Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us here in Lovell, Colorado at Hach. We're excited to have everyone here. Also a special thank you to everyone joining on the webcast. For those of you out at Matt, I'm Matt Cucino, Vice President of Investor Relations here at Danaher.
So 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. So on to the agenda, I think we'll we have a great day for you. First, we're going to show a video introducing the water quality platform. After that, Joachim is going to be on stage to give you an introduction to water quality overall.
Then we're going to have our operating company presidents give an update on their businesses, Chemtree, 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 and A session after that. We'll take a short break after the Q and A session, gather into groups for Gamba Walk. We'll see the facility here that will take a little bit over an hour.
We'll have lunch starting at 11:35 and then buses to the airports airport after that. And we'll wrap up about 12:30. So with that, let's watch the video. Thanks,
Good morning, everybody. I've 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. And 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. Also 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 will 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. And 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. And 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. And actually, in a way that's sort of similar to the story that you'll see in most other Danaher platforms. And 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 on the same time, it's also our collection of good and best practices of how to run different aspects of our businesses.
So 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 Dana. Our $20,000,000,000 5 reporting 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. You see the logos here. They are all in leading positions in their market or growing towards taking leading positions.
And many of them are an attractive spaces to start with. That's why we acquired them. And many of them, of course, have made good progress here with the application of the Danaher Business System and the injection of talent that really comes from the fact that we have a consistent business model, really comes from the fact that we have a consistent business model across these platforms. So 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.
And 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. And 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. And 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. So we venture out into service based businesses.
And 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. And obviously, then that leads to the fact that you now have access to more data because the software is automating some kind of process. So you're getting access to what is actually happening in our customers' operations. So over this journey here, which all of these businesses is essentially are at different stages of, you become more and more intimate with your customer and you learn how to play different games, 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.
And we then apply that in different industry verticals, as you see here in our platforms. Now when you come to the Danaher Business System, which I'll talk to a little bit more later, it's amongst other things, it's a collection of best practices that we've codified and documented. So, 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. So 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 1 platform or 1 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.
So great collection of businesses here that we built over the years. So what is this Danaher Business System? I know some of you are very familiar with it, others maybe a little less so. So let me explain that. On the one hand, it's our culture.
It's how we as people work together. It's how we and we assess people for it when we hire them. So it's our culture. It's how we do things. And 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.
And of course, once we've documented, we can then see how we can improve it. But if I start with a 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. And I'll start with the what we call our values, our core values. It 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.
So we're very thorough about the kinds of people we bring on to our team and we talked over dinner last night about how we assess leaders that we bring on to 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 3rd 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 improve 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. And when it comes to improving businesses, you've got to have some key metrics to aspire to, right? So some of those key metrics that we teach people about are in the middle here.
So quality, delivery costs, 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. And 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. And 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. And we'll talk a little bit more about that here later today. And 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. So we make that very clear to our people. So those are some of the values, the culture that we try to teach in Danner.
And 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. Now 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. So within the growth category there, 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 really a lot of great work within innovation over the years.
So 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. But 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. But 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 7, 8 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, and you'll see some examples of that later today.
So 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. So that's the ANA. Let's go to water quality.
And 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. But here from the city of Loveland, wonderful, all brought here with water quality equipment along the way. Now this is consumed every day, right? Economy is good or bad, we still drink water, right?
And if the economy is good or bad, we might 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. So the way I think about water quality is, it's got a non a very low level of cyclicality for a number of reasons. We'll talk about that during the presentation here. But of course, one of the reasons is that regardless of the economic environment, water is an essential part of human life. And 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.
Dollars 2,400,000,000 been growing at mid single digits here, good clip for quite a while, and we expect that to continue, healthy level of profitability, Water, along with the other business that I work with, the 2 most profitable platforms in Danaher, the others, 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 $20,000,000,000 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 spaces. Water scarcity, in particular here in the United States, 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. So 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. So where do we play in the water cycle?
And the top part of the slide, it should really be a circle, right? But to simplify here, we put it as a linear process here. So water comes from the environment, it needs to be and there's some measurement of it there, it needs to be treated to and be ready for commercial and industrial use, because water is used in many manufacturing industries to cool things, for example. And then, of course, for us to consume as well as consumers, right? And then the water goes back to some sort of treatment facility before it perhaps returned to the environment or it's put back into the water distribution system for us to consume.
