Well, good morning. How's everybody? How are we doing on the weather? It's pretty nice. The reason it's important, guess where you're eating lunch? Outside. It's always a bit risky. I think we pulled it off. It's like having a wedding. All right. Welcome. Glad to have you here, and we're especially glad that you made the trek to Naperville. This is where our water team is headquartered. We have our water R&D, our water university, which you can go through. It's one of the tours that Mike just highlighted, et cetera. I think there's a great opportunity to see additional capabilities that we have as a corporation as you come through here.
Many of you have beaten the rug, if you will, at Eagan a number of times. We thought it was good to get you in another facility to see the capabilities and understand it firsthand in real time. Here are the themes you're going to hear today. One, we're working hard, and I believe we're making strides and continuing to improve. We are a better company than we were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. We felt we were pretty good then. We know that the same has to be true 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. You can't stand still. You've got to continue to push, learn, and evolve, or ultimately, bad things happen. That's our mindset. We continue to work to do it.
That means you've got to be open to things that you're doing that aren't correct. We work hard to have that openness in the company because it is not a perfect company. We have 50,000 people, and the fact that it's run by people means, by nature, it's going to be imperfect, and so we work to understand it and drive it and move forward. Second, the world clearly has become more complicated. We always have joked that whatever era we're living is probably going to be considered the good old days, i.e., where people reminisce about how easy it was in 2019, and that may be true. We don't know. 2019 is what we're dealing with now and understanding how some of the things going on are going to impact potentially us, but honestly, more importantly, our customers. What does that mean?
What do tariffs mean, et cetera? A nutshell is we believe our strategy is as relevant, and I would even suggest maybe more relevant than ever. We know we're going to have to continue to adjust our execution of that strategy, given the reality on the ground. Finally, our opportunities remain huge and in front of us, and we remain focused forward on what we need to do to capitalize. Since we last saw you, it's been a busy two years. We reviewed, and of course, I reviewed what I said two years ago. As I was doing so, we opened with an update on Hurricane Harvey. That was the Houston event. Here we sit again with another hurricane, this one moving up a different part of the United States. It was sort of an interesting issue.
Harvey, obviously, was a monster issue for us because of its location in Houston and what it was doing to a number of facilities. We've done a lot in the last two years besides survive Harvey. We've invested significantly. The company's not perfect, but it's not underinvested, I will say that. We've made 15 acquisitions. We deployed SAP in North America. Ecolab now has 80% of its sales on an SAP platform. We have $380 million that's been invested in our digital technology. You'll obviously see a number of the results of that when we walk through both the trade show and the tours. We also built a life sciences business, really by taking two small parts of F&B and healthcare, putting it together to get a focused business, and it's now growing, it's like mid-teens growth rate. Doing great. We've grown share over this period of time.
We've added $2.2 billion net new business. That's new minus losses of chain business, stuff over $250,000. This is a metric we use because it's one of the best indicators for us of what kind of organic growth we should expect to see in our quarters. It's one of the better forward-looking indicators that we have in our business. Then innovation. This is really new technology introduced, and the $2.6 billion represents the going value that's expected at the five-year run rate, which is typically how long it takes us to ramp up technology in terms of the sales curve. As a consequence, we've delivered in terms of EPS growth.
When we were here two years ago, we were talking about our ability to ramp back up to double digits, and we quickly did so and have been delivering in the double-digit EPS range for quite a period of time. Dan will go in more detail later on today. We also sharpened our focus. Shortly after the meeting, we announced that we were selling our kitchen equipment repair business, AKA GCS. We also announced an efficiency initiative, and we have since and subsequently early this year announced that we are going to be spinning off our upstream energy business. Simply, Ecolab will go from one to two. The majority will be still called Ecolab, and these are 2018 numbers and will be $12 billion in change, obviously larger by the time we spin.
ChampionX, which is the name that the new business will be traded under and sold under the new brand, will be a roughly $2.5 billion business as we go out. Buying companies, not so hard. Selling or spinning companies, a lot harder. I won't make any marriage comments. I've had one wife, I've avoided divorce, but marriage and weddings are quick. I do. Divorces seem a lot messier. While this isn't a divorce from acrimony or anything else, disentangling a company from another is a lot of work. I would just like to say our team is doing a great job doing this, and it's important for us because at the end of this, we will be smaller temporarily, but we are going to be permanently stronger.
If you look at metrics, which we'll do in a second and Dan will walk through, or you just look at some of the qualitative standpoints, we will be more focused, we will be less cyclical, we are going to have higher returns, higher margins as a consequence. I'd say, most importantly, we're still going to have huge growth upside. Even after we get out of the upstream business, which isn't a small market, we estimate that our market in 2020 is going to be $130 billion. We're going to be roughly $12, $13 billion, hence the 10%, and we have significant upside. Now, strategically, we've always said we want to increase our market opportunity at least at the same pace that we grow our business so that we don't run into a wall.
We've all watched companies who are wildly successful and run and ramp up, but then they run into the wall, i.e., they gain the share they're going to gain, but they don't have the skills to enter a new business or enter a new market. We've worked hard to gain those skills, so we have them in advance, and we've used that skill to increase our market opportunity, and that's what the slide depicts. If you break this down granularly, you can see that we've got opportunity in every one of the businesses, including the top one, which is food service, which is a business we've been in as long as any other. As we've looked at this, we continue to enter new businesses. We announced life sciences.
I get asked all the time, "Is there another life science?" Yes, the answer is we have other opportunities. We believe we'll be announcing both of these, one probably by year end and the other in 2020 at some time, what businesses we're getting into. We tend not to tell people before we announce it publicly because then competition knows, and we're not really interested in giving them three or four months or six months head start in whatever they're going to go do. There are other opportunities, and we believe we've got good plans to get after them. It's the same logic that we've used in food retail, pest elimination, audit businesses, life sciences. Focus wins, and we want to make sure we have focused businesses getting after opportunities.
Now, with all that said, those markets are going to continue to be propelled going forward by the macro trends that we focused on. Population is going to grow. Tariffs are not going to stop that or belief systems. That population is also going to have an emerging middle class, particularly in Asia. That represents opportunity, but it's also going to create stress on Earth because that population is going to change its diet and it's going to demand more power. They're going to want air conditioning and refrigeration, just like the rest of the developed world. The two biggest uses of water, food and energy. We know a water-stressed environment is only going to become more stressed as a consequence of population growing and middle classes emerging.
Populations are aging at the same time in China, in Japan, in Europe, and probably in the U.S. if our immigration policy doesn't get figured out. As a consequence of that, we know healthcare and others have got waves behind them. Technology overshadows everything. The new advent of digital capabilities, their accessibility, their cost coming down, change the business equation for everybody. We want to make sure we capitalize, which we'll talk about. This nexus, which somebody famously called it, is more true today than it was when people started characterizing it as an important feature to look on. The fact is, water, energy, and food are completely interconnected. Demand on one affects the other.
If we are going to solve a way and find a means of feeding 9 billion people, we're going to have to do it with crops that take less energy and less water, or we're going to have to deforest the balance of Brazil with or without the fires. We are going to have to figure out this technology nexus, and we know water pressure is only going to increase. As a consequence, we like our positioning. We think it's very relevant. Clean water, safe food, abundant energy, and healthy environments is as relevant today as it was when we introduced it. We are making a difference here. You'll hear our businesses talk about best delivery in terms of results at the lowest cost. We are priced high. How do we get low cost?
We get it by delivering great results in terms of clean water and safe food, but doing it by reducing water and energy footprints for our customers. When we do that cost typically supersedes the cost of our programs. We end up to be quite an economic answer. Why is this important? It's important in good times, but it's really important in down markets because cost out becomes a high priority. When we can show customers how to do it without sacrificing quality, their ears perk up. That's what's driving the 188 billion gallons of water saved fact that we share frequently, or the 19 trillion of BTUs of energy saved for customers. Those two are related. When you save water, you save energy. We know that's an important part of our story.
It's important for our customer value, and it's also important for delivering on our purpose as a company and establishing ourselves as a very credible player in the world in terms of not just financial performance, but in value to society. While this is getting a lot of talk because of the Business Roundtable new pledge, I've never quite understood how you're going to deliver for shareholders if you hack off communities, customers, and your associates. It seems to me like a hard road to follow, that the only way to deliver for shareholders is make sure all folks are taken care of and you create a virtuous cycle. We've worked hard to do it, and we want to integrate our purpose in our offering, hence this idea of delivering best outcomes at low cost coming from reduced footprints in very environmentally sensitive areas.
We're recognized for this leadership. We're proud of that, but we don't rest on it. We can do more, and we need to do more, because more is going to be demanded. Those macro stats and situations remain, we believe, quite relevant going forward, but the micro trends aren't consistent. There's a lot going on. You know it as well as I. Turn on the news. We're watching it too. Some of this stuff is a lot of flares, and we can't chase every darn thing that happens, but we try to understand what it's going to mean for the world we live in. The political and trade policies and what it's going to mean for trade patterns, climate change pressure. We certainly have more consumer awareness. It's turning into activism. This is kind of a natural evolution.
We've seen it really have major effect in plastics in terms of focus on shopping bags and plastic straws. It's like a start, I guess. It's not going to change plastic in the ocean, by the way, but it's a start, and those are the things that we also can expect, I think, to take more shape and pressure companies and governments to continue to push in these areas. We don't think it's going away. We think it's going to grow over time. The what we do remains relevant and consistent, but how we do it's got to change. In a very simplistic way, here's how we depict it. Historically, our strategy's been to make where we sell. In China, something like 92% of what we sell in China is made in China. China isn't an export-import arm for us.
The plants there are really for China. The reason we did it wasn't because we foresaw tariffs, it was because we didn't want currency to be a strategic problem for us. It's always going to be an optical challenge, i.e., when you convert OI from one currency into another. We didn't want it to be, if you will, price us out of a market if all of our production was in the U.S. and the dollar got strong, suddenly we're no longer competitive. That was a genesis for that strategy. It's also proven to be a pretty good strategy in a tariff world because we don't have as much goods transferring as, let's say, other industries do. We also focused on best-in-class technology, which we'll consider and talent.
We know that talent technology are the secrets to our success, but we are evolving our global execution as a consequence of what we see is a bit of localization, and we want to be more in front of it. This is what I would call evolutionary steps and ones that we are really comfortable that we can take and frankly, we think will improve our ability to execute going forward. The global businesses will remain focused on what we call our three mega markets, U.S., China, and Europe. It's where all the money is. If you do a Pareto Chart of markets, even though how BRIC gets into the conversation or some of these others, all the money is in those three markets. They will be the three largest markets in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. It's almost impossible for that fact to change going forward.
That focus is there. We know we need to enable markets through more marketing and targeted R&D investments in key markets to enable them to get after local markets in a more effective way. That's a very small number of markets for us. Call it 8 to 10. We know that, we believe, is going to enable us to accelerate growth in our international businesses. It'll also move decisions and accountability closer to the market. Digital is going to foster better communication, better visibility through all this capability, and you'll see a lot of that through our 3DT, where we had an announcement, I guess, yesterday. I say, I guess, because I probably saw it three months ago. It's taken a while to get through the chain.
That type of capability is what's going to enable us to do this in a way and still, frankly, enhance visibility. While I'm on digital, I'll just talk this. We view digital, and it's a broad term, as a historic opportunity, and we believe it's really critical. We start, in our minds, with an advantaged position. There was talk a few years ago about us versus Amazon and the like, and I don't believe that's the way to think about it. We've discussed that a number of times. We view our advantage as a fact that we've got 3 million customer sites nearly, and we're collecting data in the vast majority. We're all over this. How do we leverage this advantage and this opportunity?
The fact that we collect unique data, unique data streams, nobody else would even know what to ask, gives us the opportunity to come up with unique answers for customers. Today, the vast majority of these 3 million sites, the data is housed and held into that site until one of our people walks in and downloads it on their computer or laptop or iPad through an RF port. We need that data connected to the cloud to give us a much better data stream, which is one of the objectives. Christophe will talk about our digital metrics, if you will, and one of them is how do we drive connectivity? With cost coming down, we can afford to do that as we move forward.
Creating this world, we believe gives us huge advantage in a way to make a step function change again versus competition, which is what we are set to do. We aren't happy with our current advantage. Whatever it is, it's not enough. We want to extend it. By extending it, we got to become more valuable to customers, and we believe this marriage of digital virtuous cycle and a field force that can actually deliver against what we learn digitally is the killer app in this space. Where we've won today with like a large retailer, why did we win? Was our software sexier? No. It was because we had a field team that could actually deliver against what we learned versus the digital technology. Their words. Learning it, not being able to do anything about it is maybe even a worse place to be.
