instrument that's used in dialysis clinics around the world, and taken a very strong, unique position in that space with healthy growth and some of the leaders in that space there. In Trojan, we've been able to reduce the size as well as the amount of energy that these UV treatment devices consume, which means that suddenly we open up markets that weren't available to us before, didn't make economical sense for certain customers. Able to do that.
Finally, on the digital side of things, by understanding our customers' workflows, been able to get into a couple of software businesses, and now with data, really building a digital position in water here. We're very excited about that. You see some of the performance metrics on the right here that we've been able to accomplish, Kevin will walk us through that a little bit deeper. On this digital, the last example that was there, solution that we actually started, we launched in the marketplace almost eight years ago now. This is not something that we started yesterday. We're leveraging our position. This is Hach. We're leveraging our position. We have the broadest range of instruments, the most measurement points, if you will, in our customers' facilities. We're leveraging that, this approach really has three prongs to it.
One is what we call instrument management. With software, we can make our instruments more intelligent. We can add functionality to them. We can, with software, add some predictive elements to instrument management, meaning that our customers can understand when they need to calibrate instruments and things of that nature. You'll see later today that these instruments are spread over a large facility. That is actually an important point. Secondly, by having these instruments being connected and collecting the data from them, we help our customers with a variety of compliance-related tasks that they need to fulfill. They're regulated. Do that in a much faster way, of course, but also avoiding errors, so they're able to reduce the risk in their business.
Finally, as we gain more insight from the data that we collect from these instruments, we're able to build algorithms that help customers actually run their facilities in a better way. We're able to help customers with bigger outcomes, not just deliver a measurement value, but actually help them run their facilities in a more effective way. Another aspect of our winning here, as I mentioned, was the application of DBS in the commercial arena, which Darin will talk to you about later. We're also leveraging our size and the fact that our scope of supply here. We're able to go to significant private water utility customers or food and beverage customers and have a global conversation with them about how to help them with bigger things versus merely selling instruments for their individual factories.
We've got some good progress here, as you can see here in that arena. There's some big wins here. We've also made investments over the years in digital marketing, which is important because most of our businesses play in very fragmented spaces, 60,000 potential customers in the U.S., and they don't purchase every day, how to reach them, make sure they're educated about what we can do is important. Digital marketing plays right into that. Digital marketing requires significant investments in tools as well as experts on your staff, we've been able to build a team that serves all of our businesses here and basically ramp our capability much faster than if each business would do it on their own. Finally, in high growth markets, as you heard earlier, Trojan and ChemTreat are more North America-oriented businesses, Hach being completely global.
When Steve Bell running Trojan wants to enter the Chinese market or accelerate his growth in China, he can go to Kevin Klau at Hach and say, "Kevin, I need 14 salespeople next year. Can you help me find those people?" We have them on the payroll in Hach. For those people, this is a promotion because now we're going to move them from an individual sales position, perhaps, to a regional sales manager. It's a good thing for our people as well, but helps Steve accelerate tremendously in China, of course. On this talent topic, as I mentioned earlier, this notion of having the best team here with us that work together extremely well is such an important ingredient of our success here. That's why, over the years, the DBS toolkit has really evolved in terms of how we develop our people.
In particular, in water. You will find water people spread around Danaher. Anybody heard the name Tom Joyce, by the way? That's my boss. He ran this place a few years ago. He's one of many examples. We have 16 more recent examples here. Of leaders that have learned their leadership skills, and because we have the same business model across Danaher, we can move people across the platforms, and they can be effective in their new roles very quickly. In water, we take our role as growing leaders, not just for water, but for the greater Danaher, very seriously here. We do, of course, also inject specific talent that we might not have enough of. For example, over the last couple of years, we've been adding digital talent here to the teams.
I think the best proof of what we're doing here are really some of the stats that you see here. We have very high retention levels. People stay with us because they find that this is a place where you can develop yourself, and you will be tested, and you'll be able to grow in this water business as well as in Danaher. Very good. I'm a little bit over time here, but like I said, what I'd like you to take away from today is we built a great platform here over time. We've got a great position in the water cycle, high growth areas, higher margin opportunity areas. We've got the same consistent business model as the rest of Danaher. Our competitive advantage, the foundation is this unique applied knowledge of the biology and chemistry of water.
How we bring that to life is really by what we do in innovation as well as the commercial approaches that you'll hear about and how we build stronger, greater, more capable teams, all with the help of the Danaher Business System. With that, I am now going to hand over to Steve Hire, who runs ChemTreat. I'll highlight a few things about our colleagues today because you'll understand that, one, we are all DBS practitioners. We own DBS. We also contribute to and develop new tools and approaches in DBS. Then we have domain expertise. Steve, 20 years in Danaher, 10 years in water. During his career in Danaher, he was actually the founder of the growth part of Danaher. He made great contributions to that part of the toolkit here over the years. Steve?
Thanks. Good morning. Thanks, Joakim, for a great setup. 20 years, it's been a marvelous ride. Today, I'm super excited and pleased to be able to share with you the story on behalf of all the employees in the Americas at ChemTreat, and most importantly, those who are based in Richmond, Virginia, which is where I am. Our story of growth, both where we've been and more importantly, where we're going, and how we've got there using our incredibly talented people who have really deep domain knowledge in the space, as well as the tie to our customers. I'm going to spend some time on what everybody within Danaher refers to as the model at ChemTreat, and something that has been incredibly successful for a very long time. I'll wrap it up with how that's going to go forward for us as we project into the future.
ChemTreat, Joakim did a great job of highlighting some of the key drivers within the global water market, and you'll notice that the things for ChemTreat and the spaces we play are the same as they are for the broader water group. Regulatory, sustainability, energy efficiency, those are things that are very important to our customer base. When you think about it, and I'm going to talk about a specific example here in a bit, when you think about what our customers do and how important this is for them, Joakim mentioned productivity improvements and process breakdowns. If a customer for our water treatment services has an hour of downtime, it could be $200,000 per hour that that customer is losing in productivity.
It could be a food supplier who is canning product, and when their product goes on a store shelf, if it's got spots, blemishes, et cetera, on a can that's due to water, some sort of water issue, that becomes a brand protection issue. It's a very high value add application that we do. We don't really spend time in commodity applications. We spend time in spaces where we can create a lot of value through the expertise that we have on our team. As you take a look at it, we're actually probably driving the recurring and direct numbers up within the water group. Our recurring sales are greater than 90%. If you think about it, once we're in with a customer, we contract for a long time, and we're with them for a very long time.
You'll see some numbers on our attrition here in a bit. That's primarily because we're better than 95% direct sales. We have a very intimate contact with our customers. We know their facilities as well, and in some cases, better than they do. One customer told me one time, I asked him, I said, "Why do you pick ChemTreat to spend your valuable dollars on?" He said, "Steve," he says, "Once I have a relationship with the person coming in to treat my facility, it's kind of like having a doctor. You don't want to change your doctor because they know everything about you. They know everything about your makeup, and you don't want to go through the pain and agony of changing all the time." Creates a high level of stickiness.
When you take a look at how we've broken that down, those elements and the things you're going to hear in the next few slides has really helped us drive our growth. From the time of acquisition, we've grown well over 2x what the business was when we acquired it in 2007. The majority of that growth has been organic. We believe that the model is one that is delivering high value and great ongoing growth. We'll get into where we play. There's a lot on this slide, and Joakim did a nice job of setting up how the services we do. If you think about it, we treat everything coming into a facility all the way through the process, out the back door, as far as water goes.
You think about it, every facility has water being used in some fashion in their process. They're either creating steam to power what's going on, or they're creating cooling capacity. An example I use is in a data center. Data center's mission-critical kind of application. If heat becomes too much, the servers are going to go down. Folks in this room depend on servers, don't want your servers to go down. We would have a bad situation. The water that's used to cool those servers needs to be treated, and our customers need to make sure that the infrastructure within their facility is able to hold up over time. They don't want corrosion, and they don't want scale. Corrosion's bad, things break down.
Scale, pipes plug up, and the water doesn't move as quickly and as efficiently as it could, then there's a loss in productivity. If you think about it in those sort of simple terms, that's what we do. What we do is we treat it, we crack the code of what's going on with the water that could create some sort of big challenge for them. In looking at that, Joakim put that number up of 2 to 10 times value to the customer. Again, a tremendous amount of value being created by the application of our expertise, both in the field and back in Richmond with our lab and our analytical capabilities. When we create a chemistry, it's a unique and proprietary formulation for us. It's not something that others would be able to go buy on the market.