And so what about our businesses? Where do we play and what positions do we have? So as you can see here, HAWK, the largest OpCo in the platform, plays across the entire water cycle. And we are really the world leaders in water analytics. And 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. ChemTREE 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 Hyer will tell you more about that, for these industries to really get more out of their manufacturing assets. So it's a mission critical work that we do. And 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. And there's some regulatory things that are really in our favor here, which Steve Bell will talk to you more about. But basically, the adoption of UV, the interest in that is increasing over the world. The common 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. And that's a common theme across this platform here. Business model then, I introduced that to you already, device consumables and so on. The reason 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 HAWQ world, we sell an instrument year 1, and but the revenue stream of the consumables, the reagents over the lifetime of the instrument, as you can see here, is typically 2x to 4x the revenue potential of the device upfront. And the selling price of a single device is a fairly low cost point for all the other things that our customers buy. And even the individual purchases of the consumables over the years are very small individual amounts. So and we serve this mission critical application, right? Who wants to treat water and have consumers have a water quality issue, right?
So typically, we are can count on a very low very recurring revenue stream here, low cyclicality. ChemTreat, as I said, work with customers for mission critical applications. And 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 to 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. So mission critical application and the orders of magnitude of the downside versus the value that we provide is the relationship here is very meaningful. And then 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 new standards around treatment, which is this case here.
So 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 2,009, for those of you who followed various businesses back then, this water quality group did not shrink. We were still growing at the time. So and a lot of it has to do with what's on this slide here. So what's our journey been over the years?
And this is really a Danaher journey. Most of our platforms have gone through this kind of journey. We start with an anchor acquisition. And in this case, we started with Hock and ChemTreat and Trojan over the years. And then we improve these businesses leveraging DBS and then we add on bolt on acquisitions, which could be product lines, technologies, it could be commercial reach.
So we've added about 25 more than 25 acquisitions here since the Anchor acquisitions and added about $800,000,000 worth of acquired revenue. So you can do the math. We've created driven about $1,000,000,000 of organic revenue growth by applying some of the approaches we have through DBS. And as you can see here, we've moved the gross margin in these businesses up as well significantly to the mid-50s. And 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, very healthy EBITDA margin level.
And 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. And I should have mentioned, the return on invested capital here, of course, is probably a number that we're most proud of. And obviously, the high degree of organic improvement that we've been able to drive over the years has contributed very, very nicely to that. So 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 this space. So I think you're well aware of that. So why do we win? How do we win? And I think the foundation is, as I mentioned before, of our competitive advantage, it 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. But then 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 our customers trying to do. And who are those 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.
And how we bring that to life is, of course, by bringing new products with new technologies to market. And 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. And so Cornelia will talk to us about that. And then 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. So DBS coupled with unique domain insights is really what you should take away here as the main reason for why we win.
And if you if we stay on the innovation side of things, 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. And it's not always about the water utilities or water treatment plants and so on. So a couple of examples here. The HAWK example here is an instrument that's used in dialysis clinics around the world, taking a very strong unique position in that space with healthy growth and are some of the leaders in that space there. And 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.
And then finally, on the digital side of things, we've been able to 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. And you see some of the performance metrics on the right here that we've been able to accomplish, and Kevin will walk us through that a little bit deeper. So on this digital, the last example that was there, solution that we actually started, we launched in the marketplace almost 8 years ago now. So this is not something that we started yesterday.
We're leveraging our position. This is Hock. We're leveraging our position. We have the broadest range of instruments, the most measurement points, if you will, in our customer's facility. So we're leveraging that.
And this approach really has 3 prongs to it. 1 is what we call instrument management. So 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.
And you'll see later today that these instruments are spread over a large facility. So 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, and do that in a much faster way, of course, but also avoiding errors. So they're able to reduce the risk in their business. And then 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.
So 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 Darren will talk to you about later. But we're also leveraging our size and the fact that our scope of supply here. So 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 factory. So we've got some good progress here as you can see here in that arena, 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 customers, potential customers in the United States. So obviously and they don't purchase every day. So 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.
And we've been able to build a team that serves all of our businesses here and basically ramp our capability much faster than each business would do it on their own. And then finally, in high growth markets, as you heard earlier, Trojan and ChemTreat are more North America oriented businesses, now Hawk being completely global. And Steve Bell, running Trojan wants to enter the Chinese market or accelerate his growth in China, he can go to Kevin Clough at Hawk and say, Kevin, I need 14 salespeople next year. Can you help me find those people? We have them on the payroll in HAWK.
And 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. And so it's a good thing for our people as well, but help Steve accelerate tremendously in China, of course. And 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. And that's why over the years, the DBS toolkit has really evolved in terms of how we develop our people. And 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.