It's very important that this fulfills and frankly, builds on our current capabilities. Benefits, we believe it's going to enhance our value with customers, point number 1, make us easier to do business with. We're not as easy as we'd like to be. Finally, it will also drive natural efficiency by helping our sales team become able to handle even more customers because we'll do a lot of their legwork for them in advance before they walk into the unit. All this, we believe, is what's going to continue to put us in a position to be true to our targets. 20% OI, which ultimately is the biggest driver of ROIC. We'll work to manage capital well, it's not a question of like having working capital as a magic answer for us.
The magic answer is make more money in our existing business on our existing assets. That's how we drive ROIC, and this combined will drive 15% EPS or put us in a position to regularly deliver, I would say, outsize EPS versus any of our peers, industries, indexes, et cetera. Today, you're going to hear from a lot on our team. Christophe will be up next, you'll also hear from each of our global presidents. We have a great team. We highlight our team. Our team is out talking to investors frequently. I don't know if there's another company that has as many people at investor conferences as we do. I'd like to say I invented that.
Actually, my predecessor, Allan L. Schuman, had me out and other people out early. It was a benefit, I thought, because it helped the team to understand not just customer pressures, but investor pressures and how you got to marry all these things for a happy outcome. We want to make sure that we stay attuned to investor and the financial community's concerns, opportunities, and everything else. It's important. The way we do it is we get out and we listen. You'll get a chance to see everybody today. As we go through, I think you'll understand how we can create a step function change and ideally even a better future for the company and in our value, that we still have a monster opportunity in front of us. We're focused on it. I would say more focused than ever.
Most importantly, what I'm most proud of, and I think what should give you the most confidence is the team. That's really what people bet on when they bet on a company. You can bet on the strategy and everything else, but somebody's got to execute it. Typically, if I even make little investments in my personal life, it's mostly around who's leading it and who's driving it, and I'm very proud of the team that's been built, starting with Christophe, who will come up and walk through some of the execution components of our strategy. Christophe.
Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Good morning to everyone. Good to be back here in Naperville and together with you. Welcome to this place that the mayor of Naperville actually calls the world water capital, which helps his community, as well at the same time. It's a little bit as well of a good description of the expertise that we have here in Naperville on the campus that you will have the opportunity as well also to visit and meet. We have over 1,000 people who are the world experts in water technology and science and how to turn that into business growth as well at the same time. Today, I'm also glad to be here together with our team to really share with you how we're going to continue to evolve, to continue to deliver high performance for our customers and for our shareholders, naturally.
As you've heard it as well, from Doug before, we're very uniquely positioned to win. Obviously by addressing some of the world's most pressing problems, like you've heard, at the same time as well, by focusing on delivering high performance year after year, but really focusing on seamless, exceptional execution day after day, which is the most important part. At the same time, as I will share with you, as well, making sure that we keep evolving as we've done over the past many years in order to stay ahead and really delivering better performance for everyone out there. Yes, we will keep growing because we're focusing on long-term growth trends like food safety, like clean water, like infection prevention, and abundant energy, as you've heard it many times. Most importantly is really that what we do is helping customers perform better.
You've heard it many times today, you'll hear it as well, and you've heard it as well over the past few years. It's really helping customers of all industries that we're serving perform better. We help them produce more products, better products, at a lower total operating cost. How do they get there? It's because they use less labor, they create less waste, they need less natural resources. Other call it sustainability, sustainable development. Well, for us, it's really seeing that as a means to an end to really help customers doing the right thing for the communities and for the consumers, which is a good thing, ultimately, for everyone. The way we measure that is actually an interesting metric that we call EROI. You've seen it as well so many times.
It's a very simple equation, is how much do we help customers save, and how much do they invest for that? Simple ratio, which is a return ratio, which is also driving, as you've heard it from Doug, the interest or continued interest from customers to invest more. The more they invest in what we do for them, the higher their return. In many cases, we even guarantee that return because we are so convinced that we can truly provide it to them. That helps us as well drive higher pricing, as you've seen it as well over the past few quarters. It helps us as well sell more in your business in more difficult times, that we hope will never come, but we know life comes in cycles as well.
When times are tougher for our customers, getting more productivity is ultimately something that's even more important for them. That's exactly what we sell as well to them at the same time. Ultimately, the most important part is really, to step back and to look at what's the opportunity that we have in front of us, $130 billion, which is post spin of Upstream, by the way. We're looking at that every single day and saying, "We have $118 billion out of $130 billion that we can go and get every single day." I talked about driving high performance. That's something that you've seen in the past. It's something that you will see as well, from us and this team as well going forward, because we're focusing on very simple things, at the end of the day.
Which is really focusing on growth first, which is new business and entering white spaces, as you've heard it as well, and I'll comment that as well in a moment. We work hard as well at improving our margins, even when it's difficult, by driving innovation and pricing that's driven by value for our customers, as you saw it as well a little bit earlier. Also working on our productivity in order to really leverage our investments for the good of our customers and our investors. Yes, it leads to great performance in terms of share or growth of earnings per share, as you've seen over the past few quarters. At the same time, we try to really work as hard as we can in order to improve the resilience of our model and the predictability as well of our earnings.
How do we do that? We don't have any magic solution. It's really working on the fundamentals that we're quite known for, really making sure that our portfolio is as diverse as we can, really leveraging the same model. You've seen it as what we've done as well in our water business that we segmented as well, creating Nalco Water Light, which has been a terrific story as well in the past. It's also expanding our footprint and being as spread as we can, but really focused as well on a few markets, as you've heard it from Doug. I'll come back to that as well towards the end of my presentation. It's also leveraged this unique opportunity of digital, with which we have acquired some of those, but also developed as well in-home, as you will see a little bit later.
Really working in continuous improvement. You've heard about SAP, 80% of our sales will be on SAP so very soon. We've as well worked hard on this efficiency initiative, which is leveraging the work that we've done over the past few years in terms of infrastructure, in terms of acquisition, and as well with the merger, so with Nalco. At the end of the day, it's all about execution. With our team, the four things that we're continuously talking about, and you'll hear that all along today as well, is really about this new business. We've had a great track record over the past few years, and this year has been a good one as well for that. Pricing has been a good story as well and making sure we deliver as expected, driven by value that we are creating for our customers.
Really getting the right innovation and not just innovating and bringing on the market, but implementing that properly as well, so with our customers to drive growth and drive margin, and ultimately making sure that we get as well more productive as an organization going forward. At the end of the day, it's about culture. It's this culture of accountability that is very close to our heart as an organization and is really making sure that we deliver what we've promised. We set stretch targets. We're famous for that, obviously, because we want to go this little extra mile, that we think maybe we could get there by running a bit faster, a bit smarter as well than competition. At the same time as well, making sure we invest wisely and properly as well behind our teams and our businesses.
Ultimately as well, delivering the short-term while we build the long-term as well at the same time. I'd like to talk a little bit about the longer-term and how we build it, and then come back to the short-term as we always do, because that's where we spend 80% of our time. If we think about continuing our evolution in building our future, well, it starts with what's the opportunity that we have out there. $130 billion, again, post the spin of Upstream, while we have $12 billion today. Interestingly enough, while you can see, the $118 billion that are out there. The interesting part is really the circle, the customer, which is the strategy that we've been following very successfully for many, many years. I don't even remember when it was invented, but it's been perfected every single year. What does it mean?
Circling the Customer means selling all our offering to one site in one customer. Circling the Globe means serving all the sites of that customer anywhere around the world. Circle the Customer, Circle the Globe has been very successful and useful for us and for our customers because it helped them as well get the best standards of quality and of performance anywhere as well around the world. How do we get there? Well, it's by leveraging our proven model, which is really having on-site service, and we firmly believe that our teams, our experts, going in a power plant, in a restaurant, in a hospital, in a pharma plant, well, are the ones knowing best the process of our customers. They're supported by technology, by chemistry.
They provide training and they provide as well data insights, which is what's coming out as well of our leverage investments, which will help our teams create even more value for our customers and our customers as well, to improve. As you can see on the right side of that circle in here, we can move from $12 billion, adding $46 billion by selling all our offering to our existing customers today, people we have already relationship with, and that's where we focus most of our time. It's easier to sell to those customer, and it's cheaper as well because we have people obviously so working already on those sites. At the same time, it's also about growing the pie. You've seen it from Doug, a little bit earlier today. This is something that we've been focusing on for many, many years.
We get there by globalizing our footprint, by segmenting our expertise, by expanding our offering, and enhancing our capabilities. This is something that we've been doing since 1923, when the company has been as well put on the market. As you can see, globalization, well, we started in North America, we expanded international, and now we're focusing really on mega markets. I'll come back to that as well. Our offerings are really focusing on cleaning and sanitation initially and now talking about infection prevention. It can be as well capabilities, where we were leaders in liquids, we moved to solids, and now it's really about digital and artificial intelligence as well.
It's a very natural evolution that we try to keep fueling as fast as we can, but really with a consistent view on where we came from and where we're going as well, so tomorrow. Let me take them one by one and illustrating with a few examples what I truly mean with that. Starting with the offering. We have many of those examples, but I think one of them, which is the most interesting one, is when we acquired Nalco a few years ago, which was really driven by that idea of bringing food safety, which we've been perfecting for many, many years, and water expertise together. Which is an absolute unique proposition because we need water to clean, and when we talk about infection prevention, food safety, ultimately, it's also driven by water.
Bringing that together, we're the only company that can truly do that on a global basis, which is very unique. We promised to deliver $500 million of sales synergies. After the merger, we've over-delivered that, as you know. Now we've moved as well towards an organization which is even more integrated to serve the global companies out there, the global food and beverage companies. You'll hear that as well from Nick Alfano a little bit later today. We're going towards the next period, so to get to the $1 billion. It's really leveraging water in institutional, water in healthcare, water in life science, which is one way of expanding really our offering and putting us in a place that competition so can't copy very easily. Which brings me as well to the capabilities, the second dimension as well, so to expand our pie.
You've heard it as well, this morning, technology development, digital being one of them, started many, many years in our company. Nalco put on the market 3D TRASAR in 1988, creating this concept of connected chemistry. That was three years before the internet was invented as well. Ecolab moved afterwards with remote monitoring for pools and spa. We've invented as well a new system for warewashing, like Apex, which has moved obviously into even better technology today. We connected thousands of sites as well around the world to the System Assurance Center, which is measuring performance and making sure that performance improves insights anywhere around the world in real time. As you've heard from Doug as well, we just launched ECOLAB3D, which is a new version of what was called Envision before. You'll see that as well later today.
With all those connected sites, what do we do with that data? It's been moved to the cloud, and we've created the largest cloud of Internet of Things connected devices in the industry as well. Very proud of that, a very good story, and that's just a continuation of what we started many years ago. We have very rich offering in terms of digital, for our customers in all of our businesses today. It's not all equal created. Some have started earlier, some have been there for a little bit less time as well, but everyone is really on that journey, learning from each other. Our customers, most importantly, believe in our technology and what we can deliver because we've been doing that as well in different industries or in different places around the world.
You heard it as well a little bit earlier today. While digital is not for the sake of being digital out there, many are talking about connecting a lot of things, not really knowing why the hell we do that. Well, we know exactly why we're doing that, it's driven by three objective. The first one is really so to drive revenue by creating more value for our customers. The second one is really driving productivity, our field sales, and service. The third one is to improve our operational performance. Those are the three pillars. All our investments in digital, the $325 million that you've heard as well from Doug earlier today, well, are invested behind those three pillars, which are improving customer performance, which means our performance ultimately, and building as well capabilities going forward. Talking about metrics. We are a metrics-driven company.
As you know, we have many metrics to plan and to drive our progress in digital. I'd like to share with you two, which are fairly critical here for us. One you just heard as well from Doug, is the number of connected sites that we have out there. The second one is the share of our sales that is digitally enabled. As you can see that, industrial is ahead. It's less sites. It's way bigger sites because those are plants, industrial sites, obviously. As you can see, 20% of the sites are connected. It's 40,000 plants around the world. This is a lot, and that keeps growing because the moment it's connected, well, we can help the performance get even better for our customers.