We bring something to the market that is unique to us. Talk a little bit about how we win at ChemTreat. There are two key elements there on the left-hand side, left-hand part of the slide. First of all, at the heart of what we do at ChemTreat is our people. People are at the core of what we have done at ChemTreat. It starts with our commercial model. Our field sales force and service folks are very, very tied to our customer, as I explained in the beginning. We're able to use elements of DBS in the way we talk to our customers, because most of our customers have some level of lean-type vocabulary in their lingo and in how they approach their business. Based on that, our people are able to communicate at a level that some others are not, right?
Just because they've got great experience there. The application expertise, deep industry and application knowledge. Our folks have, on average, more than 15-20 years experience in this category. This is something that is long-term for them. They've made a decision to be in this industry. They love what they do, and they stay with it. When you take a look at it, sort of how does that build out over time? How did we double the business, more than double the business since 2007? Is taking that network of customers, network of people, and it becomes a bit of word of mouth around the industry, "Well, you should try ChemTreat because they did some really great things for me." We continue to build on that reputation that we have. In 2007, we were a top 10 player. Now we're in the top tier.
Top, top tier. We continue to expand, building out from North America. I'll show you a slide here in a minute on how that'll look. How does this all happen? We've increased our feet on the street, our sales presence, by 2x since the acquisition. You do the math. 2x investment in forward sales folks, better than 2.5 times improvement in growth. Our customer retention rate is over 95%. While some businesses are losing customers out the back door and then having to add more to keep steady, we're adding more, losing less on the outflow. In fact, our attrition rate is probably half of the industry average. What does that all mean for us? Over 50 years of consistent quality growth. Right. Even in 2008, 2009, as Joakim mentioned, we didn't have a down year when things could have been more challenging.
Let's talk about the model. At Danaher, for those who followed Danaher for a long time, acronyms are our friend. We have a lot of them. ChemTreat is no different. Our feet on the street model. We love this acronym because it generates so much for us, right? The image on the right-hand side is really a depiction of what goes on in the business. First of all, we start with a very growth-oriented culture. 50 years of growth. We wake up every day wanting to win, satisfy and delight our customers. Second, we invest in our top talent. We identify those who are best at what they do. We make sure we recruit them, and we make sure that they're happy with what they're doing, so they stay with us. Our employee retention rate, especially on the field service side, is less than 3%.
Consistency on the field force leads to consistency on the customer side, which leads to a nice recurring revenue stream. How do we do that? For the folks that are in the field closest to the customer, they have a very performance-tied compensation model, which is tied to the goals of our business as well as the goals of our customers. Making sure that they're delighting their customer and delighting in delivering great performance. We're able to do that because we've got great history on the business. Over 50 years of a consistent build on the model. We understand what it takes from an investment perspective to drive new talent into the business and be able to make that work financially. Finally, continuous improvement. Making sure our team is, one of their core elements of DNA is constantly looking for improvement.
One of the elements of DBS is problem-solving, right? DBS has a lot of tools around problem-solving. If you think about it, that's what ChemTreat does. We solve difficult problems for our customers, and we're able to use that tool set to do that. Here's a real-world example of what we've done. I won't go through all the details of what happened, but suffice it to say, there was a very large customer in the petrochemical segment. They had significant issues in their facility. They had a presence that was not delivering quite what they needed. Our local team was able to have contact with this potential customer, identify some opportunities where we could create value both for the customer and for ourselves. We then jet in our application experts, our domain experts, to help refine the ideas that are being applied.
We test it, and we make sure it's going to work. Ultimately, we wrap up the customer in a long-term contract. It springboards into two more facilities within that network, which then spreads into five more facilities of people who know people within the industry. It spreads via a network. Ultimately, we wrap it up with our CT Vista solution, which is a digital capability. How does it look when we go forward? This is a nice visual of how the business is built over time. 2007, you can see we're a regional player. Mostly in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. By 2015, with the forward-looking investments and the things that we've done over that period of time, and finding good segments to participate in, the business continues to spread. Right? We become a more North American covered business.
Today, we've taken that model and continued to blow it out as we've expanded into Latin America, so that we've got a broader presence. We've been able to figure out ways to continue to drive this business forward. Putting it all together, it's all about our talent, building, creating the opportunities for our talent, the high skill level that we have, and the application of their problem-solving capabilities to create delightful experiences with our customers. Then finally, using that to build scale and expand across a broader geography. That's the ChemTreat story. Thanks for your time.
Thank you, Steve. Appreciate that. This business model, this growth flywheel that Steve talked about, some of you may know that a little while ago, we acquired a company in the life science platform called Phenomenex. Great business. Shortly after the acquisition, their leadership team spent significant time with Steve and his team to understand how their flywheel works. That model is now being implemented in Phenomenex very successfully. Great. We have another Steve coming up, Steve Bell now. Steve has been in water and Danaher for about 12 years. Trojan, that he's responsible for today, is his third water business that he's running. He's obviously had the chance to build domain knowledge across the different businesses that we have. Problem-solving is a tool within the DBS toolkit.
We believe that the more people we have that are capable problem-solvers, the more capable we will be to improve our business. Steve is an expert trainer in that and has, over the recent years here, trained up to 400, I think it is, colleagues around the world in this core problem-solving capability. With that, I'll hand it over to Steve.
Thank you. Good morning. Trojan Technologies is a leader in ultraviolet and filtration treatment. What I'm going to talk to you today is why we're so excited about the opportunities this brings. Joakim, in his introduction earlier, mentioned about obviously the glass of water or the bottle of water. What we do is keep people safe, whether that is disinfection, whether that is contaminant removal, it is something that's critical in the cycle of life. Trojan Technologies, as I mentioned, are a leader in UV and filtration. We serve the municipal, industrial, and consumer spaces, with different types of products. From a revenue mix perspective, we are looking at a 45% recurring revenue stream, 55% being non-recurring, or systems. Similar to other Danaher businesses, we sell systems, and over the life of those products, we sell consumables too. Very heavily weighted from a North American standpoint.
That's where our businesses started. We've been expanding in high-growth markets, and I will talk today about some of those initiatives, both in high-growth markets and also in other regions where we've made investments in channel to drive things forward. Where we play. I mentioned in the early intro, disinfection here. Disinfection is really critical to keep people safe. Again, whether it's bottled water, whether it's at home, when you switch on the tap. You may have a UV unit in your garage under your sink for water filtration. The local municipality that's serving your home may well be applying this on a much larger scale as well. We do have these solutions over a whole scale and breadth of opportunities. Equally within, for example, industrial process, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, as there is production of injectables or other pharmaceutical goods.
Pure water, ultra-pure water is very important for those processes. From a contaminant removal side, this is really much more of an emerging play that we're seeing in the last few years, and even say probably 10 years plus now. Contaminants, whether that is from primary solids or things like dioxane, 1,4-dioxane or PFAS, these are contaminants, whether it's filtration that is a use or UV technology, we're able to apply these in a different manner. Again, in some of the slides, I'll show you how we're able to work with our customers. The knowledge, the intimacy we have with their processes, and the way we're able to partner with them in problem-solving, has allowed us to develop new applications, which opens up new market spaces for us, expanding the portfolio overall. How we win. I mentioned application expertise. We have the largest municipal install base.
With that, a deep industry knowledge around UV protocols and specifications. What does that bring? Well, first off, it brings credibility, and certainly when we're working with governments on an international level and standard setters and regulators internationally, having the reputation that comes from more than 40 years in UV really helps, especially as we're looking at the switchover to a chemical-free method. UV is chemical-free. It's instant on, it's instant off. In terms of treatment flexibility, there are major benefits and advantages that customers can pick up there. From an innovation standpoint, we continue to look at the possibilities that our developments can bring. We focus generally in footprint reduction, so making our solutions smaller, more flexible, more accessible, but equally in terms of the power consumption, especially larger installations. For customers, having a large power bill is quite a cost.
If we can bring solutions to market, new technology that allows them to treat the same amount of water or even more with less energy, and we're not talking 5% less here, we're talking 20%, 30% less energy, that's a major gain. A major gain for customers, allowing them to think through upgrade cycles more aggressively. In terms of those new products, over the last three years, we've had over 30% of revenues coming from new products launched since 2016. In terms of commercial execution, as I mentioned on the first slide, we're very strong in North America, but that's not stopped us starting to build a much stronger runway in emerging markets, and also in Europe. We've made investments here. We've looked to leverage our water quality partners. Joakim mentioned this in the introduction, too.