But 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, very quickly. So, we and in water, we take our role as growing leaders, not just for water, but for the Greater Danner very, very seriously here. Now, we do, of course, also inject specific talent that we might not have enough of. So for example, over the last couple of years, we've been adding digital talent here to the teams. And I think the best proof of what we're doing here is 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 able to grow in this water business as well as in Danaher. Very good. So 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. And our competitive advantage, the foundation is this unique applied knowledge of the biology and chemistry of water, but 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. So with that, I am now going to hand over to Steve Hyer, who runs ChemTreat. And I'll highlight a few things for our 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. And then we have domain expertise. So Steve, 20 years in Nanahir, 10 years in water. And during his career in Danaher, he was actually the founder of the growth part of Danaher. So he made great contributions to that part of the toolkit here over the years.
Steve?
Good morning. Thanks, you're welcome 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.
And 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. And then I'll wrap it up with kind of how that's going to go forward for us as we project into the future. So ChemTreat, you often did a great job of sort of highlighting some of the key drivers within the global water market. And you'll notice that the things for ChemTreat in the spaces we play are the same as they are for the broader water group, right? 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 sort of productivity improvements and process breakdowns. If a customer for our water treatment services has an hour of downtime, it could be a couple of $100,000 per hour that that customer is losing in productivity, right? Or 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, etcetera on the can that's due to water, some sort of water issue that becomes a brand protection issue. So it's a very high value add sort of 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%. So 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.
And you'll see some numbers on our attrition here in a bit. That's primarily because we're better than 95% direct sales. So we have a very intimate contact with our customers. We know their facilities as well and in some cases better than they do. And one customer told me one time, I asked him, I said, why do you pick Kimtree to spend your valuable dollars on?
He said, Steve, he says, once I have a customer 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. So 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 over well over 2x what the business was when we acquired it in 2 1007. And the majority of that growth has been organic.
So we believe that the model is one that is delivering high value and great ongoing growth. So we'll get into the where we play. So there's a lot on this slide and Joakim did a nice job of sort 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. And you think about it, every facility has water being used in some fashion in their process, right?
So they're either creating steam to power what's going on or they're creating cooling capacity. So an example I use is in a data center. Data centers, mission critical kind of application, right? 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, right?
So 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. So they don't want corrosion and they don't want scale. Corrosion is bad, things break down. Scale plugs pipe pipes plug up and the water doesn't move do.
But what we do do. But 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. And then in looking at that, you walk and put that number up of 2 to 10 times kind of 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. So when we create a chemistry, it's a unique and proprietary formulation for us, right?
It's not something that others would be able to go buy on the market. So we bring something to the market that is unique to us. Talk a little bit about how we win at ChemTreat. There are 2 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 Chemtree is our people.
People are at the core of what we have done at ChemTreat. It starts with our commercial model. So our field sales force and service folks are very, very tied to our customers, 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 how they approach their business. And so 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.
Then the application expertise, deep industry and application knowledge. Our folks have on average more than 15 to 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.
Then when you take a look at it sort of how does that build out over time. So 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 where you should try ChemTREE because they did some really great things for me. And we continue to build on that reputation that we have. So in 2007, we were a top 10 player.
Now we're in the top tier, top, top tier. And we continue to expand building out from North America. I'll show you a slide here in a minute on how that 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 2.5x improvement in growth. Our customer retention rate is over 95%. So 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. And 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 2,008, 2,009 as Yuaka mentioned, we didn't have a down year when things could be could have been more challenging. So let's talk about the model. At Danaher for those who follow 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. And the image on the right hand side is really a depiction of what goes on in the business. So 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.
2nd, we invest in our top talent. So 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%. So 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, very performance tied compensation model, which is tied to the goals of our business as well as the goals of our customers. So 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.
And then finally, continuous improvement. So making sure our team is they're one of their core elements of DNA is constantly looking for improvement. One of the elements of DBS is problem solving, right? DBS does a lot of has a lot of tools around problem solving. If you think about it, that's what Chemtree does.
We solve difficult problems for our customers and we're able to use that toolset to do that. So 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 2 more facilities within that network, which then spreads into 5 more facilities of people who know people within the industry.
So it spreads via network. And then ultimately we wrap it up with our CTVISTA solution, which is a digital capability. So how does it look when we go forward? This is a nice visual of how the business is built over time. 2,007, 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. And then we become a more North American covered business. And today, we've taken that model and continue to blow it out as we've expanded into Latin America so that we've got a broader presence. So we've been able to figure out ways to continue to drive this business forward. So putting it all together, it's all about our talent, building, creating the opportunities for our talent, the high skill level that we have in the application of their problem solving capabilities to create delightful experiences with our customers.