More importantly, we can drive CTC, Circle the Customer, as we've talked before, by adding new offerings, really helping the customers ultimately get to a place where their whole plant, their whole site is optimized across the world as well at the same time. It can be true for a food retailer, without naming them, for instance, and ensuring food safety anywhere around the world. We can do that thanks to that kind of technology. Really thinking, how many sites do we have connected, and how much of our sales is digitally enabled? As you can see, institutional represents the largest opportunity. It's 2.7 million sites out there, so we have thousands of sites that are connected today.
Well, it's a small percentage because it's millions of sites out there, and it's really a journey that we've started many years ago, and it's a journey that's accelerating today and that's going to accelerate even more tomorrow. It's good for customers, as mentioned earlier, for that example of this food retailer as well. It's also really good for us and for our investors at the same time, because the moment that a customer is connected, it's usually a customer that's going to stay as well much longer with us as well because it's important for them. While not only to have a real-time performance management, same time as well understanding where they came from in terms of data and as well driving it across their fleet as well going forward. A very good tool to drive retention as well for our business.
The third pillar in order to increase that pie, as mentioned a bit earlier today, well, it's to segment even further our expertise by industries. You've heard many examples during the past few years and as well this morning. We talked about Nalco Water Light. We talked about Life Sciences. Doug shared the two new ones that we're going to talk about in the future. Well, one of them I can unveil today because it's something that is happening right now. It's really focusing on data centers. You're familiar with that? It's obviously an industry that is growing extremely fast. It's an industry that we've been part of for a very long time, since it started, actually. It's an industry that needs huge amounts of water.
An average data center requires as much water as 80 hospitals on average because they need so much water in order to cool down the servers and the computers that they have in their data centers, obviously. What's most important for them is not so much how much they spend or invest with us in terms of really cooling the operations. It's making absolutely sure that their operations never stop because we always want to be connected as consumers, as you are right now, for instance. The second segment is one that we will talk probably more in the year to come that we're preparing as well, and I think we will have prime time in the next 12 months.
The last pillar, really to expand our pie, as mentioned before, is really to drive this globalization, to really get the right organization, which needs to be very agile, and we have a very agile organization, at the same time being really focused. We want to make sure that our global businesses are focused first and foremost where most of the money is, as you've heard it, and that's really North America, Europe, and China. We have a separate but really well-connected organization that we call the international markets, where it's much more empowered at the local level to do what's right without creating any distraction for our global businesses. At the end of the day, and I'd like to wrap up on that, it's about three major priorities, which are execution priorities for our people around the world. It's really about driving your business.
This is what's most important every single day when we wake up. The second one is really sort of driving our margin through pricing and innovation and exceptional service, as you know. Last but not least, it's building our teams, our capabilities in order to drive productivity anywhere around the world. At the end of the day, I think that we are extremely well-positioned with where we are today, but even more where we're going tomorrow with a great team, great capabilities. We have a proven model of Circle the Customer and Circle the Globe that's been successful for many years.
We're bringing it to the next level, thanks to new technology, as shared with you, and the high performance that we've been delivering to our customers and our shareholders over the past few years, well, it's going to be the same story as well going forward because I think that we have the best team in the industry, and you'll see that as well in action during the day. Take as much opportunity to discuss and ask questions and really share views with our teams. We would love to get your input as well, and I hope that you're going to have a great day. With that, I'd like to introduce you to my friend and successor, Darrell Brown, here in Naperville, who is going to share with you the story on water. Darrell?
Okay, good morning, everyone. I'm Darrell Brown. I've been with Ecolab now for 17 years and now lead our industrial group here based in Naperville. What a fabulous day we have here today. The weather is absolutely beautiful. Coming from Houston, this is quite the change for me. Nalco Water have a fabulous opportunity. We have a really great growth opportunity. We see the increasing need to manage water globally. We find that customer core needs are something that we're focusing on deeply within the organization, making sure that we cover off the deep needs they have around water and also energy. We have very strong and sustainable growth momentum right now in the Nalco Water business, and really emphasizing the need to create and maintain value with our customers.
We have a very unique global capability, both from a capability perspective, but also from a supply chain and network capability perspective across the globe. We're also making sure that we're enabling our global offerings around the globe as well. When we look at the Nalco Water model, water in, water out, and the processes in between, Nalco Water do a fabulous job managing that. Whether it be pre or post-treatment, whether it be on cooling process water, we have solutions for all of that, making sure that in every single way, we're creating value for our customers, and making sure that we deliver on our promise. The three main things that we're really focusing on here, minimizing water, maximizing results, and also optimizing total cost of operation.
For the world, we have the ambition to reduce the industrial water consumption, which also leads to $300 billion worth of water saving, which then leads to drinking water for over a billion people in the world. We're also very heavily segmented. It's a strategy that we have in the organization. You can see from the Nalco Water team here, we have five global divisions, light, heavy, mining, paper, and downstream. We also operate across 11 global industries across four core platforms, operating in 170 countries. We have a very ubiquitous footprint across the globe with very strong segmentation subject matter expertise. We have a big opportunity. Christophe talked about it, so did Doug. We operate in a $47 billion market, we only have a 9% share.
When you take a look at the sales that we have by region, yes, we have a big share in North America, 50% of the pie, but then also in Greater China and Asia Pacific, 20%, Europe 15%, Latin America 10%, and the Middle East 5%. When we take a look at our business portfolio by segment, we feel that we have a very balanced portfolio. Downstream 25%, which is a new entrant into the industrial group. Light at 25%, Paper 20%, Heavy 20%, Mining at 5% and other. A very balanced portfolio across the segments that we operate within. We also have very strong strategic ambition. We'd like to grow our business 6%-8% organically. Of course, making sure that we are the global leader in water treatment technology and management.
Leveraging the digital solutions and the investment that Christophe talked about to make sure that we're strengthening our offerings day in and day out for our customers. Making sure that we, again, minimize water, maximize results, and drive an optimization in total cost of operation. Making sure that we meet our ambition of delivering 300 billion gallons of water by 2030 and delivering drinking water for 1 billion people around the globe. Let me talk to you a little bit about the performance and the acceleration of the performance. As you can see over a 3-year CAGR from 2014 through 2016, we grew at 3%, and we've really stepped up the growth over the last three years, including 2019 to 7%. We have an ambition to grow 6% to 8%, we're midpoint of that ambition right now.
Continuing along a very good journey to continue to accelerate the growth in the business. We feel that we have our growth fundamentals in place. Again, you heard Christophe talk about Circle the Customer, Circle the Globe. That continues to be a very strong theme for us in Nalco Water, along with the growth strategy we have around retain, grow, gain. Retaining our best customers, growing within those customers, and then bringing on new business. New business acquisition for us, incredibly important. Of course, across these four pillars, making sure that we have long and deep customer relationships, driving that global knowledge platform and training activity we have, not only for new entrants but also for existing associates. Making sure that we have a world-class sales and service organization and leading in innovation, and making sure that we're making the appropriate investments in digital.
When we think about digital as a growth lever for industrial and for Nalco Water, it's driving three main pillars. It's enabling us to drive revenue, increase our productivity, and maximize customer performance. You can see on the bottom there's a lot of initiatives that we have that fold under each one of those. What I would say is that Nalco Water has been involved in this digital space now for 30 years. As Christophe said, back in 1988, we started, and so we have a very strong global footprint in this regard. We're collecting a lot of data. 90 billion pieces of data are being collected each and every day that fold into all of those customer insights that Christophe talked about, which again, drive value for our customers.
When we look at water innovation strategy for Nalco Water, we're making sure that we're focusing on growth markets. We're making sure that we understand the mega trends that are occurring in the markets. We're making sure we also understand the differentiated technologies that it takes, I think you'll see some of that today as we showcase some of those. Also making sure that we continue to create and maintain value for our customers. We want to create it, we want to collect it, we want to communicate it, and we want to make sure that we maintain that value each and every day for our customers. To do that, we have an integrated offering.
That integrated offering that we have around chemistry, monitoring and control, performance models and data analytics and insights, as well as making sure that we have a good understanding of how we manage our customers' assets, and also understand the performance of those assets and dashboard those so that we can benchmark them, is incredibly important for us. When we look at our innovation pipeline, and again, you'll hear Larry talk a little more about this during the research and development engineering piece, but I thought I'd just touch on some of the innovations that we've got underneath the segments that operate within industrial. Firstly, on the heavy side, OMNI is one for condensers that we're working very consciously on. PURATE, which is a chlorine dioxide generation chemistry. Downstream, you'll hear a little more from Larry today and the team on CrudeFlex, which we're very excited about.
In the light space, LegionGuard, also 3D TRASAR, solids for cooling. You again heard Christophe talk about the generation from liquids to solids, and you'll see more of that today, particularly in the light space as we've segmented that particular business portfolio. On the mining side, oxalate control, and on paper, of course, we have some new dry polymer applications with Altus and also Filatech technology. A lot happening here. We feel we have a very strong and robust innovation pipeline in Nalco Water, and it continues to improve. Our service model really is the fundamental of how we take care of our customers. It has four pieces to it. The segmentation, which we've already talked about, making sure that we have dedicated subject matter expertise down the vertical.
These are very technically oriented segments, and we need to have that subject matter expertise aligned with those segments, and I think we've done a very good job achieving that. Training is incredibly important for us, for our existing employees, but also for new employees joining the company. We have a lot of accelerated university programs in the company. You'll be going through our water university here today if you're on one of the tours. Really take the opportunity to see how we onboard our associates and train our associates to understand the complexities around some of these segments. Customer insights from those 90 billion data points that we're collecting each and every day. Of course, making sure that we can enable our field team to drive productivity and gain that extra edge to make sure that our customers get the value they deserve.
In terms of long-term growth trajectory, we know that there's a differential between demand and supply around water supply heading into 2030. We know that there are stressed water environments around the world, and we're doing everything we possibly can to make sure that we address those. We also understand that the demand for water solutions in industry is outstripping industry growth. Now, that's a gap that we see as a huge opportunity for us to be able to fill. Of course, the cost of water just continue to increase, and we see those each and every year, and here's a couple of examples just across a couple of countries where you can see exponential increases in water cost, which we're focused very heavily on in regards to us making sure we understand what those costs are and how to best manage those for our customers.
In regards to growing our market, we know that we have a $47 billion market, there's a lot we can do to increase the scope and drive expanded offerings. Three areas we're concentrating on. The new technology, new services, and unique chemistry services. Again, you'll hear a little bit more about these expanded offerings as part of the tour today. A couple just to point to. Filtration treatment, wastewater, and pretreatment in new technologies. Big developing areas for us and expanded offering opportunities. Certainly in regards to consulting and on-site service for new services where we see opportunity to expand our revenue, I'll talk a little bit more about that in an upcoming slide.
Of course, 3D TRASAR, which we've managed to leverage now for over 30 years, driving our protected chemistries and making sure that we can understand how best to leverage that data in terms of personalized service delivery. Downstream. One of the pleasures that I had was to lead the Downstream business when I was running energy for Ecolab. I'm pleased to say now Downstream forms part of the industrial group. It's a fabulous business. It's an annuity business. It operates in a very segmented approach like we have in the balance of our businesses in Ecolab across refining, fuel additives, ethylene, reactive monomers, and polymers. Highly technical, highly annuity-based. The business model for Downstream is almost an exact replica of what we have in our other industrial businesses, so it's a great fit.
We think that we have a great opportunity to continue to expand some of the offerings we have in the hydrocarbon space. Again, as Christophe pointed to a little earlier, it's downstream plus water. There's huge process and water opportunities in the downstream refining and petrochemical areas. In terms of expanding our end-to-end offerings, we think there's exponential growth opportunity for us there as well. Here's just a couple of examples from our light business in transportation, food and beverage, and also data centers where we feel we already have an offering, we already have revenue streams.
We feel we can expand those offerings simply by going a little deeper and making sure that we circle the customer, circle the globe, and get everything we possibly can within the confines of whether it be a refinery fence, whether it be a food manufacturing facility or a data center. If we look at transportation, owning the paint booth for us provides us what we think to be a 5x potential in terms of future growth opportunity. In light industry, we know that if we concentrate there, we can get an 8x increase in our revenue. Some of those sites now around $65,000, we feel we can take those to over $500,000 simply by looking at different applications within the same site. It may be cooling, it may be water, it may be wastewater treatment, it could be pest elimination in terms of circling the customer.