Within high growth markets, where there is greater reach and how we can leverage to build our business. That's also really important from an application standpoint. We do have, and we do hire, recruit, and look to retain experts in those regions. Why? Because it's extremely important in the setting of standards. We need people who are knowledgeable, who are respected in their industry and in the domain to help us drive double-digit revenue growth. In terms of application expertise, we've got a great track record here, first in leveraging the technology that we're able to develop, but also in leveraging those customer relationships. From a problem-solving standpoint, understanding the issues your customer's facing, working on those big problems to drive solutions. Piloting is very important, obviously, in a new development process. We've been able to uncover a number of different opportunities here.
The one I'm sharing on the screen is around advanced filtration. There are a number of new contaminants that are coming to market are being uncovered. Regularly, these are carcinogenic contaminants. PFOA, PFAS in general, are one that's talked about relatively often in the news these days. There are many solutions to eliminate or remove PFAS from water. All of these come with, let's say, some benefits and also some issues in terms of waste. What we've been able to do is demonstrate a 15% reduction in operating costs for our customers, opening up new spaces for us in the filtration market. In this case, in this example, that's allowed us to expand our addressable market by $60 million in a very short space of time. We see that growing even further from here on out. New product development and innovation.
I mentioned earlier, making UV technology more accessible. Footprint reduction is very important. If you think about municipalities today, there is certainly demand for more water, and in emerging regions, emerging countries, having a small footprint can be very important. Cities are already built around, you're kind of landlocked. The other thing that we've been focusing on, as I mentioned, is the power output. Being able to drive improved power requirements or lower energy use for our customers is a big plus. That's also allowed us to grow our recurring revenue stream. Today, we're at about 45% of our total revenue. That's come through, I'd say, investments, not only in the product, but also in the commercial channel, which I'll get to in just a second. Some of the DBS tools that we've really focused on, too, visual project management's one of those.
We've been able to use this to bring our time to market down by 50%. What visual project management is a very simple way of bringing a team together, having things visually up on the wall, and looking at what the critical path is. When we face a hurdle, a challenge, something not working as we thought, we're getting behind. What do we do to DRA within the team to allow us to solve the problem and get back on track? Again, very simple things, communication, making it very clear to the team exactly where we are, where we stand, and what we need to get done, has delivered great results for us. Certainly in everything that we're looking at here, two common goals we have, safe water and low operating costs. Those are common themes across our businesses and across our technologies.
On the commercial execution side, obviously, if you develop great products and you have great customer knowledge, how better to bring that to market than through a strong commercial channel? We've been investing in go direct, whether that is increasing our local presence, specifically in Europe. We added a number of sales and service staff. We also use the DBS toolkit from an organizational talent assessment, a talent upgrade path here, as we looked at how to best leverage our footprint across Europe. On the high growth market side, this is really regional diversification for us. It's an area that we've been working in for a number of years, if not decades, although very selectively. We've seen that accelerating over time. We still believe we've got a really strong runway in high growth markets.
Partnering with our water quality colleagues is allowing us to leverage not only our knowledge and expertise, but also the reach that they have to influence within these markets and grow things even further. Results since 2017, we've increased by twofold our customer-facing associates outside of North America. We have over 1,000 municipalities who have added Trojan UV capabilities in terms of treatment. In terms of our win rate, we regularly track, obviously, projects, as how we're doing on the municipal side. We've seen an increase in our win rate of 600 basis points. Really great results in driving that commercial execution across our businesses. Putting it together, Trojan Technologies is certainly a leader in the UV and water filtration industries. I'd say in a certain sense, a market maker as we've started to build things out in terms of emerging markets, high-growth markets.
That application expertise, being able to address and expand our market space has been critical for us, and we see that going forward as well as we have additional emerging contaminants coming through from a UV standpoint, but also on our Pall Water filtration side. Again, great success with our new product introductions and driving commercial gains through the ads we've made in regions beyond North America. Thank you.
Thank you. All right. Nice job summarizing there. Great work. I hope you picked up on the fact that we've moved the recurring piece of Trojan from less than a third just a few years ago, to close to half, and there's more to come. It's no mistake. Obviously, we're applying the learnings we've had in other operating companies such as Hach and some of the DBS tools that are around how you create and drive recurring businesses. We're very excited about the future here at Trojan. Kevin Klough is the president of Hach, and he also was promoted here a few months ago into the group executive role for the water quality platform. He and I are tag teaming right now. He'll assume the full leadership of the platform here over the next couple of months.
He has 17 years with Danaher, seven in water, and during his 17 years, he had a variety of different roles from operations to marketing, and he also did a stint working for Larry Culp in HR, and that's when he was part of hiring me. I owe him a great thanks here for being part of that process there. Kevin has contributed to DBS in many ways, but similar to many other senior leaders, Kevin is frequently on the faculty of when we teach something called policy deployment, which is really our way for driving breakthrough changes in businesses with a little bit of a strategic slant quickly. And we can talk about what all that entails some other day. Kevin is a frequent teacher of that for newly hired leaders. With that, Kevin, I'll hand it over to you.
Thanks, Joakim. Good morning. Whether it's a patient in the chair of a dialysis clinic, a supervisor in a wastewater plant, or maybe it's a child in the village in a place far away in Cambodia that's benefiting from Hach Technology, we wake up every day at Hach inspired by our mission to ensure water quality for people around the world. Those of you here in Colorado, in years past, we might have provided you with some merchandise or a gift bag, this year, instead of doing that, Danaher will make a $50,000 donation to Water Mission, which is a partner that Hach has worked with for many years. Water Mission is a world leader in the non-government organization, NGO space in really three areas: helping bring safe water to emerging communities, bringing safe water to refugee camps, and bringing safe water to disaster areas.
Rather than tell you that story, I thought I would just throw a video up on the screen to let you see a little bit of how a community in Cambodia has benefited from some money we raised here at Hach, and now has the benefit of safe water.
Okay. Hi, everybody. This is Sean, and I'm coming to you from a community in Cambodia named Endor. It's a community of about 1,000 people, and through the support from Hach and their Walk for Water they did in 2017, we're able to come into this country and provide a safe water project. Today I want to show you a quick few things about the project. If you come with me this way, you can see the well. The water's pumped from the well, and it's pumped up to the top of an aeration tower.
This tank has a weir system in it, so it's divided into two compartments, which allows for the proper settling time and enough time for the chlorine to react. We're using a sand filter, and the water is filtered, and then it's disinfected through residual chlorine and then stored on the tank on top of the tower. You see the storage tank, you see the solar panels up top. There's also a satellite water meter installed, and this information will be relayed to our platform so we can monitor the project from Charleston or anywhere around the world. People can come here and gather water from the three spigots that we have on the side of the house. It tastes delicious.
It's a great opportunity today to say thank you to a lot of people. One of the groups I want to thank is the Hach Walk for Water committee, without their leadership and selflessness and sacrifice and commitment to making the event a success, we would never have had the chance to do what we did today, which was commission this living water treatment system here in the Endor village of Cambodia. I wanted to ask Yum Tida, the operator, to tell us a little bit about what clean water means to her and her family. We wish you nothing but good luck and good health and safe water in the months and years to come.
We could have done a better job with product placement. You did not see Hach test kits, but every day when Yum Tida comes to work, the first thing she does is test to ensure there's sufficient chlorine before she opens the taps and lets the people in the village come and take safe water. If you're curious, I'll let you know we're in the process of deciding which community will benefit from a system like that in the years to come. If I see you at an industry event in the next several months, you can come up and ask where we've decided to put our next system, and I'll let you know. Let me jump into Hach. This is an extraordinary business and really consistent with some of the themes you've heard today.
First, we're built on tremendous applications expertise and really what we understand about water chemistry and biology. Second, we really have an outstanding tradition and history of innovation and leadership in terms of technology. Third, it's a really differentiated commercial and go-to-market model. You see some of the growth drivers, which are consistent with some of the other businesses you've heard from today, Trojan and ChemTreat, and from Joakim about the platform. I'll speak quickly to our customers. We serve municipal and industrial customers globally, cities and towns all over the world, as well as any customer who uses water in a production process. It's a very sustainable business model, and you can see that through some of the data in the center of the screen. First, our recurring revenue is about 45%, and the instrumentation or equipment, what we call non-recurring, would be about 55%.
Second, in terms of geography, you'll see it's pretty evenly distributed, about a third in North America, a third in Europe, and a third in the rest of the world. Lastly, you'll see that about three-quarters of our business we take directly to customers. However, it's a very integrated commercial model, we'll talk more about that later, where we also do work with channel partners here in the developed markets as well as globally. Put that together, it's over a billion and a half dollars of revenue growing at mid-single digits. As I mentioned, really, we are focused on ensuring water quality and making it easier, faster, more informative in terms of how we test and help our customers with water analysis. As far as where we play, Joakim teed this up earlier.