And then finally using that to build scale and expand across a broader geography. So 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 Phenomenix, great business. Shortly after the acquisition, their leadership team spent significant time with Steve and his team to understand how their flywheel works. And that model is now being implemented in the PhenomenaX very successfully.
Great. We have another Steve coming up, Steve Bell now. Steve has been in water and Danner for about 12 years. And Trojan that he is responsible for today is his 3rd water business that he is running. So he has obviously had the chance to build domain across the 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. So 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. So Trojan Technologies, as I mentioned, are either in UV and filtration. We serve the miscible, 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 nonrecurring or systems.
So 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. So 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 tower. You may have UV unit in your garage, under your sink for water filtration. The local municipality that's serving your home may well be applying this in a much larger scale as well. So 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 the contaminant removal side, this is really much more of an emerging play that we're seeing in the last few years, I'd even say probably 10 years plus now. Contaminants, whether that is from primary solids or things like dioxane, 14 dioxane or PFAs. These are contaminants, whether it's filtration that is used or UV technology. We're able to apply these in a different manner.
And 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. So how we win. I mentioned application expertise. We have the largest municipal install base, and 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 standards 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 switch over to a chemical free method. UV is chemical free. It's instant on, it's instant off. So 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, 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 3 years, we've had over 30% of revenues coming from new products launched since 2016.
And then 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. Jochen 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 to 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 describe double digit revenue growth. So in terms of application expertise, we've got a great track record here, 1st, 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 is facing, working on those big problems to drive solutions. Piloting is very important, obviously, in new development process. And 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.
However, all of these come with, let's say, some benefits and also some issues in terms of waste. So 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 $60,000,000 in a very short space of time, and we see that growing even further from here on out. New product development and innovation. I mentioned earlier making UV technology more accessible.
So 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, very important. Cities are already built around, so you're kind of landlocked. The other thing that we've been focusing on, as I mentioned, is the power output.
And 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 is one of those.
We've been able to use this to bring our time to market down by 50%. What Visual Project Management is, 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? So 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. This has delivered great results for us.
Certainly, in everything that we're looking at here, 2 common goals we have: safe water and low operating costs. Those are common themes across our businesses and across our technologies. Then 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? So 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 used the DBS toolkit from an organizational talent assessment, 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 diverse 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 TrojanUV capabilities in terms of treatment. And in terms of our win rates, 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.
So really, really great results in driving that commercial execution across our businesses. So putting it together. Trojan Technology 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 the full our poor water filtration side.
And 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.
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, right? So we're very excited about the future here at Trojan. Kevin Clough is the President of HAWK, and he is 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, 7 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. So I owe him 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, but Kevin is a frequent teacher of that for newly hired leaders.
So 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, but 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 3 areas, helping bring safe water to emerging communities, bringing safe water to refugee camps, and bringing safe water to disaster areas.
So 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 Hawke and now has the benefit of safe water. Darren?
Hi, everybody. This is Sean and I'm coming to you from a community in Cambodia named Anda. It's a community
of about a 1000 people.
And through the support from HOC and their walk water they did in 20 17, we're able to come into this country and provide a safe water project. So 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. So the water is 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 2 compartments, which allows for the proper settling time and enough time for the floor flooring and is stored on a tank on top of the tower. You see the storage tank, you see the solar panels up top, and then there's also a satellite water meter installed. And this information will be relayed to our platform so we can monitor projects from Charleston to anywhere around the water.
And then people can come here and gather water from the pre spigots to the Neville side of the house. It's
a great opportunity today to say thank you to
a lot of people. And one of the groups
I want to thank is
the HAWK Walk for Water Committee. Because without their leadership and selflessness and sacrifice and people here in the Endong village of Cambodia. So I wanted to ask Yum Tida, the operator, to tell us a little bit about what clean water means to her and and We could have done a better job with product placement. You did not see Hock test kits, but every day when Yam T. Da comes to work, she 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.
And 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. So if I see you at an industry event in the next several months, you can come up and ask where we decided to put our next system and I'll let you know. Now let me jump into Hach. This is an extraordinary business and really consistent with some of the themes you've heard today. 1st, we're built on tremendous applications expertise and really what we understand about water chemistry and biology.