Lastly, in terms of data centers, driving new offerings in data centers. Driving managed operations, water technology, adiabatic cooling, which is a big play for us in the data center space, and also digital insights. Lastly, and to close, I think we're uniquely positioned for growth in Nalco Water. We have sustained business performance, as you've seen in the last three years. Our performance in terms of growth has kicked up substantially up to 7% CAGR. We feel we are making very impactful innovations for our customers, driving those digitally enabled solutions, making sure that we stay true to the segmentation of the business and driving corporate account growth. Not only growth with our corporate account customers, but also with our team, and making big investments in the corporate account environment. Making sure that we continue to create and maintain value for our customers.
That's an absolute critical piece for us, driving that value not only through what we do out in the field, but how we price our products and programs and how those fold into the value proposition we have as a company. Lastly, making sure that we expand our offering. Circle the customer, retain, grow, gain has been a fundamental growth strategy for Ecolab, I think, since day dot. We'll continue to drive that strategy. We see huge opportunity there to expand our growth revenues around that expanded offering. We also want to make sure that we have a continued focus on the protected chemistries and technologies we have in the organization. Again, you'll hear a little bit more about those today. I think without any further ado, that's it for Nalco Water. Questions, please, if you have any. Yeah.
The growth from 2014 to 2016, step up to 2017 to 2019, what enabled that growth to accelerate so quickly in that time frame?
I think it's a couple of things. I think growth for us is partly volume and partly pricing. I think we've done a very, very nice job over the last couple of years understanding some of those inflationary headwinds that we've had and being able to price for those and being able to price for them in a value environment. Yes, we've seen incremental increase in our volume growth, but we've also seen a growth aspect related to the pricing activity and the value that we're able to capture with our customers. I think it's a combination of both pricing but also volume growth.
Darryl?
Yeah.
Hi, Mike Harrison with Seaport Global. You talked about the potential for exponential increases in the cost of water. I know that at least in the past, there are some regions of the world where the actual cost of water is kind of separated from or divorced from the real economic cost. Are you seeing that there are certain regions of the world where the market cost of water is really starting to change and you're starting to see that have a real impact on customers in those regions where water is becoming more scarce?
Yes, we are, but I would say the pace of change there is glacial. I think that's the big issue. You looked at the chart a little earlier there where we had all of those distressed areas that we saw around the globe, all of the areas in red. More often than not, the areas in red had the lowest cost of water, and they're the areas that are changing the slowest. I think if we can gain some momentum there to try and drive an improved circumstance where those areas are driving higher costs of water, I think we'll then start to see some change. We certainly haven't seen that today, and I think that the pace of change there is a lot slower than we would anticipate and certainly a lot slower than we'd like.
Talk water and energy.
Yeah.
Energy. If you reduce water, you reduce energy.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Doug's just making the point there. When we reduce water, we absolutely reduce energy at the same time. That's a concentrated focus we have to make sure that two go hand in hand. We see that in almost every environment, in almost every customer base that we have, whether it be in a downstream space, whether it be in a food and beverage space, or whether it be in Nalco Water Light space. Where we reduce water, we always reduce energy.
Shlomo.
Hey, it's Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the institutional potential from digital. You talked about 2.7 million customer sites. How many of these sites are realistically an option to be digitally connected? There are certain sites that are just kind of the smaller end, they're never gonna migrate over there. For the addressable amount of these, is this an 80%, 50%, 70%? How would you think about that? Then kind of the leverage you can get after you're able to collect data over there. If you can just put some numbers around that. Yeah, look, I think it's a great question. It's probably something that Tim's more capable of being able to answer than me. Tim, that's more of an institutional question than it is an industrial question.
Maybe if we can kind of hold that question over, and Tim could probably take that as part of his Q&A session.
Hey, it's Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Just a quick question using the data center opportunity as an example. They've always needed water for cooling and so forth. I guess what I'm just trying to frame is, how do you find these breakout opportunities, and I guess what's the limitation in taking so long to find them?
Well, I think it's certainly a new area for us. We see it as a huge opportunity, of course. One of the things about data centers, and this is very new to me as well, is that a lot of the data centers that exist around the globe aren't exactly visible. Having access to those in the early days, I think, has proven to be a little challenging. We're now getting that connection, and so we're now understanding how the customers are positioning themselves around the data centers that they have and the future growth potential that exists there. As Christophe said, it is huge for us. These data centers use an enormous amount of water. Their number one imperative is to make sure that they have zero downtime. It is 100% uptime all the time. Yes, they're huge consumers of water.
We need to understand exactly where these facilities exist and how best to access them. They're highly connected in certain geographies, and there are customers there that have these data centers in multiple geographies, which we see as an opportunity around circle the customer, circle the globe. We see a big opportunity not only to drive what we have on our existing portfolio, but also to drive that into different geographies where they have an expanded platform.
Can I add something maybe just to that? The data centers opportunity is something that has been evolving so quite interestingly. Over the past few years, it was mostly owned by individual companies. In the past, it can be banks, it can be us, by the way, as well. That's something that is shifting. Now those are the Amazon, the Microsoft, the Google, the Facebook, and all those companies. The way we sell to them has changed dramatically in a way that we are used to sell because it's selling over the counter, bringing our technology to global companies that are just doing that. That's why it's such a sweet spot, so for us. Just wanted to add it, that perspective as well.
Sure. Good. Thank you.
Yeah, just a question. You'd shown on one of the slides in terms of the industrial applications in the digital connectivity, where 20% of the sites are linked and about 13% of the sales are linked. I guess on that data source that you have, that 13% of the sales, is the margin and profitability on those sales versus the rest of the industrial segment, is it stronger? Can you speak to the turnover that you see at the ones that are digitally connected versus the ones that are not digitally connected?
That's a great question. Yeah, we do see higher margins in that environment, and we see a much stickier approach in those accounts for sure. We know where we have digitally enabled solutions driving better customer value in those facilities, we end up having a much, much higher retention rate. We're actually tracking that as well, particularly in our downstream space, where we've moved very heavily towards the RK platform solution. We know where we have RK installed, we have a much higher retention rate there, and we see much 8 margins. Great question, and yes, that's exactly the case.
Okay, thank you. Now we'll have Nicholas Alfano present F&B.
Okay. Nicholas Alfano, Global Food and Beverage.
All right. Well, good morning. Darrell, thank you for that. My name is Nick Alfano, and I've been with the company for 24 years. Different roles, sales, marketing, general management. Now I have the privilege of leading the global food and beverage business. What I'd like to tell you is, food and beverage is a $2 billion business organized in the following segments. The first one is obviously our dairy and agri business, which essentially we follow it from where the milk is produced into the plants, where it ends up into cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter, and even infant formula. We move into protein. Protein is about raw and ready-to-eat chicken, beef, pork. It also includes now the non-protein forms, plant-based protein that we see now into those plants.
Food processing is a very large segment for us. That's comprising baking, snack, produce, meals, confectionery, condiments, and soups and sauces. That's a very big one for us. Lastly, beverage and brew, which is a considerable segment for us. That's all about carbonated soft drink, water, energy drinks, and then the big mass-produced beers, craft brews and spirits. At the bottom of the chart, what you see there is what we deliver every day is food safety and operational efficiency through the platforms you see there. CIP is the major cleaning platform. Antimicrobials is how we kill pathogens and spoilage organisms. Bottle wash, you see that a lot in beverage and brew. Conveyor lubrication, that's a major platform for us. That's keeping efficiency in the beverage and brew facilities, moving the bottles and cans down the line efficiently. Okay.
If you think about opportunity, we've all said the same thing. We play at food and beverage in an $11 billion addressable market. We've got less than 20 share, there's plenty of room to grow there. As I mentioned before, this is a truly global business with good balance between the two mega markets in North America and Europe and the emerging market portfolios in Asia, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, and China. The growth in consumption of protein and processed foods in Asia, Latin America, and Middle East, Africa is a great opportunity for us, along with our ability to expand our dairy platforms globally into markets like Greater China, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. As Darrell said, the business continues to accelerate sales even as our customer growth stays at low single digits.
Our ambition has shown 6%-8% top-line growth, and we're right on the path in the midstream to achieve that. We're growing well in the largest global food companies. As our value prop, we've mentioned this before, integrating hygiene, food safety, and water conservation is resonating well with the largest customers. Additionally, innovation and digital provide new sources of revenue and promote excellent customer outcomes and solid gross margins. I'll show you a few examples of that later on in the presentation. We continue to aggressively price to stay ahead of input costs and drive value delivery to customers to get paid for it. If you look at this slide, the mega trends are clearly in our favor, namely food safety and changing consumer preferences, where we see a lot more health and wellness and natural and organic products becoming very important.
The need for hygiene solutions in our business increases as preservatives are removed to produce clean label products. Similarly, productivity and sustainability enabled by digital solutions change the outcomes we deliver. Our customers then desire the best results at the lowest total costs, and the integrated model we form between Nalco Water and Food and Beverage on end-to-end solutions positions us uniquely to capitalize on this. Now, on the topic of consumer preference, I wanted to take you through this very quickly. You see the evolution here from taste and price, which were the initial tickets to entry for the food market for many years. 20 years ago, with the onset of two parents working, meals being consumed outside the home, more ready-to-eat and prepared meals, and better packaging, now you see convenience becoming a major attribute for food companies.
Today, it's all about health and wellness, simple, clean labels, natural ingredients, and staying ahead of consumer reactions on social media. What I wanted to do was show you how two of our customers have fared against those trends I just talked about. If you look at Hormel, for example. Hormel is one of our preeminent protein customers globally. They started out as a basic pork producer. As you move to the right on the slide, what you see is they got into ready-to-eat through SPAM. They entered into the turkey market in the mid-'80s. Right. You see the shift towards natural and organic. Right. Some brands that they acquired, of course, now they're into non-meat protein and a big ethnic foods portfolio. Similarly, if you look at PepsiCo, another one of our large global customers.
They started out as a carbonated soft drink company, then moved into sports drinks, then moved into juices with Tropicana and Naked Juice. They have a huge water platform driven from Aquafina and others. Now they're into probiotics, which is KeVita, which is a very sensitive beverage they produce. On the bottom of the slide, you all know the Frito-Lay brand. Right? As the preeminent snack brand. They're moving also to healthier. Right? They acquired the Quaker business. Right? Sabra. Then now they're into protein and things like that. Here's the situation. In that same period of time as those customers have evolved, we've evolved with them. Our sales at Hormel in that period of time have doubled, and our sales at PepsiCo during that period of time have tripled.
The reasons are, as you move to the right on that slide, what you see is preservatives are minimized, the shelf lives become shorter, rapid changeovers due to SKU proliferations are the norm, and more natural ingredients are used. When those things happen, the need for cleaning and sanitation hygiene goes up. Our value proposition, as Darrell said, continues to change to these large global customers. You think about where we started in this business, it was on the right-hand side of the slide. We were a food safety business focused on the key unit operations in a food plant. You'll see a CIP system there, you'll see conveyor systems, you'll see bottle washing. That's all around treating stainless steel surfaces for food safety. With the Nalco acquisition, 2011, now we had the ability to follow the water influent to effluent in a plant. Right?
Now we had that holistic view that Darrell talked about of following that water and helping our customers reuse and recycle it. Okay. The intersection of those two, if you think about when the hygiene side and the water side came together, now we're reusing water. We're taking water from the plant side. Right. In this example shown here, it's taking water from a CIP system that's used as a rinse and repurposing it back into the utility side of the plant. Right. We call this our reduce, reuse, recycle. That's a very powerful message to our customers in terms of integrating a food safety offering and a water solution for the best outcome possible.
Now, on the topic of the large customer value proposition, we took Circle a Customer, as was mentioned several times, to a new level in 2018 by forming a dedicated enterprise selling and marketing team to focus on the 30 largest food companies in the world. Okay? The team delivers the value proposition I described on the last slide, focused on food safety, sustainability, and operational efficiency at the lowest total cost. We experienced great receptivity to the approach and are winning big with some of the customers you see on the slide, and well-positioned to deliver this model anywhere in the world based on our large network of field associates and technical support.
This was a big move for us, and when you think about the future growth of the business, it was a bet on big customers, it was a bet on the integration of food safety and water, and taking it to the biggest food companies in the world, and delivering on that promise. Okay. Digital and innovation. What I wanted to talk about here is the way that we view digital innovation in the business is we try to couple it as much as possible. Wanted to take you through where the markets were before we took this approach. If you think about a dairy plant, you see a lot of analog monitoring. In a dairy plant, you'll see a chart recorder there just recording point-by-point data.