I will point out that we really believe we are positioned in the most attractive segments in the space. These are places where we can bring our technology expertise, and we get rewarded for that. We also don't have legacy commodity positions, which might really infringe on some of the progress we can make in these high-value spaces where we can drive growth above market, and we can drive profitability. We have the largest portfolio, which again, I think was alluded to earlier. When you think about applications, we go to market, and our customers use our products in laboratories. Think about folks in white coats making tests every day. Think about a process or online environment. These are going to be people out in the field where water is running through the equipment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We also do some work with portable instrumentation, where they're going to move around their service territory and take samples as the application requires it. You can see what we measure here. Our customers really measure for two reasons. One, for regulatory-driven decisions they need to make, and the second is for process control. Really, when we put that together, it gives us an enormous and attractive place to play and really what we think is the best position in the segment. I mentioned that the business model is very sustainable. I talked about the recurring and non-recurring revenue. There's another piece to this, which is that the Hach transactions and the products and services that we sell typically are much lower price point. What that means is the decision to make that purchase can be made lower in the organization.
It's typically an operating expense decision, not a capital budget decision. As a result, it's probably not as susceptible to some of the macro changes or investment decisions that might be made by larger industrial customers or even sometimes municipalities when they need to hold back spending. We really haven't seen the implications of that. As Joakim mentioned, in 2009, the last time we had a real challenging macro environment, we were able to continue to maintain growth in Hach, certainly very proud of that. It's also a nice dimension to this business because a lot of the purchases are made for regulatory-driven reasons, which I mentioned. When a local, a state, or a federal regulatory authority assesses that a certain water quality parameter needs to be measured or reported on, that's a very positive driver for Hach.
Decades ago, we helped write a lot of those methods, and it continues to this day that we get to advise and partner with those regulatory agencies, which really helps make this a sustainable business. I'll show one example on the right. If you had a chance and came in early here in Colorado, you might have seen we had it set up on the table, but this is our Portable Parallel Analyzer, what we call our PPA or the product name SL1000. We launched this a few years ago. It's a breakthrough product, and you'll see on the tour how we manufacture it. I show it here because what you'll see is this instrument, if you went to our website, you'd know it costs about $3,500.
Over the course of the eight to 10-year life of that product, the customers are going to run tests using what we call our Chemkeys or single-use consumables, kind of a razor and razor blade model. They're going to buy about $1,000 of chemistry typically a year. Over the course of that eight to 10 years, the value of that chemistry would be about three times the value of the instrument. In the case of PPA, we've actually expanded that because we initially launched a more narrow set of products and chemistries, but we've expanded that to increase the application range of that instrument.
We see our customers actually testing not just some of the chlorine measurements, but additional parameters, which actually will probably bump this up instead of more of a 3x to be more like a 4x in terms of the consumable pull-through that comes from that instrument. Again, when you put that together, we have a tremendous install base, having been focused on this business for decades, and the applications expertise together with that consumable pull-through has really created a great business model for us. Joakim alluded to some of these themes, but I'll go into detail. We went at Hach in part because of our technology and innovation leadership. The reliability of the portfolio, and really from our earliest days of being a trusted advisor for our customers, we continue today to be really counted on to help them deliver high-quality sensor data.
We've built out from that position, which I'll talk about in a bit, to get more of a digital workflow and software solution opportunity. Second, our commercial execution. This has been a direct business model from the very earliest days, and that continues today. You saw the mix in the revenue. That is no longer just a developed market conversation. We are continuing to expand that footprint globally, both in terms of our direct sellers, but also our indirect commercial partners. The expert answers, they come to us with questions, much like our colleagues at ChemTreat. They don't bring us the simple questions. They bring us the hardest problems that they have.
Our position in these different high-value segments, we're really solving some of our customers' most challenging problems, but they come to depend on us, and that's not just as a supplier of instruments, but it really is as a trusted advisor. Lastly, you put that together with the ability to do this globally. For those of you less familiar with water, you may not know how fragmented this customer base is. There are hundreds of thousands of discrete customers, both municipal and those who use water in their production process. The challenge of reaching them commercially should not be understated. Our position, having direct sellers and channel partners globally, allows us to get into dozens of countries and cross those doors every day and engage with those customers.
We really think when you put the technology leadership and the commercial capabilities together in a global model, it's really what's driven the mid-single-digit growth over our horizon, which we think compares to peer average more in the low single digits. I'll zoom in quickly on innovation on the commercial model and on our high-growth market investments. I'll orient you quickly on this slide to some of the innovation that we've done, first around instrumentation. It was really the position we started in many years ago, and we continue to be very proud of having the broadest range and really, as I said, the advantage sensor portfolio in the laboratory, the process, your online environments, and portable. You can see over the last several years, we've continued to be hard at work in those areas.
While we've done that and we've applied the principles of DBS, my colleague, Kornelija Zgonc, Hach's Vice President of R&D, will tell you a little bit more in detail how we've done this. We have brought the time to market down on average for more than 36 months to 18 months. Again, we think that's not only beneficial for customers, but it helps us increase the cycle time and the cadence with which we can bring out new products. If you look to the top of the screen, what you'll see there is how we've been really focused on software for a long time. 10 years ago, we bought a small business that really helped us get started on this path. Since then, it's really been heavily focused with organic development. We started solving really important point problems for customers.
As I'll share in a minute, we've expanded that to solve broader, more enterprise-level problems and really become an even bigger part of our customers' universe, not just in the laboratory or online, but connecting those environments in a way that makes our position in those environments even more sustainable and more important. You put that together, we're really excited because our new product pipeline has increased by 35% over the last couple of years. As I mentioned, we've increased the cadence in the launch of new products by 25% and really feel like the innovation engine is alive and well here at Hach. Joakim spoke to this slide earlier, so I'll try not to repeat some of the things he said, but our Claros product and solution offering is really broken into three areas.
Instrument management, where we're bringing predictive diagnostics to our analyzers, helping our customers make better decisions in real time with what to do with their people. Process management, where we're bringing together what we know about the applications in water chemistry and biology, what we know about the instrumentation, proprietary algorithms, and models, then we help make a process decision. We can turn on something like a fan or a blower. We can dose a chemical. When we can do that more precisely, we can save them a significant amount of operating cost. We can also increase the environmental compliance and know that they are reducing their risk of an event, all of which they really value. From our position originally as a sensor provider, now to a position that is much more embedded in the customer's enterprise through our process management efforts.
Then lastly, data management. We're bringing in disparate data from all across the enterprise, Hach sensors, and other instrumentation across the customer universe. That's where we get at some of these higher value use cases where we can look at things like what's happening in their collection system, what's happening in their source water, and how can they manage events more effectively. This has opened up a $1 billion of addressable market for Hach. Over the last several years, we're proud of the fact that we've been able to deploy over 4,500 customers or products and Claros solutions into 4,500 customers. You can see that even in a very risk-averse customer base, we've driven more than 35% compound annual growth through our Claros offering since 2016.
We think that the reason we've secured this advantage position is because we focused on helping customers lower costs, reduce risk, and improve compliance, which again, was built from our strong established position as a partner, but now helping them in more higher value use cases than just in some ways providing them the instrument. If I zoom in on the commercial model, you heard from my colleagues at ChemTreat and Trojan. At Hach, we have a similar approach, although it varies in some ways. First, it's worth noting that about 10 years ago, as one of the longest-tenured businesses at Danaher, we took the lean tools and what had worked with us in DBS and really started to expand that in other parts of the organization.
From a growth perspective, we've been excited because funnel management, or how we manage opportunities through the funnel, is something that we've seen tremendous opportunities to accelerate our customer's journey and really condense the cycle time that they spend considering whether to make a purchase decision with Hach. It's driven significant efficiencies so that our sellers can spend more time with customers, and it really has eliminated a lot of waste in the sales process, much the way we applied the same thinking in the factory years ago. My colleague, Darin Stell, the Vice President of Sales, will come up in a few minutes and tell you in some more detail how we've done this. We're not just applying DBS for our own benefit. It really helps us meet our customers where they are in the purchase decision, and it aligns with their needs.
The five parts of our model you can see in the center. As customer buying behavior's changed, we see a lot of different drivers, some of what you all see and we see in the consumer world playing out in our customer world. We have a lot of customers that want to drive more business through e-commerce channels. They want to make more efficient buying decisions. They want to be on their own, and we have met them there, and we have a thriving e-commerce business. You can also see the other elements of this model, whether it's global key accounts, inside sales, our distribution partners, as I mentioned, or our large and growing field service organization.