2nd, we really have an outstanding tradition and history of innovation and leadership in terms of technology. And 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 Chemtree and from you welcome 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, will be about 55%. 2nd, in terms of geography, you 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. And then lastly, you'll see that about 3 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 $1,500,000,000 of revenue growing at mid single digits. And 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, Joachim 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. So think about folks in white coats making tests every day, think about a processor online environment. These are going to be people out in the field where water is running through the equipment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And then 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 2 reasons. 1, for regulatory driven decisions they need to make and the second is for process control. And 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. But there's another piece to this, which is that the HAC transactions and the products and services that we sell typically are much lower price point. And so what that means is a decision to make that purchase can be made lower in the organization. It's typically an operating expense decision, not a capital budget decision. And 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 2,009, the last time we had a real challenging macro environment, we were able to continue to maintain growth in Hach and 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. So 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. But 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 8 to 10 year life of that product, the customers are going to run tests using what we call our chem keys or single use consumables, kind of a razor and razor blade model.
And they're going to buy about $1,000 of chemistry typically a year. And over the course of that 8 to 10 years, the value of that chemistry would be about 3 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 in chemistries, but we've expanded that to increase the application range of that instrument. And so 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. So again, when you put that together, we have a tremendous installed 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 ad hoc in part because of our technology and innovation leadership. The reliability of the portfolio 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. And 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.
2nd, 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. But that is not 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. And 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. And 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 adviser.
And then 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, But there are hundreds of thousands of discrete customers, both municipal and those who use water in their production process. And the challenge of reaching them commercially should not be understated. And so 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. And we really think when you put the technology leadership and the commercial capabilities together on a global model, it's really what's driven the mid single digit growth over 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, 1st 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. And 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 Cornelius Gantz, Hawk's Vice President of R and D, will tell you a little bit more in detail how we've done this, but we have brought the time to market down on average for more than 36 months to 18 months.
And 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. And since then, it's really been heavily focused with organic development. And we started solving really important point problems for customers.
And 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 percent over the last couple of years. And as I mentioned, we've increased the cadence and the launch of new products by 25%, and really feel like the innovation engine is alive and well here at Hach. Joachim spoke to this slide earlier, so I'll try not to repeat some of the things he said, but our Clarios product and solution offering is really broken into 3 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, and then we help make a process decision.
We can turn on something like a fan or a blower, we can dose a chemical. And 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. So 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. And then lastly, data management. We're bringing in disparate data from all across the enterprise, Hawk Sensors and other instrumentation across the customer universe.
And 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 $1,000,000,000 of addressable market for Hach. And 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 clear our solutions into 4,500 customers. And 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. And so 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 customers' 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, Darren 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. But 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. And as customer buying behaviors 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. 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. And then lastly, as we've done these we've made these investments in technology and in the commercial organization, we've continued to expand globally. You also heard from Steve at Chemtree and Steve at Trojan, they've been focused in similar ways. At Hach, it's an extremely global business. And what we've learned is that the 5 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 and 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. And so in some cases, in China, for example, we have an R and 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 Applitech 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 2nd largest country in terms of revenue. And 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.
So 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. So 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 is really bright. Hopefully, you got a sense today for the differentiated business model with attractive position and 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.
And then lastly, this opportunity to continue to take what we've learned and apply 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. So I'm going to transition quickly and welcome my colleague, Cornelia, up to the stage in a second. But 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.
And for us, one of the big breakthroughs we've made here, which you'll see a little bit of this and the 2 or 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 and D, and really unlock some tremendous potential, not just for Hach, but for our customers. And so with that, I'm pleased to welcome up, Corneus Zygance, Hach's VP of R and D.
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. So 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. So for us, in each of these categories, we have many, many DBS tools. We won't go in detail in all of them, but I will highlight some that I believe are the hardcore and important part of our innovation.
Strategy starts off with the strategy. I think that is not too surprising. In the strategy, we identify with several DBS tools, we identify key attractive segments that we need to pursue, technology trends, market drivers. So that all comes together in a strategy. Out of that, we then know where we should focus as a company.
2nd, we do something as called problem to portfolio, P2P, yet another acronym. It's a very important process because now 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. Now it comes to execution. You need to map that with the resources. So after we do that, we involve a team called product planning team, which would include a president and his direct reports. And we would then make sure that resources are allocated to the projects that are the highest value project.
And then we go and execute those projects and monitor them monthly, they don't get stuck and that 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. And throughout the tour today, you will see these tools in actual environment. So it will be probably much easier to understand. But I'll try to describe what is the core and heart of those projects.
And not the least, the last category is launch excellence. I think you will hear some more about that from Darren, but 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, but it's not. It's really entered quite through the process.