Similarly, in a protein plant, you'll see people doing manual titrations to make sure that the concentration of the chemicals are in the right range. Now with the combination in our dairy business of Synergex, which is a sanitizer, and 3D TRASAR, we're continually monitoring the performance of the chemicals in the system. We're taking data points, millions of data points, and making sense of it, and we're giving our customers a real-time view of what's happening in that plant to stay ahead of problems, increase their quality and their shelf life. Similarly, in a poultry plant, we've combined our InSpecx 250 antimicrobial with our antimicrobial InSight digital platform. What that does is it real-time monitors the concentration of the antimicrobial in the chiller, makes adjustments real time, reduces pathogen risk, and keeps the customer in compliance.
To show you an example of that in real practice, this is it. This is a North American poultry producer. In this particular operation, we installed both solutions, the InSpecx 250 antimicrobial and the antimicrobial InSight digital solution. We were able to take this customer from what's known in the industry as Category 3. Category 3 is a higher level of salmonella on the chicken to Category 1. Okay? Category 1 is the highest quality chicken you can produce, and then that would be obviously sold for a higher price to the quick-serve restaurant organizations. Additionally, because we're controlling the pH better through the antimicrobial InSight, we use less commodity caustic for pH control and use a lot less water. When it was all said and done for this customer, $18 million of value created, okay?
That's simply because switching from Category 3 to Category 1, the better quality poultry resulted in a much higher level of sales for them. Okay? Here's another example in our dairy. This is a North American whey producer. In this particular plant, we dropped in our Synergex most advanced sanitizer. What Synergex is, it's a 1-stage sanitizer, so it eliminates the need to do an acid rinse. Okay? Here what happened was, we were able to give them a better operation, reduce the amount of CIP time, and because there's no acid, no nitric acid, zero nitrates in the system. What that allows them to do then is sell that whey to the export market, generating a lot more revenue. Again, with the overall reduction in chemical usage and time on the CIP system, we reduced their water by 1.2 million gallons.
Creating $15 million of value for this customer, mostly driven by the fact that the better quality allows them to sell that whey to the export market. Okay? If you think about the future of food and beverage, we think we're in a very, very good position right now in terms of where we go. I talked about our segment approach. We like where we are in dairy and bev and brew. The protein segment continues to globalize outside of North America and Europe. We like that. We entered a new segment this year called biofuels in North America, which is the ethanol market. We followed emerging trends like small food. Small food is cropping up everywhere, so there's lots of different offerings. We have the ability to get to those small food companies.
A lot of what they manufacture right now is manufactured in co-manufacturing plants, so we have a good footprint to go after that. If you think about digital and innovation, I talked about that a lot. We like the fact that we're coupling a lot of our innovation offerings with digital to give the customer a much better outcome. One of the things that we like very much is, and how we're thinking about the market in the future is, it's a concept of what we call clean to clean. What that really means is today our customers clean based on time. We think there's a time in the future we can get them to clean based on demand.
We can tell them when they need to clean, for how long, and then get their capital assets and their valuable piece of equipment back in production quicker. Okay. Just in summary, when you think about food and beverage, I think we're very well positioned to continue to accelerate sales, capitalize on global trends at the segment level, and use the enterprise selling model to maximize customer operations. As the two case studies illustrated, the combination of products and digital generate superior outcomes and new revenue streams. We remain committed to provide the best result at the lowest total operating cost. I'd like to thank you for your attention, and I think now we'll open it up for some questions.
Thank you. Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley. Could you talk a little bit about the sort of this plant-based protein trend and just sort of the intensity of that process for your products versus the sort of traditional meat-based proteins and sort of where the opportunity is there?
Yeah. You know the story there. It's picking up very fast. There's a lot of interest in it both, and there's two types of it. There's the plant-based, and then there's the cultured. Right now, the plant-based is on the market. We have several of those customers, so Beyond and Impossible are customers right now. There's no change. There's absolutely no change in cleaning and sanitation in those type of plants. As a matter of fact, because they're so worried about the taste profile, they are amping up what they do from a cleaning and sanitation standpoint, and very much worried about any kind of carryover in the plant. We're seeing good receptivity to our programs from a cleaning and sanitation perspective. We like the category. The category to us, it's growth for us.
We don't see it coming out of any other sources of protein right now, and we're well equipped to go after it.
Thank you.
Over here in the bleachers. John Roberts from UBS.
Yep.
How penetrated is water into the food and beverage customers? Are you nearing saturation that you've got almost all of the Ecolab legacy food and beverage customers now on Nalco Water?
That's a great question. No, we're not having saturation at all. I think as I talked to you, we made a bet on that, the initiative last year on the 30 largest customers. We're focused on some very, very big operations right now, big customers. I think our penetration rate right now is in the 20% range right now with a tremendous amount of upside. What we're seeing is the receptivity of that model between what we do with hygiene and then we bring the water in. We're creating huge amounts of savings for the customers because we can optimize their water systems while at the same time give them improved quality. A lot of runway to go, and we like where we are right now.
Yeah. Hi, Gary Bisbee, Bank of America Securities. What's the key to delivering the acceleration to 6%-8%? I think everybody knows there's been some headwinds of plant consolidation and other things, and you've grown the business much faster than the industry. What really is the key? Is it that water penetration? How real is the digital opportunity in the next few years as a incremental growth driver, and what gets you to deliver that level of growth?
Yeah. We've got a good value proposition. I think the inflection point was really when we took that water business and that hygiene business and shaped that value proposition around it. Look, a lot of it is pure share gains, right? As I said, we still have roughly a 20% share in those largest 30 customers in the world. We've been able to take a nice value proposition, and we're winning big there. Additionally, inside of that acceleration, there is digital revenue. Right now it's small, so I think as we build out those platforms I talked about, I think the ability to drive more digital revenue is going to be tremendous in the future. Really, it's about share gains with very large customers with the value proposition I talked about.
Eric Petrie with Citi. A question on the $15 million and $18 million of savings, is that typical, and is that against a competitor technology platform, and how much of that does Ecolab capture?
Yeah. Is it typical? Those are examples of when we can affect productivity, the most amount of value we deliver is when we affect productivity, right? When a customer can create more time, sell more, that's when you see those kind of big numbers. It is pretty typical that when we see that kind of example, that's what the customer sees. Do we get every dollar for that? No. What we get is better margins. We get the ability to bring our innovation in, right? We keep those customers for a lot longer. Like the one from category 3 to category 1, it'd be very difficult for that customer to switch off of us, right? Now they've achieved the top quality protein, right? When they're selling it to the end market in QSR, it's pretty hard for them to switch and go backwards.
Time for one more.
Hi, Colin Deschamps with Sterling Capital. Thanks, Nick. I guess this question would be as true for your segment as it would for any other, but I'm curious how you measure success against the circle, the customer strategy. How do you manage that internally, especially as you try to penetrate with things like digital and water? Is it an individual customer? Is it on a portfolio basis? Are you using a metric akin to retail or same-store sales or a net dollar expansion in software? Because we see price and mix and volume on the outside, but we don't necessarily get a like metric. I just wanted to hear comments. Thanks.
Yeah. The way we look at it is, it's kind of what you said, it's on the amount of solutions we can sell, right? We know the broadest portfolio we can sell. You take a big brewer in the world, right? We know the broadest portfolio of hygiene solutions and water solutions that we could sell, and then we track it, including new innovation and including digital. It's really about, we size the market based on all in, right? When we trickle sales targets to our people, it's by application. We make sure that when they sell it, we're trying to sell as much as we can the bundle, and the bundle includes the water, the hygiene, digital offerings, and new innovation. We have metrics around all of that. Okay? Okay, now it's my pleasure to introduce Beth Simeri from Life Sciences. Beth.
Okay. Well, good morning, everyone. I'm thrilled to be here to talk to you about Life Sciences. You've heard a little bit about Life Sciences today. Since it's our newest division, it's entirely possible, I think, that you don't actually really understand what we do. In my 10 minutes here, my goal is to tell you about who our customers are, what their pain points are, and then how we create value to win with them. To answer the first one, our customers are pharmaceutical manufacturers and personal care manufacturers. There are other groups we could go after, but those are really the places we're targeting. It's a $5 billion plus marketplace. It is growing. As you heard earlier, it's one of the markets that is really advantaged by the macro trends, right?
Aging population, more medicine, growing population, more consumption of both pharmaceutical and personal care products, a lot of cost pressure, and a lot of regulation. We think it's ideal for the Ecolab model because it's a very consolidated customer base. Within pharmaceuticals, the top 10 companies control over 40% market share, and it's increasingly consolidating. It's also a very fragmented competitive base, so a lot of small local players. In fact, in personal care, a lot of times the competitor is water or steam, so it's quite fragmented. We have an outcome-based program, which is really gaining traction, which is around safety, compliance, and operational efficiency, and we're building our global franchise. In the few years we've been set up, we've really been investing in these growth-enabling opportunities with sales, marketing, and you'll hear a little bit more about our technical support, which is critical.
It's critical to how we deliver value to these customers, and it differentiates us versus the competition. Again, large market, $4 billion plus, we have only a 4% share. We have a lot of runway ahead of us. We set up in the end of 2015, early 2016. I think Doug mentioned there was a small business in food and beverage, and there was a small business in healthcare. Neither were really sweet spots for those businesses. We combined them, and we put a team dedicated to waking up in the morning and figuring out these customers and how to win with them. Our organic CAGR has been 11%, and we have aspirations of accelerating that as we move forward. Has anyone here been in a manufacturing facility for pharmaceutical? I think I saw one tentative hand back there. A couple of hands.
Okay. Most people don't get in. They're incredibly closed. They're incredibly private. It's hard to get in there. We thought we might talk a little bit about what goes on in a plant. The left side of the slide is non-sterile manufacturing areas. Still incredibly high standards for cleaning and disinfecting, but the equipment itself wouldn't look dissimilar from a food and beverage plant. Okay. There's clean-in-place technologies, which you're probably familiar with. We do have different chemicals that suit them better, but that's more typical for an Ecolab setting. The right side is a clean room, and I don't know if you've heard much about clean rooms, but those are the sterile manufacturing areas. A clean room means it's a closed and highly controlled space. It has to stay sterile. Everything that goes into it has to stay sterile.
When you go back to our booth later on, you'll see some spray bottles that are in several packages, several bags. We double or triple bag things because what happens is they want to avoid what they call transfer contamination. They want to avoid anything coming into that sterile space and causing problems. You pack in several bags, they're sterile, and as they go through the different stages to get into the clean room, they tear off a bag, sterilize the outer packaging then, and it keeps going through the process to make sure there's absolutely nothing gets in. We have four unique programs, three for pharmaceutical. I should say pharmaceutical is the majority of our business and of the market opportunity. We have the clean room program, which is a variety of cleaning products, wipes, chemicals, mopping systems.
We have vaporized hydrogen peroxide, which came with our Bioquell acquisition at the beginning of the year. That is a generator. It's sort of for deeper sanitizing and sterilization. Different companies use it in a wide variety of ways. They can use it when they start up, after they've had some sort of contamination, or they can use it more regularly. It's been a great complement to our already existing portfolio. We have the clean-in-place. In personal care, it's more of this clean-in-place technology. They do not have needs for sterile manufacturing in personal care, but they do still want it to be clean and disinfected. Now to talk a little bit about their pain points. In the pharmaceutical industry, they're very change-averse. They don't want to take risk.
When they do have changes, it's required that they do something called validation, which it's a timely process. It takes them out of production. It takes a lot of resources. Really what they're doing is they're trying to prove that any change in cleaning product or process gets them the end results that they're looking for. That's one of the big barriers to change, which I'll show you in a minute, have a plan against on how to break down that barrier. There's also just increasing regulation that they always are trying to stay ahead of. Personal care is interesting. Personal care, the big categories would be haircare, skincare, oral care, and cosmetics. As consumers, you know those are constantly changing. Pretty much every year, over 30% of the SKUs change over. There's constant changes in the need for cleaning and manufacturing.
Also, if you think particularly about cosmetics, those are formulated to be water-resistant and long-lasting, and they are tough to clean. A lot of these companies have used water, hot water, or steam, which is a safety hazard and ends up being not good for their sustainability goals. There's a big opportunity there. As well as Nick talked about in food, consumers are really demanding more natural ingredients, less preservatives, and all of that leads to scenarios where they could have more microbio outbreaks. They have a lot of challenges. Now, the way we go and win and provide outstanding value to them are three big areas. First and foremost is always safety. It's the safety of their products for their ultimate users. It's also the safety for their operators. Regulatory compliance, and we say we're going to help them stay always audit ready. Right?