When we put all of these elements together, and we do that globally, it creates a tremendous competitive advantage and really helps us, as I mentioned, address what is an otherwise extremely fragmented customer universe, but one that we think we're uniquely positioned to continue to partner well with and drive advantage in. Lastly, as we've made these investments in technology and in the commercial organization, we've continued to expand globally. You also heard from Steve at ChemTreat and Steve at Trojan. They've been focused in similar ways. At Hach, it's an extremely global business. What we've learned is that the five-part commercial model that has served us so well in the regions where these businesses were born, whether it was Europe or the U.S., it applies globally. We've seen great success by bringing in our talent and our teams and making them more local.
In some ways, investing in growing those teams organically, in other ways, acquiring distribution partners, which really helps us accelerate that and get more traction and more critical mass quickly. We've also focused on innovation, and those of you who serve customers globally know that the needs are different. In some cases, in China, for example, we have an R&D team in China developing products for that local market. They're also able to take some of what we've done with acquisitions in other regions. Example is an acquisition we did in 2017, a company named AppliTek, with a really advantaged and winning range of online parameters. We've had to tailor that to the needs of the local Chinese market, and it's really that unique opportunity to take the in-country and region resources with the global teams and really provide a differentiated offering.
When you put that together, that has resulted in China, from really humble beginnings 20 years ago, now being our second-largest country in terms of revenue. You can also see as we come together as a platform in some of these regions, multiple operating companies inside of the water platform working together to help solve customer problems and really be that trusted advisor in more than 100 projects today, where we're doing that and bringing multiple operating companies together. The high-growth markets have been a consistent growth driver for us and part of why we think we've over-delivered in terms of core growth to our relative peer group, and we expect that to continue. When I put that together, I think it's been a great journey here at Hach. We've been part of Danaher now for almost 20 years, and we believe the future's really bright.
Hopefully, you got a sense today for the differentiated business model with the attractive position in what we think are the best parts of the water sector. We think the competitive advantages we've driven and the way we've been able to apply DBS will continue to serve us well for years to come. Lastly, this opportunity to continue to take what we've learned and apply it globally into the high-growth markets together with our position in the developed markets really creates a sustainable advantage that we're really excited about and we expect to continue to build on. I'm going to transition quickly and welcome my colleague, Kornelija, up to the stage in a second. First, just to ground you again on the principles of DBS. Joakim set this up really well.
As we've been on our journey at Hach, it really has become not just about what can be done in the factory, but what can we do across the enterprise. For us, one of the big breakthroughs we've made here, which you'll see a little bit of in the tour later, is how we've been able to bring those principles, really the same themes of continuous improvement, apply that on the growth side, apply that inside of R&D, and really unlock some tremendous potential, not just for Hach, but for our customers. With that, I'm pleased to welcome up Kornelija Zgonc, Hach VP of R&D.
Thank you. As Kevin mentioned, I'm going to provide a bit of deep dive what these growth tools look like and how they help us with our innovation cycles. I think the best way to start is to explain our holistic innovation framework. Here you can see key categories that we have identified are absolutely needed for innovation cycle. For us, in each of these categories, we have many DBS tools. We won't go in detail in all of them, but I will highlight some that I believe are the heart core and important part of our innovation. Strategy starts off with the strategy. I think that is not too surprising. In the strategy, with several DBS tools, we identify key attractive segments that we need to pursue, technology trends, market drivers. That all comes together in a strategy.
Out of that, we know where we should focus as a company. Second, we do something called Problem to Portfolio, P2P. Yet another acronym. It's a very important process because in those attractive segments, we go and research unmet customer needs. We study their workflows, we try to understand what digital solutions or products or whatever features might make sense for that particular market, and what technologies would solve a particular problem. After we are done with the Problem to Portfolio, we end up with a very powerful prioritized product roadmap. It will be including both instruments and digital solutions. It comes to execution. You need to map that with the resources.
After we do that, we involve a team called product planning team, which would include a president and his direct reports. We would then make sure that resources are allocated to the projects that are the highest value project. We go and execute those projects and monitor them monthly. They don't get stuck, and we remove the obstacles, because nothing ever goes completely smooth. The next bank of projects, it's really a large set of projects, is around new product development execution, around project management. Throughout the tour today, you will see these tools in actual environments. It will be probably much easier to understand, but I'll try to describe what is the core and heart of those projects. Not the least, the last category is launch excellence.
I think you will hear some more about that from Darin. Launch excellence starts throughout the project, throughout the cycle. It starts as early in the problem to portfolio because value proposition for specific product might be defined. Here it looks like it's at the end. It's not. It's really intertwined through the process. Let me dig in a little bit into the new product development. What allowed us to achieve these fantastic results that you have seen from Steve Bell and Kevin Klough? How did we shrink time to market by 50%? I think the heart of everything is something we like to call speed design review. Before I explain the basics, let me just give you some context how I see this. In the past, traditionally, we would develop products sequentially.
We would develop something, we would call it a prototype, maybe go to customers, then we would develop it some more, go do beta testing, and then we would transfer to manufacturing, and then after this sequential sequence, hopefully we are done. The problem with that is that can be highly non-transparent. There could be an engineer working in the corner for six months, bringing something to the alpha prototype and things don't work. You might lose six months at a time. If project manager has their schedule in their computer, that doesn't help either because many people do not know who depends on them. It's not intentionally they will miss something, but things just don't go right. I think that's where speed design review really changes the game. I would consider that a breakthrough, a change in our processes for developing innovation.
It starts with the Voice of the Customer. Obviously, those tools are probably very familiar to you. People go to Gemba, they study user workflows, they define personas that will be the final users of the product. Soon as that comes back and this feedback is synthesized, the team collocates in a very large room. We like to call them Obeyas. This comes from Japanese word. It just means big room, I understand. I don't speak Japanese. In this room, we collocate cross-functional teams, and we ensure there is full transparency of everything that everybody does. It almost looks like a manufacturing site because the team would literally come every day and see what they need to do that particular day. We break down the cycle of development in something we call sprints. In hardware development, those sprints are four weeks long.
If I'm a developer, I know in four weeks I need to bring such and such because this prototype is going to be assembled. If I don't have something, let's say I'm electronics engineer, I might not have printed circuit board in four weeks, I will just bring a cardboard or styrofoam. That's okay. Then we keep going. Because we do these four-week cycles, when we bring in our operations, our manufacturing associates, who also assemble whatever we have at the time into the product, we learn a lot. We learn every four weeks. We learn something. With each iteration, we learn more and more and more. This kind of breakdown of the work and constant checking and full transparency really results in something that is quite amazing. At the last four-week cycle, when we feel we are done, there is no transfer to manufacturing.
We just take the production line, luckily it's on the wheels, you will see that today when Janaya will show you how this works. We roll it down into production. That's what saves months at a time. Going from sequential to this highly parallel concurrent design, the idea is maybe not completely new. I think some of other companies develop product this way, but how you put it all together with the rest of DBS tools and the rest of upfront work and backend work with the launch excellence, that's where we really feel we made a breakthrough. You can see on the right-hand side, I will not go through all the details. Joakim already mentioned our chlorine dialysis system. This is a medical device system. That was developed in less than three years, which included the FDA approval.
I come from medical industry, and I can honestly say I've never seen such a short time. It's hard to compare this now. You will say, "Well, you didn't do this without this process and with this process, how do you know how much time did you save?" We took the projects of very similar complexity and compared them side by side, and it's real. So far, we have three examples here. We can say with high confidence, we kind of shaved two years in time to market. Going now to software. How is DBS helping software? I think Kevin already talked about the strategy and market drivers. Here on top are the market drivers that pertain to our software solutions.
I won't go in too much details about them, but in those area, we go in and we use these customer workflows, and we study user experience and create very valuable problems that we need to solve with digital solutions. We play across the customer value chain with our solutions, as Kevin outlined, so I won't repeat that. You can imagine, because this is so many areas where we can play, from predictive diagnostic to highly sophisticated process optimization, there's quite a lot of applications and cloud-based environments that we need to develop. If we did that in kind of sequential, traditional way, that wouldn't go so well. DBS really came to the rescue. Besides the user experience tools, we call them UX DNA. We also, in the recent years, developed Danaher Software system.
is based on the agile methodologies, for those of you who know how software is typically developed. What is so beautiful, that it runs like a production. As soon as I develop the code is integrated, deployed. Literally within 24 hours, I know whether I developed something that is without bugs or I need to do something more to make it usable. DBS put all these tools together in a smart way, so that combined with the VoC, user experience, and our software execution, we are really proud to say that we can execute software as planned. I think we are releasing every quarter, and not I think, I know we are releasing every quarter. Here are some stats that will help you understand what this process has delivered, that it's not just me saying that they are breakthrough processes.