So let me dig in a little bit into the new product development. What allowed us to achieve these fantastic results that you I think the heart 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 will develop it some more, go to beta testing, and then we would transfer to manufacturing.
And then after this sequential sequence, hopefully, we are done. But the problem with that is that can be highly non transparent. There could be an engineer working in the corner for 6 months bringing something to the prototype, alpha prototype and things don't work. You might lose 6 months at a time. And 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. So I think that's where speed design review really changes the game. I would consider that a breakthrough change in our processes for developing innovation. Starts with the voice of customer. Obviously, those tools are probably very familiar to you.
People go to GAMBA, they start the user workflows, they define personas that will be the final users of the product. But as soon as that comes back and this feedback is synthesized, the team collocates in a very large room. We like to call them Obehas. This comes from Japanese word. It just means big room, I understand.
I don't speak Japanese. But in this room, we co locate cross functional teams, and we are sure 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 4 weeks long.
So if I'm a developer, I know in 4 weeks, I need to bring such and such because this prototype is going to be assembled. And if I don't have something, let's say, I'm electronics engineer, I might not have printed circuit board in 4 weeks, I would just bring a cardboard or styrofoam, that's okay. And then we keep going. But because we do these 4 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 4 weeks, we learn something. With each iteration, we learn more and more and more. And this kind of breakdown of the work and constant checking and full transparency really results in something that is quite amazing. At the end of the at the last 4 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 Genaya will show you how this works, and we roll it down into production. And that's what saves months at a time. So 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 back end work with the launch excellence, that's where we really feel we made a breakthrough. So 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 3 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 shave 2 years in time to market. So 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 into 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. But you can imagine, because this is so many areas where we can play from predictive diagnostics 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. So DBS really came to the rescue. And besides the user experience tools, we call them UX DNA, we also in the recent years developed Danaher's software system. It's based on the agile methodologies for those of you who know how software is typically developed. But what is so beautiful that it runs like a production.
As soon as I develop the code, code is integrated, deployed. So literally within 24 hours, I know whether I develop something that is without bugs or I need to do something more to make it usable. And so 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, but here are some stats that will help you understand what this process is delivered. That it's not just me saying that there 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 and D resources, we are going to release 35% more revenue over the next period plan period for the strategy. On the software development side, with this agile methodology and this biweekly sprints that we have, like breakdown the problems in 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.
And I think that would definitely be assignable to DBS. And 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. And 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 and D resources who were used on instruments toward digital solutions and higher growth projects. So what you're going to see today is our new innovation center. It will be part of the tour.
So the new building is called Pikes Peak. It's about 90,000 square feet of new space. And I think what is so great about this building, it was designed really 100% around the speed design review DBS tool principles. So 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. So to put it all together, I think it's fair to say that we can consider DBS for innovation and all the growth tools competitive advantage for HAC. And not just for HAC, 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, Cornelia. 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. And we get the good fortune of being able to do that with in Hock here in a breakthrough R and D facility that we just opened 2 years ago.
So 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. So 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. And I'm going to welcome up Darren 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. And we just learned from Cornelia the importance of innovation. But innovation alone won't give you growth. This is where we come and talk about those commercial tools. And what I want to share with you today is how we've taken those commercial tools and how we've executed them here at HARC to drive to accelerate our growth and drive market share gain.
First, to come back to the 5 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 success. Water is 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. But how do we decide where we're going to go and where are we going to put our sales associates for maximum return? This 5 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. And this is what we've been able to do. Importantly, with each of the 5 points, we leverage DBS independently so that we can accelerate the performance of each segment. So we're using those same tools in each segment to drive those results.
And you can see at a high level in the last 3 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 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 2 or 3 points. By utilizing and executing on these tools, I hope to show you this morning how we've been able to do that at Hark.
1st 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. And those of you that had 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 in remote 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 as 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 sales force, 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?
But really focusing the sales associates on these leading indicators, we're able to get ahead of the curve. And with standard work, with strong weekly cadence on opportunity review, Importantly, at every level, nobody has exempt these funnel reviews. I attend every week a funnel review process with my direct. So I look at the top top X number of opportunities globally because those are big ones we win, and it's 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're making better sellers. To make better sellers, we need to build both commitment and competency. And we see where we've fully rolled out and deployed this, we're growing the funnel at an average of 15% CAGR.
But 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. So applying BBS, 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 5 point model.
1st, 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. So 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've done that work, we're 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 opportunities greatest opportunities for Hark. And 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 Joachim'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.
2nd example, inside sales. When you do the Gamba 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?