One of the worst things that can happen to you in these industries is to have an audit where something goes wrong. Operational excellence. You could see below some of the ways we deliver those three big benefits in terms of less waste, labor efficiency, comprehensive training programs, because one of their big challenges is operator error, of course. We deliver nice water and energy savings, and then also help them with their innovation programs to get those launched. Now, this is the way we talk to customers about how we give them incredible value. In the middle, you see the three benefits of safety, compliance, and operational efficiency. Starting up at the top, we, of course, have cleaning and disinfecting programs. We also have validation support.
I talked about validation being a real barrier to entry, and we like to think of this business as a really sticky business. It's hard to get in. It's also hard to get out once you're there and entrenched. How do we help make that not a barrier for us to get in? We have a team of microbio experts who go in and work with customers to really help make sure the validation process goes as smoothly as possible. We also have technical lab support. You're going to see a little bit of that at the booth. Before we ever have to go do trials in plants and cost them production time, we do a lot of testing in the lab to have a high probability solution for when they have to take it into the plant.
We've invested in regulatory and scientific insights above and beyond what would be normal regulatory keep up with current regulation. What we really want to do is see where the regulation is going and how we can help our customers stay ahead of it, too. The other thing is the FDA tends to have themes that are going on. All their citations are public knowledge, but they're not easily accessible. We have resources that go in and are watching where the FDA is doing warning letters, citations, and we inform our customers of that so they can stay ahead of that, and that's real value to them as well.
We do something called the site survey, which is we go in, our team of experts go in again and work with the customer in a kind of a mini audit to find their opportunities in safety, compliance, and operational efficiency. We work together to come up with a prioritized plan of how we can deliver those things. Finally, the customer training. We have these great plans. We want to make sure they get implemented well, so we see the full value of the plans. We do customer training on site for our customers, as well as do centralized training where they can send a certain number of people to the training program. These are some of the customers that we've built strong relationship in the time that we've been in place. I'm sure you recognize most or all of these names.
Maybe the one is KDC, it's a contract manufacturer, which is also a nice part of our business. I wanted to give you a couple of customer examples you could really understand, how do we deliver this value to the customers? The first example is a pharmaceutical example. The customer, they were having real problems cleaning their centrifuge. This is not a normal centrifuge. This is four stories high. It is a huge centrifuge and very hard to clean. Our team of experts went in. They worked with the team to understand the best way to clean and sanitize that critical piece of equipment.
We were able to save almost 2 million gallons of water a year, increase in production worth more than $1 million per year. We reduced the clean in place time by over 1,000 hours a year, by their standards, resulting in $2 million in savings. For a total of over $3 million of value created in just that one site. This is a personal care example. It's a toothpaste example. This particular company really thought they needed efficiency improvements, as well as they were not meeting their stated sustainability goals. They needed our help. We went in and worked with them. Oh, I should mention, they were using hot water. They also had some safety issues.
They would flush through their system three to five times with hot water just to try to get the right results. Very inefficient. We were able to help them with our programs to save, again, almost 2 million gallons of water, significantly decrease the energy, and their CO2 emissions that were avoided, and actually give them nine full weeks of cleaning and sanitizing time saved per year, which just the labor alone, associated with those nine weeks, was over $4 million of value created for them. We are able to really go in and show the value versus the competitive set, which would sell them chemicals and not be involved in these other areas. Just in summary, there are a lot of challenges in this industry. We are chasing a large and growing opportunity with a lot of runway ahead with only a 4% share.
It is a highly consolidated customer base, so we can focus on the top players in a highly fragmented competitive set. The solutions are gaining traction. We went in there with what you see as typical of many of the Ecolab businesses at best results, lowest cost of operation, and it's a model that's really transferred well to this industry. Our performance is accelerating organically, and we continue to look at opportunities to grow through acquisition. That's the very brief story on Life Sciences, and I would be very open to any questions. Yes.
John McNulty, BMO. On the validation process, it sounds like it's a pretty costly thing for a pharmaceutical company to take everything down, trial it out, prove it out, and go on. I guess, how prohibitive is that, and are you winning those customers, or is it more a function of, okay, they're going to put in a new line or a new facility and that's where the win is coming from, where they don't have to take on that incremental cost? I guess, how should we think about that?
Well, we look for some sort of compelling event. If there's a regulatory change, if they have to change anyway, if there's a new plan, those are a little bit easier, but we are definitely winning places where our story is strong enough for them to revalidate. With the validation resources we provide them, we can make it a lot easier for them. You're right. If there's something else going on, that's a little bit easier entree point. Do I see another question up here? Hi.
Hi, thank you. David Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Who has the bulk of share in this business with the pharma companies, and what's the opportunity to grow them? At a very accelerated rate.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear.
What's the opportunity to grow them at a much faster rate going forward?
Grow us or grow-
Grow the pharma customers at a faster rate. Who has a bulk of share?
Yeah. Steris is probably the biggest player, it really is very fragmented, there are other companies that are in the three to $500 million range. There's a lot of small regional competitors. In personal care, there's a lot of water or homemade brews. The biggest opportunity for us to grow is just to continue. We're adding salespeople. We have more corporate accounts, people starting up. It is a long sales cycle, it's the longest in the company that I'm aware of. It's about 18 to 24 months, because we have to go through all these hurdles, the single best thing we can do, and have total support from the company, is to add more salespeople. Any other questions? I know I stand between you and your first break, I will be back at the booth.
I would encourage you to come to the booth certainly, because we have more examples of what's going on in the pharma industry that might be interesting to you. All right, Mike Monahan's coming up here to talk to you about your break. Thank you.
I'm Tim Mulhere. I've been with Ecolab 19 years. I've been in a number of businesses, food and beverage, ran the Nalco Water business, now most recently here in institutional. That's what obviously I'll be talking to you about today. Our focus in institutional. Let me start off with some context on the business. Right. We focus on customer outcomes. You've heard that from Doug and Christophe and Darrell and Nick as well. We focus on customer outcomes, and for us, those customer outcomes are slightly different, although very much related to those in the industrial world. Really three parameters that we focus on with a customer, and the first is delighted guests, where we can have a big impact for our customer on their customers, right? The second is their reputations, right?
This relates directly to food safety in the comment I made earlier, regarding Shlomo's question. The third is optimized operations. We have a big impact, not unlike the other businesses, on efficiency of the operations. Of course, importantly, doing all of that while delivering the best-in-class food safety. About a $3.4 billion business with four principal market segments, food service, lodging, long-term care, and facilities, with four core anchor programs, warewashing, laundry, housekeeping, and floor. I did want to give you some context of the customers that we serve, and most of you probably have already been aware of this. We've got a great series of flagship customers across the globe, some of the best brands in the business, right?
North America-centric, certainly Marriott, although they're a global customer and global operator, but also a number of customers across the globe, many who we've had for many years. Marriott would be an example of that. Right? Hyatt, et cetera. Also newer ones like Belmond is a lodging company out of Europe, and we feel like we're making great strides in some of those areas as well. Look, again, a little context on the business. If you look at the pie chart on the left, you can see that sales broken down by region, 70% still in North America, 18% in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and you can see Asia and Latin America. Obviously, the other regions represent significant growth opportunity, I will show you in a moment, North America does as well. Right? Then sales by segment, 50% in food service.
This is the biggest opportunity we have. It's also the biggest segment we have in terms of sales. Lodging, 25%, facilities, 15%, and long-term care, 10%. Look, we have a huge opportunity, $27 billion opportunity. You can see in the bottom of the chart, our current share represents 12%, the $3.4 billion represents 12%. We have another $10 billion, Christophe emphasized this this morning, in terms of penetrating solutions into our existing customers. Very significant opportunity to grow within our existing customers with new solutions. $14 billion in terms of new customers. Plenty of opportunity for growth. When you look at it by region, you can see that we also, I'll just orient you with the chart. The bars are the opportunity, obviously in blue. Green is our sales.
The number at the end in the box is effectively our sales CAGR in that region. Plenty of opportunity to grow in each of the regions. You can see North America, obviously the biggest share, but again, plenty of growth opportunity in terms of the overall market. From a sales growth standpoint, in terms of the CAGR, North America at 5% is performing very well. We feel like we can continue to accelerate there, but it's performing relatively well. Europe at 1%, obviously, we believe that we have to accelerate, and we'll accelerate that, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we're going to do that in the next number of slides.
China, 10% solid, but frankly, we believe that should be higher, and I'll talk to you about how we're approaching that and the investments that we're making in China to drive that growth. We believe it should be significantly higher given the size of the market, the growth opportunity, and frankly, the dynamic environment in China. Look, I mentioned that we have a huge market, right? $27 billion. We have very significant built-in advantages. Our global accounts position, right? We believe we have great relationships. I showed you the chart before with a number of the brands. Best-in-class technology, and when I say this, I don't just mean our chemistry and dispensing, but increasingly important is digital, and I'll talk about that as we move through the presentation.
We're performing well in North America, as I said, particularly in the underlying business, even though we've exited a couple of businesses. Underlying, we feel the performance has been there. We need to get the rest of the markets moving. That's clearly the biggest opportunity here, right? Sharpening our focus and winning where it matters, and Christophe talked a little bit about this in terms of how we're thinking about the business this morning. First, global accounts everywhere. CTC, CTG. You heard that a number of times this morning, but it's certainly something that we continue to follow. Follow our customers around the world, solve their problems, continue to grow with them. The second area is national or local, regional, if you will, accounts, particularly in the mega markets, North America, Europe, and China. The fastest-growing subsegment within full service restaurants is regional chains.
6 to 50 units. That applies in all three mega market regions, and that's where we're making the investments in terms of sales firepower. Let me peel that back for you just a little bit more in terms of the what and the how. The first thing is continue to extend our advantage, and leverage that to drive share gains. First, leverage our technology and innovation. You heard it a number of times this morning, but the best results at the lowest total cost, that's what we drive in our innovation. That's what we drive into our customers. Driving corporate accounts and the advantage we have with our global account team and continuing to invest, particularly outside of North America, but also in these emerging chains, kind of the 6 to 50-plus unit chains.
Last but very important and increasingly important is leveraging digital. I'll talk more about this in the presentation, so I won't spend some time on it now, but we have a Ecolab intelligence platform. I encourage you to come by the trade show booth. We'll have a team there demonstrating that. I think you'll really enjoy it. A big part of that, and a critically important part of that is the food safety intelligence component, and I'll talk about that more as we move through the presentation. The second area is unlocking growth outside North America, and particularly, as I said, focusing on the mega markets, Europe and China, and focused on segmentation. You heard this morning, focus segmentation from just about every presenter. You're hearing it from me. Really getting focused on the key countries that matter in Europe.
This is Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain. In addition to that, the segments, and this is really full-service restaurants, global lodging, but local chains as well in Europe, and building the segmentation and capability to meet the demands of the local chains. That is both from a model standpoint, from a technology standpoint, from an innovation standpoint. Obviously, restaurants that tend to be smaller in Europe, and making sure we've got the right segmentation and product line in terms of serving them. Then last, but certainly not least, is enabling productivity, and you heard that this morning a number of times. We are investing in a mobile sales and service platform that I think is really going to drive tremendous efficiency and effectiveness for us across the globe.
I won't go through all of the gory details of it, but I'll just give you one example that I think will illustrate it. When our salesperson rolls up to an account, they're going to break out their iPad or their iPhone. All of the standard data, of course, will be there, the orders and this kind of stuff. More importantly, the food safety intelligence components. Where we can help that customer, where there are potential risks in that customer. The health department data that we have from the audits we're doing for that customer with our EcoSure business. Importantly, what innovation we should be thinking about for that customer to solve some of those problems. That's the really, I think, cool stuff that we'll be able to do for them in terms of making them more effective and obviously more efficient at the same time.
Oops. The early indicators, I think, are very positive. We've been at this now for just under a year. Big investments, new leadership in Europe and China. The leaders that we put in Europe and China have significant Ecolab experience and tremendous institutional domain depth. We've been, as I said, driving segmentation, et cetera. New business up 14% in the first half and pricing strong at 2%. We feel like the early indicators are strong and making progress. Innovation is a critical component, and I talked about it earlier. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see some of the recent innovation that we have launched. I think many of you have heard of Aquanomic, a laundry program that we introduced a few years ago.