I'm really excited about that. I will start from the bottom, the one that Kevin already talked about. We have increased our incremental pipeline value by 35%. What this means, that with the same amount of R&D resources, we are going to release 35% more revenue over the next planned period, for the strategy. On the software development side, with this agile methodology and these biweekly sprints that we have, like break down the problems in a very short sprints, and full integration and testing, we are proud to say that not just that we have quarter releases, which everybody can do, but we also deliver 100% of planned features for that quarter. I think that would definitely be assignable to DBS.
Going from the bottom up, the third one, I think given what we know so far, we have seen 50% reduction in time to market for instrument products. Not the least, because of all these efforts, it's coming all together, we were able to reallocate some of the instrument and some of the other R&D resources who were used on instruments toward digital solutions and higher growth projects. What you're going to see today is our new innovation center. It will be part of the tour. The new building is called Pikes Peak. It's about 90,000 sq ft of new space. I think what is so great about this building, it was designed really 100% around the speed design review DBS tool principles. You will see these large rooms.
Every of these large windows represents one of these rooms, and you will be able to see some of the tools that Steve and myself mentioned today, visual project management, production line, concurrent development. You will be able to see that in the real environment. To put it all together, I think it's fair to say that we can consider DBS for innovation and all the growth tools a significant competitive advantage for Hach, and not just for Hach, also for the rest of the Danaher. These tools are standardized anywhere you would walk. Anywhere in any Danaher facility, you will see very similar deployment. Thank you.
Thanks, Kornelija. Nice job. Hopefully you got a sense for why we're so excited about what happens when you take what we understand about the valuable problems we solve with customers, you put that together with the culture of continuous improvement, and we start to really think about some of the higher value problems and more complex challenges we can solve. We get the good fortune of being able to do that within Hach here in a breakthrough R&D facility that we just opened two years ago. While we're decades along in the journey in some ways in these businesses, in other ways, it's still early days for how we continue to unlock the value and the opportunity and really partner with customers to continue to drive advantages.
Now we're going to shift from innovation to how we think about our commercial team and organization, how we take that go-to-market model I talked about and apply some of the same principles of DBS to do that. I'm going to welcome up Darin Stell , our Vice President of Sales, to tell you a little more about that.
Okay. Thank you, Kevin. Well, good morning, everybody. It's great to be here, and I'm looking forward to talking to you over the next few minutes about commercial execution at Hach. We've seen the fundamentals, the DBS fundamentals referred to earlier in this presentation, leadership, lean, but today we're focusing on growth. We just learned from Kornelija the importance of innovation. Innovation alone won't give you growth. This is where we come and talk about those commercial tools. What I want to share with you today is how we've taken those commercial tools and how we've executed them here at Hach to accelerate our growth and drive market share gain. First, to come back to the five-point commercial model that Kevin introduced earlier. Just a few additional words about this. This really is a critical ingredient, if you like, in terms of the recipe for success.
Water's just a wonderful place to be. Almost we have a luxury problem in the sales organization. You don't hear that very often. There's too many opportunities. Water is everywhere. How do we decide where we're going to go and where we're going to put our sales associates for maximum return? This five-point model allows us to assign our sellers with the right customers. Quite simple, really, but we put the right sellers with the right customers. We can then improve our productivity and close those gaps. This is what we've been able to do. Importantly, with each of the five points, we leverage DBS independently so that we can accelerate the performance of each segment. We're using those same tools in each segment to drive those results.
You can see at a high level in the last three years, since we really introduced this model, we've more than doubled the number of our large global key accounts. With inside sales, we've maintained a high single-digit growth rate, and on e-commerce exceeded a 30% CAGR. This DBS-driven commercial strategy has really allowed us to win in this wonderful but diverse and complex water market. Diving a little bit deeper into the DBS commercial tools, I'm going to talk about sales standard work, sales productivity, prospecting, opportunity management. Stuff I guess you've heard of before, but what does really sales standard work mean? What is that? I would best describe it, Joakim was saying about codifying best practice, but in my organization, 1,000 globally based sales associates, I've got some superstars. I've got people that exhibit best practice.
With this sales standard work, what I'm looking to do is replicate that best practice across the world in the different geographies so we can move the overall team up two or three points. By utilizing and executing on these tools, I hope to show you this morning how we've been able to do that at Hach. First, coming to funnel management or opportunity management. This is what really underpins our success. This is the how, the how we bring standard work or replicate best practice and continuous improvement to this diverse, externally based team. Those of you that have any interaction with sales teams will know that's easier said than done. We have a lot of individuals, shall we say, in a sales organization, and trying to replicate and drive them in one direction when they're based remotely is tough. Funnel management has allowed us to do that.
How have we done that? We've done that by implementing strong process discipline. We look very much at leading indicators, so we map the funnel, and we look at both our short-term opportunities, 30, 60, we've got to eat today. We also look at our mid to long-term opportunities because we need to eat and live tomorrow. With strong visual management, again, visual management with an external team is more difficult than it is, as you'll see earlier, in the office on the plant floor. By utilizing Salesforce, we've got these visual management dashboards which show us the shape, the size, the funnel sanity. Do we have enough in our funnel to meet our commitments today, tomorrow, looking ahead? What does the 12-month rolling funnel look like? Really focusing the sales associates on these leading indicators, we're able to get ahead of the curve.
With standard work, with strong weekly cadence on opportunity review. Importantly, at every level, nobody is exempt these funnel reviews. I attend every week a funnel review process with my directs. I look at the top X number of opportunities globally because those are the big ones we win, and it is worth my time spending that there. We win the big ones, we cascade down, and we win the small ones. Lastly on this slide, important is situational leadership. This is a coaching tool. We are making better sellers. To make better sellers, we need to build both commitment and competency. We see where we have fully rolled out and deployed this, we are growing the funnel at an average of 15% CAGR. The important number on this slide is an increase of 30% in opportunities closed won from the funnel.
Not just about adding to the funnel, it's about how much you're converting. That's where the improved sales professionalism comes in, which is adding 200 basis points to the core growth. Applying DBS, make no mistakes, allowed me to improve the sales process at Hach. I'm going to share with you three examples of how we've implemented the five-point model. First, global key account. Fragmented business, lots of customers, lots of small customers. What we understood well was those small regional customers. We didn't really understand as well those big global accounts. Before we got started here in true DBS spirit, we decided that we needed to really map and understand the mindset of these global customers and their real needs, which is quite different from a locally based organization here in Loveland or anywhere in Europe.
Once we'd done that work, we were then able to develop a standard work playbook. This playbook enables us to think about where do we focus, which of those accounts we can win, which are the greatest opportunities for Hach. Through effective business processes and using some of those tools I referred to earlier, we're able to accelerate the growth through cross-border management, sharing innovation, and become true partners with these global companies, some of which you saw on Joakim's slide, some of the logos earlier. Since 2015, we've been able to drive constant double-digit growth, and this is not done yet. We've still got fantastic opportunity as the world becomes more joined up and more global. Second example, inside sales. When you do the Gemba Walk later this morning, you'll see a little bit about funnel management and inside sales.
The goal here was to improve our prospecting and penetration with small and medium-sized customers. We want the big ones, but we also want the little ones. A lot of customers in water. How do we go about that? What we learned was these small and medium customers weren't getting a heck of a lot of attention from our field sellers. We recruited and we developed an inside sales team. We approached the leadership the same way as we approached leadership with the external team. We gave them the same tools, and we supported them in the same way, and we assigned discrete account ownership. That's important. Again, it reduces overlap. They know where they need to go. Reinforce this with regular daily management and we have a daily standup meeting.
The image in the middle there, you see some of the teams standing by the cubic board. This is what we'll show you later. Combination of coaching, developing that team, utilizing DBS, daily management. We've doubled our funnel in the last 3 years and maintained a high single-digit growth rate. Expanding the team in North America times 3, and this year we've teed it up in Europe with 6 countries. Great results, good start in Europe. Last but not least, I'm calling out the e-commerce slide. This is unique because it does go across all segments, okay? What we learned was things are changing. Our customers' buying behavior is changing. We set about a couple of years ago building the most comprehensive water platform in our space. This gave us true global reach in multi-language that allowed our customers to buy as they wanted, when they wanted.