And what we learned was these small and medium customers weren't getting a heck of a lot of attention from our field sellers. So 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. And we enforce this with regular daily management, and we have a daily stand up meeting. The image in the middle there, you see some of the teams standing by the QDIC 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 ecommerce 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. So we said about a couple of years ago building the most comprehensive water platform in our space. This gave us true global reach in multi language.
It allowed our customers to buy as they wanted, when they wanted. Importantly, it got us into the prepurchase phase. Customers nowadays are not visiting exhibitions or not using so much printed material. They're doing that pre research online. Very important that we have a very comprehensive landing pages, solutions, applications so that customer can get educated on the HARC side whilst they're procuring their consumables and low ticket items.
This site has been a gold mine for opportunities for us. But 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 5 years. So 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.
So to summarize, let me leave you in no doubt, DBS isn't just for operations or lean. It's truly a competitive advantage for Hark 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, Darren. I didn't get that. Thank you. So you had the chance here to meet 2 incredible leaders who work in water. Cornelia joined ANR about the same time I joined, 9 years in water.
And Darren, 20 years in water and 14 years with us and ANR. Both of them are big contributors to the innovation toolkit within DBS as well as the sales toolkit. And 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. And they evolve these tools as well. You'll see them in action later on the gamma walk here.
By the way, I have 6 years in water earlier in my career, not with Danaher. And I guess my career is really summarized by this consumer packaged goods with water inside of it. Those are the 2 things I've worked with during my career. I'm going to bring it to a close here now, then we're going to do a quick Q and A and then we're going to go for a gamma walk, so you can see some of these things in practice. So I'll start with where we started this morning.
And 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. And the business model that we have is consistent with the rest of the Danner companies that has these elements that I walked you through. We compete on a device, There's a very interesting recurring revenue stream over the life of the device. We become intimate with a customer during that time period, get the opportunity to build service businesses, later on software businesses. And as we get more data, we can help customers with bigger, better outcomes over time, consistent with the other data platforms.
And that position has then allowed us with the great people we have the team to execute and build this platform that has this size growing at mid single digit rates and at very healthy profitability levels and more to come because we are still taking share. And 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. And when we think about how we make all of that happen, I mean, 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. And then just a quick reminder for you, we built this platform and this is the Danaher story again, right?
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. And 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.
And then, of course, we applied the other Danner 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 investment capital results here. So fantastic story here, I think. We've got a great franchise here in Water. And I know that some of the other platforms that perhaps you follow are a little younger in this journey.
So 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. So 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. But I know that many of our employees around the world are watching too. And obviously, none of these results would have been possible without all the great work that you're doing. So thank you so much.
We really appreciate it. And we appreciate the partnership, of course, with our customers around the world. None of this would have been possible without that. And 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. So with that, I'll invite my colleagues back up on stage.
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 am bringing up in the water area. QDIP is great, but I still believe it all starts with employee engagement, employee involvement. Shouldn't you shouldn't that be part of the mantra?
It is. It is very much so. We didn't cover it today in our presentation. But over the last couple of years, 5 or so years, we've and as part of the leadership toolkit, by the way, we 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. And so 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.
And we measure this. So there's a metric, of course, we're Danner, so we're quantified. And in our water businesses, 3 quarters of our employees would be categorized as highly engaged. And if you compare that to and we have benchmarks, of course, external benchmarks. So we are above the external benchmarks for in terms of how engaged our people are.
And 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?
Well, so we have an annual survey and then we measure a few things during the year. But 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. But 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. And 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. And so we've got a great length to talk or survey the details behind those main metrics once a year.
And then during the year, that will then lead to certain improvement activities, kaizen, of course, this is not just top down. We're all doing this together. So during the year, we'll run kaizen. 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.
So I have one macro and one product question. So the macro, I think you did a good job explaining why this business is not cyclical as one would think. How does this business perform during cyclical downturns? That's the macro part. And on the product part, e commerce, you had the 30% CAGR, but what's the revenue base and where can e commerce go in the next 3 to 5 years?
Yes. So, on the first on the cyclicality question, I think we mentioned that even in 'nine, we did not shrink. I mean, obviously, we don't live in splendid isolation from everything else that happens in the world, but we were still able to grow. And 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, but we're below the we're OpEx, not CapEx, as we try to show you, right? So we do not see slowdowns at all, like maybe some other higher value ASP transaction value businesses would see.
And 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, so then I need more service help to maintain the performance of the devices that I have. And in terms of the consumables, the recurring piece of our business, you still have to there are regulatory requirements, right? So you still need to test regardless of how things are doing sort of in the external environment. And then 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. So there's sort of multiple things that we can do when things maybe change a little bit in the external environment.