We continue to leverage that platform as we introduce extensions on the platform and continue to drive growth with that, both on existing customers and new customers. The other area that I'll hit on is SMARTPOWER. I think you've heard us talk about this over the last couple of years, introduced SMARTPOWER. We've seen tremendous results from customers. The feedback is very positive. In addition to that, we are ahead of our plan for new business. Think about that $14 billion part of the pie in terms of going out and getting new customers. This is helping us do that. The last piece I'll hit on, the recent anyway, is the advanced health department diagnostics and intelligence.
This is really an important component of what we do in terms of our EcoSure audits, understanding where there might be problems for the customer, getting ahead of those proactively. It's also a key feeder, frankly, for our Ecolab Intelligence and Food Safety Intelligence platforms, which I'll talk about in just a moment. Now, the future. I mentioned this segmentation approach and really the focus on making sure we have a fit-for-purpose solutions both in Europe and in China. One of the things is taking SMARTPOWER and the technology that we've deployed there, and thinking about how we bring that to smaller units to have success in Europe, et cetera. That's the work we're doing now. We're very excited about it. Obviously, a lot smaller units in Europe and China, and frankly, it's applicable in North America as well.
The other thing, and I don't want you to think we're not continuing to invest in our base technology. The other thing that I would hit here is that we just are about to introduce a new hands care line, as well as a new hard surface disinfectant line that has norovirus claims. Obviously, a very critical component for our customers, where norovirus is a very significant problem. Obviously, cruise ships, restaurants, hotels, et cetera. We continue to innovate on our base programs as well, but of course, on digital too. The Ecolab Intelligence platform, again, I encourage you to come over. Christophe talked about this earlier this morning. We'll be demonstrating it, as I said, at the trade show. We're super excited about this. The customer feedback's been fantastic. We're collecting data from multiple sources. We've got the advanced health department data.
We've got the data from our field sales and service organization, their observations, where there were problems, where there were opportunities for the customer, both in terms of efficiency of operation, but certainly in terms of food safety. We also are collecting data right directly off our SMARTPOWER and other dispensers, and both in warewashing and in other units. Importantly, bringing in customer information that is critical to decision-making and prioritization in terms of risk. For example, remote temperature monitoring, where the customer is doing that, and we can pull that data in. Proprietary algorithm gives us an opportunity to predict, not unlike, and we're leveraging the technology that we saw introduced from the industrial group, but not unlike the industrial group, to predict risk both within a unit for the customer, and also frankly across their units, frankly, benchmarking.
We also are moving into the predictive analytics that we believe will have, not only in terms of risk profile for the customer, in terms of their units, but also in terms of social media and potential negative social media scores. It's a very powerful tool, and we're super excited about it. Feedback's been great from customers. Look, what I'd like you to take away is this: we have a huge opportunity, $27 billion. We have a great position today, largely built on the work that was done around building the global corporate account, business and teams, and the fantastic technology work. Again, increasingly include in that the digital component. We have unmatched capabilities in terms of food safety, water. You heard it this morning from the water team and some of the nexus that Nick Alfano is working with, food and beverage and water.
There's an opportunity here in institutional as well. Digital. I think most importantly, that's all built on the fundamental proven model of the best results, lowest total cost. I think somebody said it earlier, but I think it's worth repeating. We think this works for all customers. While it works in good times, it certainly also works in more difficult times. With that, I'll open it up for questions.
Tim?
Tim, John Roberts from UBS. Have you had specific programs targeting Diversey customers, products, and how do you understand their strategy now under the new ownership since the last investor day we had?
Yeah. How shall I say this? We target all of our customers. We do have a special place in our heart for our largest competitor. We believe we are having success against them. I've mentioned the mid-level chains. We're taking a ton of business there. Their strategy, look, we haven't seen significant changes in their strategy. We've seen this over a number of years. They kind of cycle through how they approach the business. They've certainly been aggressive, but I would say no significant change in the strategy. We continue to operate, particularly driving the value creation that I just mentioned, best results, lowest total cost. I think in the end, we believe that's the right way to do it. We've won historically and continue to, we believe, win today.
Thanks. I just wanted to piggyback quickly on the Diversey question. They've got negative free cash flow. Bain's had a problem growing that asset. That sounds great if you're Ecolab, particularly in the European geography, yet I'm juxtaposing that against some slower growth in that geo for you guys. If you could just help us think historically about the competitive landscape as you see it today, because that sounds pretty advantageous in my opinion. Yet we've got a little bit of a challenge growth-wise, at least versus some other geographies.
Yeah, Europe. Okay. Maybe it's good to just take a step back, even in terms of Europe. The business in Europe really came about in a very different way than largely the rest of our businesses, regionally anyway, institutional. Came out of the joint venture with Henkel, right? It was largely a facilities-based business, right? The team has been building, I'd say, over the last number of years, the fundamentals around how we get after in terms of portfolio, infrastructure, sales firepower, corporate accounts, lodging, and full-service restaurants. Right? A lot of that work was kind of fundamental work over a period of time to kind of build out the capability. Now, I think we've got an opportunity really to accelerate. As I mentioned before, we put in a new leadership, upgraded leadership.
Tremendous individual who's got long time Ecolab experience and very significant domain knowledge in institutional, including some of the team working with him, et cetera. The segmentation approach and really focusing in on both lodging, but not just global lodging, regional lodging in Europe, which is much bigger part of the pie than it is in North America. Then, of course, full service restaurants, the same thing. There is chain business. We need to focus on that, but there's a much bigger piece that is regional, right? Focusing in on those with a segmented approach and really dialing in the programs, right, and products, that's what the team's been working on. I do believe we're gaining traction. Look, I don't blame you for being skeptical. Obviously, the numbers aren't there. I showed you them, right? Certainly, we are too.
We will be until we see it, but I believe we've got the right team in place, and we're now building off the right fundamentals.
Hey, Tim. Bob Koort with Goldman Sachs.
Hi, Bob.
Has the takeaway services had any impact on your business food delivery service? Secondly, I know a couple of years ago in your business, you guys culled a little bit of the portfolio, sort of high-graded the portfolio or took out some of the weaker margin accounts or customers. Is that a continuous process now, or would we expect to see that every couple of years, that kind of effort?
Yeah. Let's go to the takeout first. We were talking about that at the break. Look, here's what I'd say. Our customers have not seen a significant impact. We have not seen a significant impact. Clearly, it's here to stay. Doug was mentioning that millennials, they don't cook. They don't know how to cook. They don't want to cook, right? Maybe they assemble a salad and that's it, right? By the way, if you go to China, nobody cooks there either. Particularly young people, it's breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they're ordering out. This is here to stay. So far our customers feel like there's been some upside opportunity, but largely hasn't been an impact. Anyway, that's the first question. Second question you asked was the portfolio. No, I don't think we feel like we're in pretty good shape.
Obviously, we continue to manage lower-margin businesses and how we might improve them. Usually, we can do that through continuing to sell upgrades in technology, new innovation, et cetera. That's kind of the standard procedure. I wouldn't expect to see significant exits of any kind. Of course, there's always some, but it's not any different than historical norms. Those, obviously, that you were referencing were a little bigger than historical norms. I wouldn't expect to see any more.
Time for one more.
Eric Petrie with Citi. On the opportunity in China, is it easier to buy versus build out your platform?
Well, I don't think necessarily it's easier to buy. If there's the right opportunity, certainly we're open to that. We believe we're positioned really well. We're investing heavily in sales firepower, and particularly the segmentation that I referenced earlier in the Europe conversation, doing the same thing in China. Global lodging represents a significant opportunity for us, and we'll continue to invest there. Local lodging companies, and you've seen Chinese lodging companies expanding outside of China, right? As well as local food service chains. When I say local, I'm not saying they're small, right? These are multiple-unit chains. It's just they're regional, let's say, in China. Those represent significant opportunity. So we are building both the segmentation in terms of the portfolio and in terms of the field service, as well as the sales firepower, to focus on the growth there.
I think, we believe we've got the right plan organically. If there's an opportunity to do something inorganically, we certainly would leverage that, but I don't think it's necessarily an advantage. Thank you. With that, I'd like to introduce Bobby Mendez, who runs our Global Services & Specialty sector.
Good morning, everyone. Happy to be here with you guys today, and ladies. My name is Bobby Mendez. I've been with the company 37 years. Throughout that period of time, I've had the privilege of doing a lot of different things in the company. Most recently, over the last 10 years or better, I've been directly involved with the specialty and services. That includes the food retail business, the QSR business, and the global pest elimination business. As you can see in this first slide, they've been high growth engines for the company for a very long time. Like many of my friends and peers before said, these businesses are built on the fact that we delivered for our customers the best possible outcomes and results for the lowest possible cost.
We're fortunate to be in industries that over the years have proven to be pretty resilient to bad economies and still thrive in good economies. Your average worker will stop at a quick-service restaurant in the morning to grab a $2 breakfast, no matter what the deal is economically. We've been fortunate in that area. I'll start by talking about specialty, which you probably know as the K businesses. We're headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina. These are the quick-service restaurant and the food retail business. In these businesses, we're number 1 or 2 in every country that we serve, and we serve 130 countries around the world. We are known as the leaders in innovation. We provide premium customized cleaning and sanitation programs. We're leading the way in food safety technology.
We've been, for a decade or better now, pursuing digital innovation in many of these businesses, particularly in the food retail businesses. We have a very unique product line, which is safe for younger people as well as all kinds of operators to use. They're non-corrosive to skin and eyes. We have the largest on-site food safety professional organization of any company or fundamentally combined in the world, providing services to our customers. As you can see here in the slide, we do business in both these markets with the very well-recognized brands along anywhere in the world. We're proud that with many of these brands, we have 30, 40 years of relationships based on that statement I made earlier. We deliver the best possible outcomes for the lowest possible cost, albeit being the premium price offer.
Like many of our other markets, we work on large market potential. This is a $5 billion global market just for the specialty portion of the business, so QSR and FRS. These markets are moving very quickly. They're moving to fresh foods prepared in small areas like a quick service restaurant where the risk of contamination and possible foodborne illness grows, so we are playing a very important role. Hygiene is so much more important now to the rest of the world where the average consumer has better wages. Social media has made an extraordinary impact here, because if there's a problem in a store, if they see a bug or if there's an issue, they can get this around very quickly to millions of people, and it's very detrimental to the brands. I mentioned earlier, we lead in innovation, and we're focused in four areas.
We're focusing on expanding our solids technology and our concentrated technologies. We're simplifying the product line to kind of fit, one product can do two or three different functions. We're broadening our services, just recently acquired a program to evaluate how strong is the food safety culture inside our customers. We're working very hard in digital around both of these businesses, working towards improving predictability on analytics that can help our customers avoid problems that are coming. In a way, I guess the easiest way for me to describe our digital objective here is we've transitioned these units from a lot of paper to no paper, and to creating data that is actionable and that operators can use specifically to improve areas that they really need to do better and perform better in their restaurants to save money and to be able to keep their food safe.
These industry trends are all creating opportunity for us. Nick mentioned earlier the new proteins that are coming in. A lot of these new trends are creating heavier soils. In our industry, we're seeing a very big move towards delivery, so that's impacting volume in a positive way, creating more soils and more things for us to work and clean. Ultimately, the risk that these operators are seeing on using fresh chicken and fresh beef instead of frozen precooked items has increased the need for our products and our services tremendously. We're trying to align our offerings to that. Another big trend in the industry is shortage of workforce, higher wages. I'm sure you've all heard wages have been rising in our country and around the world, so that's making a big push to mechanization.
When I started my career early on, I would have never guessed that you would see a dish machine in a quick service restaurant. Now they're all over the quick service restaurant industry, we derive the premium because we generate a tremendous amount of value, and we allow operators to be able to take that limited workforce and put it to interact with their customers instead of having to clean stuff behind the shelves. The outlook for these businesses, the specialty and services, in my view, remain very, very strong. We have a very big opportunity for growth where we only have a 16% share. This opportunity continues to expand, as I've been mentioning through now, with all the new offerings and market trends that are happening.
We continue to see our chains expanding globally and regional chains sprouting up all over the world in parts of Asia as well as Latin America and Europe. We see, for the foreseeable future, a high single digit, possibly even bumping double-digit growth for many, many years to come. With that, I will transition quickly to the pest elimination business. I say elimination and not pest control because we don't control, we eliminate. That's just been a tradition of us for a long time. I'll talk about that in a minute. Fundamentally, the same concept, premium offering, catering to a very basic, similar industry in the food service as well as food and beverage. I'll share some slides with that. We help customers protect their brands because I just mentioned media would destroy a brand in minutes.