Importantly, it got us into the pre-purchase phase. Customers nowadays are not visiting exhibitions or not using so much printed material. They're doing their pre-research online. Very important that we have a very comprehensive landing pages, solutions, applications, so that customer can get educated on the Hach site whilst they're procuring their consumables and low-ticket items. This site has been a goldmine for opportunities for us. Again, in true DBS fashion, we didn't leave it to chance that those opportunities would be converted into dollar. We built a very robust process to ensure those marketing qualified leads ended up in the hands of the right salesperson to be followed up in less than 24 hours. Get to the customer quickly, improving the close rate, impacting on the growth. You see more than 30% over the last five years.
Really aligning with our customers, enable them to research better, and us to understand their ordering behavior better, and indeed understand their needs in a better way, which is, of course, a good thing. To summarize, let me leave you in no doubt DBS isn't just for operations or lean. It's truly a competitive advantage for Hach and Danaher in enabling us to leverage the growth. 5-point commercial model proves our productivity closes the gaps. Coming close to our customers means we understand their needs in a better way. That's it. That's DBS in action, and it's DBS in sales. Thank you.
Thank you, Darin.
There you go.
I can get that. Thank you. You had the chance here to meet two incredible leaders who work in water. Kornelija joined Danaher about the same time I joined, 9 years in water, and Darin, 20 years in water and 14 years with us in Danaher. Both of them are big contributors to the innovation toolkit within DBS, as well as the sales toolkit. Both of them actually spend an important part of their time helping teach, not just new businesses that join the family how to do this, but also businesses that have been with us a little longer and who haven't figured out how to apply some of these approaches. They evolve these tools as well. You'll see them in action later on the Gemba Walk here.
By the way, I have six years in water earlier in my career, not with Danaher. And I guess my career is really summarized by this: a consumer packaged goods with water inside of it. Those are the two things I've worked with during my career. I'm going to bring it to a close here now, we're going to do a quick Q&A, we're going to go for a Gemba walk so you can see some of these things in practice. I'll start with where we started this morning. I'll say that we, in terms of where we're positioned, play in the most attractive parts of the water cycle in terms of growth and margin opportunity.
The business model that we have is consistent with the rest of the Danaher companies that has these elements that I walked you through, that we compete on a device. There's a very interesting recurring revenue stream over the life of the device. We become intimate with the customer during that time period, get the opportunity to build service businesses, later on software businesses. As we get more data, we can help customers with bigger, better outcomes over time, consistent with the other Danaher platforms. That position has then allowed us, with the great people we have on the team, to execute and build this platform that has this size growing at mid-single digit rates and at very healthy profitability levels. More to come, because we are still taking share.
With what we've walked you through here today, we're convinced that we're going to be able to continue to take share, not just with increased rate of innovation speed as well as scope, but also by continuously adding new approaches to our commercial execution engine, as well as how we develop our people. When we think about how we make all of that happen, as you've learned by now, DBS codifying best practices so we can teach people, develop people, develop organizations, not just in a few locations, but across the world. DBS plays a significant role for us in how we're able to improve our businesses and drive these compounding returns that we know that you and others expect. Just a quick reminder for you. We built this platform, and this is the Danaher story again. This is the story of every platform we have.
We built this platform. We start with anchor acquisitions. We continue with technology, product line bolt-ons, geographic access, commercial bolt-ons. As we do that, we kick up the growth rate a little bit with DBS tools. Part of that comes from innovation, part of that comes from the growth tools, commercial tools that you saw. Of course, we apply the other Danaher toolkits within lean and leadership to make sure that we make room for more investments as we pick up the margin rate as well, and also help build more capable leadership teams who can continue to grow the business here. Really, the Danaher story and all of that then ends up into these financial metrics that you can see here and very interesting return on invested capital results here. Fantastic story here.
I think we've got a great franchise here in water, I know that some of the other platforms that perhaps you follow are a little younger in this journey. I think you should think about water and look at those other platforms and think about what that could mean over time because the playbook that we're applying is essentially the same. Before I ask my colleagues to come back up here, I would like to take the opportunity since this event is being webcast to colleagues, peers of yours in the industry to thank everybody for joining here. I know that many of our employees around the world are watching too. Obviously, none of these results would've been possible without all the great work that you're doing. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
We appreciate the partnership, of course, with our customers around the world. None of this would've been possible without that. Finally, thank you for your trust in us, and we hope to continue to earn that trust. Hopefully, you've learned here today that these results didn't happen by chance, and there is a lot more to come from this team here. With that, I'll invite my colleagues back up on stage.
We'll go to you first here. We have some microphones, just so wait until I can get the mic to come around to you.
Thank you. It's Cliff Ransom, Ransom Research. I asked this question at the December meeting, but maybe you can drill down and tell me how you resolve this issue that I'm bringing up in the water area. QDIP is great, but I still believe it all starts with employee engagement, employee involvement. Shouldn't that be part of the mantra?
It is. It is very much so. We didn't cover it today in our presentation. Over the last couple of years, five or so years, and as part of the leadership toolkit, by the way, we've spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand how can we unlock not just the brains of our people, but more of their hearts. Some of the work that we've done there, it's not just the charity work that Kevin was describing here that we've done, but a lot of it's been about how do we make their job easier to do with us and help unlock more creativity, more passion around our businesses? We measure this, so there's a metric, of course. We're Danaher, so we're quantified.
In our water businesses, three-quarters of our employees would be categorized as highly engaged. If you compare that to, and we have benchmarks, of course, external benchmarks. We are above the external benchmarks in terms of how engaged our people are.
If I may, just a quick follow-up. You've taught me that metrics mean everything, because if you don't measure it, you can't improve it. What are the metrics that you use to track your trends in employee engagement?
We have an annual survey, and then we measure a few things during the year. Some of the elements are, there's actually an engagement metric, and there's some questions behind it, and some of those questions are along the lines of, would you recommend this as a great place to work? Those kinds of things. There are also some other metrics around supervisory effectiveness. Do I work in a team where my supervisor helps organize the work and inspires me? There's also a group of metrics around performance enablement, which basically is about, is the company I work for helping me get my job done for our customers in a great way? We go to great lengths to survey the details behind those main metrics once a year. During the year, that will then lead to certain improvement activities, Kaizens.
Of course, this is not just top-down. We're all doing this together. During the year, we'll run Kaizens. We'll do pulse surveys to check in on particular areas that we decided to focus on.
Vijay Kumar from Evercore ISI. Great presentation. Thanks for putting this up. This is my first time here. It was helpful. I have one macro and one product question. The macro, I think you did a good job explaining why this business is not as cyclical as one would think. How does this business perform during cyclical downturns? That's the macro part. On the product part, e-commerce, you had the 30% CAGR, but what's the revenue base in now? Where can e-commerce go in the next 3-5 years?
First on the cyclicality question, I think we mentioned that even in 2009, we did not shrink. Obviously, we don't live in splendid isolation from everything else that happens in the world, but we were still able to grow. What happens in downturns in these kinds of businesses, and it's similar for other parts of Danaher, actually, is that perhaps some new equipment purchases would slow down a little bit. We're OpEx, not CapEx, as we try to show you, right? We do not see slowdowns at all, like maybe some other higher value ASP transaction value businesses would see.
Even if there would be some slowdowns, there are not in all businesses, then what customers then come to us with is they say, "Hey, okay, I need more service help to maintain the performance of the devices that I have." In terms of the consumables, the recurring piece of our business, there are regulatory requirements, right? You still need to test regardless of how things are doing sort of in the external environment. Maybe lastly, I would say that because of the positions, the differentiated positions that we have, mission-critical roles that we play and so on, we, of course, have, how should I put this, reasonable pricing power. There are sort of multiple things that we can do when things maybe change a little bit in the external environment. A number of reasons.
On the e-com question, I'm going to defer it to Kevin.
Sure. Thanks. I would say probably two things when we think about e-commerce. The specific kind of quantitative answer to your question would be, we've been growing at double-digit rates for a number of years, and we expect we can continue to do that. It's probably a function of a couple things. One would be how we execute and how we continue to learn about converting those opportunities into revenue. The other one is we continue to scale that capability globally. While we've built out from the regions that we've probably learned and understood the most about, the developed markets, we see that continued double-digit growth as we bring more regions online. The second thing I'd say is, it isn't just the transacted revenue.
I think as we hopefully alluded to, that capability serves us really well in a lot of other areas, because our customers increasingly want information. They're on a buying journey for the more complex products that might last 9-18 months, and we want to be there, and so the online presence isn't just about revenue for us, it's also about how we work with our customers in the buying journey.
We're going to go to Tycho then.