So a number of reasons. Then on the e comm question, I'm going to defer it to Kevin. Sure.
Thanks. I would say probably 2 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 of things. One would be how we execute, and how we continue to learn about converting those opportunities into revenue.
And the other one is we continue to scale that capability globally. And so 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 to 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.
Maybe it's Tycho Peterson from JPMorgan. Can you just touch on deregulation? I think there have been 85 environmental regulations dialed back in the last year and lot of focus on water recently in the Clean Water Act. How much of a headwind could that potentially be? And then a follow-up, you mentioned the medical device for chlorine analysis.
How big is the FDA kind of certainly, we read
the same headlines that you probably see in this regard. I certainly, we read the same headlines that you probably see in this regard. I would say the nice part of this business is it's highly fragmented. And so 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. But as some of these regulations have been in place for a long time, and those by and large continue, the EPA lifecycle also takes a long time from when they study something to when they convert it into a new regulation or really change the requirements. So there's really very 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 and 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. And so 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. So 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. And that's something we continue to evaluate is how well and how much we want to invest there relative to the opportunity. But I would say we've it's early days in some ways, we partnered with one of the leaders and we see the potential to continue to do that.
Yes, over here, It's Dean Dray from RBC. Just to spread some of the questions around. For Steve Hyer, when ChemTreat was first acquired, there was a recognition that there are some end markets that are more commoditized and more how do you more lot more competition, lower returns? Is there still this end market selectivity within your go to market for ChemTreat? And what are the attractive markets?
And 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. So what kind of presence there? And then lastly for Kevin, you have on these emerging contaminants like PFOS, they're measured on parts per trillion. You're not going to have a big lineup of HAWK mass spec, but there is linkages within like SCIEX.
Maybe you can talk about where and how these linkages for HAWK 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. So thanks, Dean. So from a ChemTREIT side, I think we have continued to stay very focused on the higher value, more complex problem elements and segments. So we've stayed purposely away from certain areas. And I think we're very comfortable with the segment mix that we have in delivering kind of growth that we expect.
So we stayed very focused.
Paul Waddagh. So, sorry. And 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. And so while we continue the growth, I think that kind of validates what you're saying.
So Paul Water, yes, Dean, you're correct. That is part of the Trojan Technologies business. Fabulous brand, great brand recognition. You specifically call that 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 continue.
And then the PFOS question that Dean asked, I would speak to a couple of things. As he said, there's really an instrument range within Hach, and we can get down to parts per million, parts per billion. But this particular measurement challenge gets you to parts per trillion. And it's really something that we continue to look at and explore. But 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. And as Dean is alluding to, one of the best parts of that from a HAWK 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. But here in water, they typically don't get into the space where HARC plays.
And so 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. But 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 kind of come at that from an indirect point of view with some other HAWK instruments that might not give them a direct measurement, but might help them as they're making a specific decision in their business.
Great. Dan Brennan from UBS. Just wanted to ask a question on China specifically. I know there's a lot of focus on high growth markets and 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 business has been in China? And then 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 Hock and Chojan?
Sure. So I would characterize where are we on the growth curve. As I alluded to in the prepared remarks, China is the 2nd largest country for Hach. And we've really grown it from pretty humble beginnings 20 years ago. So 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, straight partners. And so 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. And 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.
And so I think what's 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. So 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 benefited that Hach was able to benefit from. So 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 and some of the verticals you heard about, we continue to see sort of 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'd 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. But as we've done that in North America, we've done that in different regions. We continue to do that in China and both municipal and industrial, we're really excited about the uptick in UB.
But we're well positioned there. We've got a leader we have no expats, I haven't had expats for years. Our local leadership team, I mean, some of them, I would anticipate, would be running some of our global businesses here over the next years. We have local R and D capability. We put manufacturing there years years ago.
And the local R and D capability is relevant because like Kevin said, there are some unique demands in that market. And so 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, not just what they are looking to measure. And we're able to turn things around because we're local quickly. So I love the position we have in China. We're very well positioned there.
Doug Schenkel from Cowen. 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 trade dispute? And then 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 5 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. And the whole portfolio story is one about picking up growth rates and improving margins. So obviously, we have aspirations like that.
Going back to China, I think for it's not a 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 out, 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 and D there too, right? So, it's a game we're familiar with playing and we've played it for many years already.
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. So that does conclude our formal remarks. So thank everybody. Thank you to everybody who joined on the webcast.
Kevin is going to take us through our Gemba walk to