Maybe it's Tycho Peterson from JP Morgan. Can you just touch on deregulation? I think there have been 85 environmental regulations dialed back in the last year and a lot of focus on water recently in the Clean Water Act. How much of a headwind could that potentially be? Then a follow-up, you mentioned the medical device for chlorine analysis. How big is the FDA kind of opportunity for you guys? Is this a newer area?
Yeah. Kevin, probably best you take that one.
Sure. I'll take both. I think on the regulation question, certainly, we read the same headlines that you probably see in this regard. In that case, there's no single regulation, there's no single geography where we feel overly exposed to an issue like that. I suspect your question was mostly focused here in the U.S. As some of these regulations have been in place for a long time, and those, by and large, continue. The EPA life cycle also takes a long time from when they study something to when they convert it into a new regulation or really change the requirements. We haven't seen a tremendous impact here in the short term. We wouldn't expect to see it because there's really no single regulation where we feel overly exposed to.
Regarding chlorine. What I would say there is we see a tremendous opportunity in the U.S. We're partnered with one of the leaders in that space. We see opportunities in some of the other leaders as well as, if you know it, there's a long tail of providers of renal dialysis. We love the position that we have. We think we can continue to grow by partnering with some of the bigger accounts. We also see an international opportunity there. Some of the issues and challenges is that it's a different regulatory environment. While the FDA serves us well here in the U.S., we have to go explore and partner with some of these other regulatory agencies. That's something we continue to evaluate, is how well and how much we want to invest there relative to the opportunity.
I would say it's early days in some ways. We've partnered with one of the leaders, and we see the potential to continue to do that.
Yes, over here. It's Deane Dray from RBC, just to spread some of the questions around. For Steve Heier, when ChemTreat was first acquired, there was a recognition that there are some end markets that are more commoditized, and a lot more competition, lower returns. Is there still this end market selectivity within your go-to-market for ChemTreat? What are the attractive markets? For Steve Bell, it looks as though the Pall business of Pall Water has been folded into Trojan. Just talk a bit about what that brand is, what it means for the water sector, and a little bit, some color on this mobile fleet, because those are recognized as highly attractive in terms of returns, in the market. What kind of presence there. Lastly, for Kevin, on these emerging contaminants like PFAS, they're measured on parts per trillion.
You're not going to have a big lineup of Hach mass spec, but there is linkages within SCIEX. Maybe you can talk about where and how these linkages for Hach outside within the Danaher family to help in some of these precision measurements and what those opportunities are. Thanks.
As the audience can hear, some people have studied the water space for a long time. Good questions.
All right. Thanks, Deane. From a ChemTreat side, I think we have continued to stay very focused on the higher value, more complex problem elements and segments. We've stayed purposefully away from certain areas. I think we're very comfortable with the segment mix that we have in delivering the kind of growth that we expect. We stayed very focused.
Pall Water.
Sorry. As a proof point of that, we're not going to go into the details, I want to say now, but the margin profile of ChemTreat continues to improve. While we continue the growth, so I think that kind of validates what you're saying.
Yep.
Pall Water, yes, Deane, you're correct. That is part of the Trojan Technologies business. Fabulous brand. Great brand recognition. You specifically called out mobile fleet. We continue to invest in that. It's an exciting space overall. We see a lot of demand there, and we see that continuing.
The PFAS question that Deane asked, I would speak to a couple things. As he said, there's really an instrument range within Hach, and we can get down to parts per million, parts per billion. This particular measurement challenge gets you to parts per trillion, and it's really something that we continue to look at and explore. There's probably a range above where Hach traditionally plays and really below where SCIEX, who's a mass spec life science tool business that you may be familiar with. There's kind of a range between where Hach plays and where SCIEX plays. As Deane's alluding to, one of the best parts of that from a Hach perspective is we get to collaborate with the innovators at SCIEX. We get to learn how are they thinking about that space. They characterize and quantify samples all day in different applied markets.
Here in water, they typically don't get into the space where Hach plays. This is an area where we've learned a lot about how they're thinking about it. We continue to study and listen to what the EPA is thinking about it, and we continue to look for those collaboration opportunities. In some cases, where we work with our customers, we guide them to that higher-end solution and say SCIEX is the answer. That's how you're going to get that measurement, quantification, and characterization. In other cases, we can come at that from an indirect point of view with some other Hach instruments that might not give them a direct measurement but might help them as they're making a specific decision in their business.
We're going to go Dan and then Doug and then UBS.
Great. Dan Brennan from UBS. Wanted to ask a question on China specifically. I know there's a lot of focus on high-growth markets, I think you broke out China, I believe, for one of the businesses. Maybe just spend a little bit of time on giving us some flavor for relative size of your business in China today. Where are we in the growth curve for your businesses within China? Maybe what are some of the biggest opportunities as we look over the next couple of years? Thanks.
Do you want to take that one for both Hach and Trojan?
Sure. I would characterize where are we on the growth curve. As I alluded to in the prepared remarks, China's the second largest country for Hach, and we've really grown it from pretty humble beginnings 20 years ago. It's become a really nice, strong, established position for us. We have hundreds of associates over there on the ground and a whole range of functions, great partners. It's a business that's critical to our success. Where are we on the growth curve? I would say it's a really unique market. If you know the space, you know that a lot of the decisions, the purchase decisions made by both municipal and industrial customers in China are driven by what the government dictates, whether it's effluent discharge, whether it's water quality standards.
I think it's still emerging in some ways because they're still getting clarifications and more determination on what they want to measure at what different levels in terms of the measurement range. We continue to benefit from that. As recently as last year, you probably would have seen that we called out some of the success we had in China relative to a specific policy that they made on surface water and measurement that Hach was able to benefit from. We continue to see that as it emerges, and in other ways, I'd say it's a bit of a developed market because they've been at this for a number of years, and I think that's where the depth of our relationships. We see our key account position really being a huge advantage there.
Because some of the global customers, whether these are engineering firms or key accounts in some of the verticals you heard about, we continue to see our ability to gain traction, in some cases, working with global headquarters in different regions and their growth. We participate in their growth in China, but in other cases, I think it's coming from really the decisions and the mandates coming from the government. Relative to Trojan, I would say that the UV piece of that is similar and different. It's similar because UV continues to be more of an accepted technology, both in wastewater and in drinking water, and so we love to participate and play a role there. It's a bit more of a missionary challenge, where we have to convince people to embrace the technology.
As we've done that in North America, we've done that in different regions, we continue to do that in China. In both municipal and industrial, we're really excited about the uptick in UV.
We're well-positioned there. We have no expats. We haven't had expats for years. Our local leadership team, some of them, I would anticipate, would be running some of our global businesses here over the next years. We have local R&D capability. We put manufacturing there years and years ago. The local R&D capability is relevant because, like Kevin said, there are some unique demands in that market. We're able to respond locally with people who can go work with customers and figure out exactly what they need, how. Their workflows might be a little different. It's not just what they are looking to measure. We're able to turn things around because we're local, quickly. I love the position we have in China. We're very well-positioned there.
We'll just do one last quick one. Doug.
Okay. Thanks, guys. Doug Schenkel from Cowen. I really appreciate you going through all this detail this morning. First, maybe to just start with a follow-up on Dan's question. On China, any change in commitment or hesitation to invest or to work with Danaher specifically as a U.S.-based company, given the trade dispute? I guess, since I'm closing here with the questions, I'll take a shot at asking about your longer-term growth targets. I know that's kind of breaking one of the rules of DBS, but given you've done a great job across all the segments here already improving core revenue growth to mid-single-digit levels.
Given all you showcased when it comes to innovation, the ability to drive more recurring revenues, the ability to drive more through e-commerce, I'm wondering if it's a reasonable expectation if we come back here in five years, that we're going to be talking about closer to high single-digit growth rates. Thank you.
I think on the last question, I think these are the guys you need to talk to about that. We obviously have very clear aspirations internally, and I think we have picked up the growth rate a little bit here over the years. The whole portfolio story is one about picking up growth rates and improving margins. Obviously, we have aspirations like that. Going back to China, it's been a phenomena playing in the Chinese market with munis and so on for decades, right, Kevin? That occasionally, there will be RFPs coming up, requests for proposals, from customers that will, for example, stipulate you need to have so and so much local content. That's why we have local manufacturing. Sometimes they may go beyond specifying material content, and that's why we have local R&D there too.
It's a game we're familiar with playing, and we've played it for many years already.
Right. Well, sorry, and apologies for those that weren't able to ask a question. The team will be around during the Gemba walks as well as at lunch after. That does conclude our formal remarks. Thank you to everybody who joined on the webcast.
Thank you.
Kevin is going to take us through our Gemba Walk to-