We operate this business in about 34 countries. Well, not in about, in 34 countries. Here's what I really see as our different. I break it into four pieces, is we create partnerships with our customers, and we have long-standing relationships because our offerings are all science-based, and our technicians drive that science-based approach. Something very important in this industry is the industry experience of very high turnover of technicians. We have over 5,500 people around the fields in the U.S., around the field for us, servicing accounts. We enjoy a 90% retention rate of our employees, and that is because we focus on good training, good compensation. We treat our employees with a lot of pride, and they love working for our company. This is not an easy job, by the way, to go kill cockroaches at 12:00 midnight. It's a tough job.
We also innovate tremendously here. We have over 140 patents in this industry. We believe we're the largest holder of patents in the pest industry worldwide, and we clearly have superior solutions and, most important of all, through digital as well as through our ongoing visits, we have great communications with our customers. Again, you can see in our slide here that we do business with the greatest brands across many segments of the different businesses of Ecolab, whether it be food and beverage or retail or mining. I would've never thought, but mine villages create tremendous opportunities for us where they're doing significant excavation and other service because they have big food operations. Much larger market for us than specialty, $11 billion, where we currently have about a 7%. Growing very quickly, this business in China. Here, again, all the trends are favoring us, okay?
Because the more complex the menus get and the more complex the food production gets, the more that's attractive for bugs to hang out. We got to go in there and get rid of them. It's a very attractive environment for us that is favoring the premium service provider. Again, we do this because we have superior solutions. We focus on market segments. We have distinct R&D support for each one of these market segments. You see here that we have either Restaurant Protect, Retail Protect. Those are specific programs that are catered to those specific industries. Again, 100% science-based. We were the first company in this industry that used an outside-in protection approach.
The idea is not to let the bugs get in, not to get rid of them once they're in, but try to protect the environment of the unit so that they can't get in. Ultimately, we have, again, 140 patents here, great innovation from fly programs to rodents, second to none. Again, here, we're doing a lot of digital work. Most of our work here is being done in trying to monitor traps and in trying to monitor activity of bugs by being able to put sensors and being able to detect areas in which rodents are going to be more, or cockroaches are going to be more prevalent, or other bugs. We've done a tremendous amount of work here.
Also a lot of work in being able to gather all this information and giving it back or offering it back to our customers in a way that it becomes actionable and simple to work with. We've also been expanding our markets here very significantly. Most recently, we made three acquisitions in an area, we called the deal at the time Triple Crown, and they put us very well-positioned into the fumigation business for crops and for grain and for all the import of fruits and vegetables that are coming in. We do a lot of this work in the ports. We do it in silos. We do it in fields, and it's a very unique business that requires very heavy expertise, and we're becoming quickly a strong force in this area.
We also continue to focus very strongly in our three imperatives, which is we want to provide the best customer outcomes for our customers and be recognized as very customer-centric. We want to continue to offer world-class experience to our customers through our people, through our products, and through our technology. Last, but probably one of the most important of all is we want to be the place where talent wants to come, and we want to continue to improve on this retention rate that we've worked so hard in creating because our product to our customer in the pest business is our people. It's not a chemical or a cleaner or equipment. It's people. We got to make sure that they're well-trained and that they're going to provide the right services. In closing, I love these businesses. I think they have an extraordinary track record.
Very recently, we announced also an acquisition in food retail, which is a privately held company called Chemstar and Sterilox. This company has a very unique technology that is applicable in the flower industry. Every grocery store, every area where you can buy flowers, we have a technology now that actually keeps the flower longer, keeps the water in the vase in a more sanitary and more suitable way for the flower to be bloomed and to look nicer in our homes for a longer period of time. This is a very cool technology, very exciting, and I'm really looking forward to it. I think the future of these businesses, as well as the many other businesses in Ecolab, are positioned to perform exceptionally well, whether the economy is great or it's not. With that, I'll take some questions if you have them. Sure. Microphone's coming. Right here.
John Roberts from UBS. This is a great business. Ecolab for a long time has been looking for other businesses like this from ChemLawn, GCS. What is it about this business or do you have a sense why the other attempts were not successful, and pest elimination has been such a great opportunity?
First of all is, I think we have extraordinary people. These businesses have been great incubators for our senior executive team. Doug managed the K business. Many of our executives here had gone through that. I think that it's in a great industry, and I think that at the heart of it is, look, we provide an extraordinary service to these industries, and I think in reference to what their risk of not doing this right is versus our cost, it's like a no-brainer. Even though we're the premium price and we have some of the highest margins in the industry in our businesses, we provide such a valuable and such a unique service that the match between the industry and our offering is second to none. I would say, most of all is I think we have extraordinary people, and that's what makes us great.
Thank you. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Bobby, in QSR, amongst the large U.S. chains, McDonald's, Burger King, can you discuss what your share is in the U.S. and how that's translating into their overseas operations and the challenges to gain the same share over there?
Yeah. The overseas business for us, the international business for us, is growing in two avenues. It's the unit growth international of the largest U.S. chains continues to be very strong. They're expanding in China, they're expanding in other parts of Asia, they're expanding in Latin America. We have a very good growth pattern, and they're doing very well there. A lot of the chicken-based QSR operations are doing very well in China and in Asia. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of regional chains growing that are sort of like they start as a copycat of these large U.S. chains, and all of a sudden, they pick tremendous amount of speed. We're probably growing our businesses internationally at, in many instances, four times the rate of the industry.
We're growing in China at a high teens year after year after year. It doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon. I think also in the United States, as we continue to see expansion of urban development, the QSR industry follows the highways. Whenever they're building new highways in North Carolina, where's my home, they're building highways all the time. Every time there's a new exit, there's five QSR stores. That's creating a tremendous opportunity, too. I think that that's going to be way past my lifetime.
Labor.
Time for one more.
Labor.
Cost of labor.
Yeah, cost of labor is another issue, right?
Well, why don't you talk about mechanization? I think the big thing that you guys are doing that I'm not, warewashing and some of the other stuff.
Yeah, I mentioned that.
You're investing.
I mentioned that in the one slide. Obviously, it's becoming harder to find work. In fact, stores have a hard time opening at times for work because they can't get workers. We've moved a lot of mechanization to the quick service restaurant industry. In an operation that's like a sandwich shop, for example, we now put an under-counter washing unit that will do anything from trays to utensils. Obviously, they don't serve in glass or china, but I think that's going to be a tremendous opportunity for us. There is water filtration. We're expanding heavily into the water filtration area.
I foresee a lot of opportunities, particularly driven by digital, and digital is also helping tremendously on the labor side because, like for example, in the burger industry, they need to do these checklists to make sure that all the burgers are at the right temperature. They're doing that properly now with digital. I got to stop here. With that said, I'm going to introduce my dear friend, Jill Wyant, who is our president for our regions and for healthcare. Jill?
Thank you, Bobby.
You're welcome.
Well, good morning, everyone. As Bobby said, I'm Jill Wyant. I've been with the company for 10 years. I lead our international regions organization and also global healthcare, and reside in Zurich, Switzerland. I'm going to talk a bit about the healthcare business today. I think the headlines are fairly straightforward. It's a big market, $20 billion and growing with not unlike what you heard from Beth in life sciences, challenges that we think we're uniquely positioned to help solve. It's got good macro trends, namely aging populations and middle classes. As middle classes emerge, people consume more healthcare. Our plan is working, I would say, albeit not as fast as we would want. I'll talk about and dimensionalize that for you this morning. We are on growth. We are on digital.
Over time, it's an exercise in continuing to drive gravity in the portfolio to our advantage in terms of top-line growth. On net, we feel it remains a very good business for the company. Healthcare is about a $20 billion opportunity, so this is about an $800 million business, so very small share. We're present in the largest economies with the biggest healthcare spend around the world, namely in the U.S. and in Europe, the big economies in Europe. In rest of world, we're aggressively getting after investing in and expanding, and I'll talk about how the Anios acquisition we made in 2017 is really helping us fuel growth outside the U.S. It's a big wide world, and across the big opportunity are some different themes, if you will, in terms of a pretty diverse set of market drivers.
In the U.S. industry, obviously, it's a stressed marketplace in the sense that they are in great need of operational efficiency, and they are amidst a sea change towards value-based care. This idea of your knee replacement work, so you get your money back. More has heightened focus not only on efficiency and effectiveness, but also reduction in infections. It tends to be a more consolidated market in the U.S. than in Europe, which by comparison is a bit more fragmented given the number of countries across the continent. Europe, we see real capacity constraints. As populations continue to age, hospitals continue to get crowded. This is also a bit of an issue in China. Again, real acute needs for operational efficiency.
Of course, Europe is also a very dynamic and ever-changing regulatory environment, which we feel on net for us is tailwind because many of our fragmented, more local competitors in Europe just can't make the investment of time, money, and resources to keep pace with regulation. For those of you who might be new to the healthcare business, we effectively focus our efforts around the big drivers or the big vectors of transmission of infections in healthcare settings.
Those are hands, surfaces, whether those be surfaces in patient rooms or other areas throughout the hospital, instrument hygiene, both a presence in central sterile, but also increasingly in endoscopy, which are very complex diagnostic devices that we keep clean and safe, as well as, of course, in the operating room, which is the heart of the hospital, the profit center of the hospital, and surgeons, the most demanding customers are there as well. We go to market largely via the four programs that I'll talk about and really help improve efficiency, drive labor savings, and reduce infections. This really outlines our strategy. First and foremost, as a business about $800 million in size, we're continuing to drive growth scale and ultimately growth-driven efficiency.
The Anios acquisition and the connection that that's had for us in transforming our Europe business but also expanding internationally has been huge, and we have and continue to do select M&A to drive growth scale and efficiency. We go to market uniquely and I think enjoy first-mover advantage with our program-based approach. 100% of our program sales are digitally enabled, meaning our hand care, surgical changeover, and patient room programs all have a very powerful digital engine at the core of what they do, and you can see that later today during the trade show. We're also selling technologies like endoscopy capability that Anios brought to the equation, as well as continuing to build partnerships with original equipment manufacturers, and I'll talk about that in more depth. International is a very high-growth piece of the portfolio.
Anios had a great presence around the world. We've plugged Anios products and Anios brand into Ecolab growth infrastructure to grow into some of the smaller healthcare economies around the world. We're building a full Ecolab business in China as we speak. Last but not least, there's pieces of the portfolio that will never be fast growers. We're working on either shifting those to faster growers. Again, programs are a big lever there. Where we can't get pieces of the portfolio into higher growth, we're working to do better and shore up execution. That plan, that approach, if you will, from a portfolio, is working. These really show the high-growth pieces of the global healthcare business, which comprise about 60% or 65% of our sales.
You have Europe, which is growing in the mid-single digits range, a business which was fundamentally transformed by the acquisition of Anios. There we have one business located at a center of excellence in Lille, France, on the French-Belgian border. We are actively cross-selling each other's products and technologies. Ecolab brought programs in the hand hygiene, patient room space, and we're leveraging Anios's programs in areas like endoscopy to bring a program-based solution to that aspect of the market. International, which is growing well into the teens, 15%, 20%, 25%, was also really jump-started by the Anios acquisition. We continue to feed that with products and capabilities, but that'll also be an area of select M&A focus for us going forward. The original equipment manufacturer business has been a nice grower. This is a little bit of hunting elephants.
It's not unlike some of Bobby's businesses in that you have big players, and so you win them in big chunks, but nonetheless, that's been a nice grower in the 7%-9% range for us. Lastly, as I said, program selling, growing in the healthy teens and completely digitally enabled. That's about 60%-65% of the business growing in that Ecolab aspirational range of 5%-7%. The work here is really to continue to transform the portfolio in that direction. We are on the growth levers, investing in them. We're on the digital work, and the team knows what our must-dos are as we continue to make those growth aspects of this portfolio a bigger piece of the pie, which will ultimately power us to 6%, 7%, 8% growth and beyond.
One example of how this is at play in the business and shifting this portfolio to growth. I talked about our programs, and we have a program that we refer to as the Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring Program. We all know hand soap is a key part of any healthcare setting. You go into a lobby, it's one of the first things you see when you walk in. Just core hand soap in healthcare, there's a lot of competition. Oftentimes, the products can be very. There's a lot of commoditization pressure in the space. It was not a piece of our portfolio historically, three, four years ago, that was growing fast at all. What we've done here is combined innovative, effective hand soaps and sanitizers with cutting-edge IoT-driven digital devices to leverage technology to transform our hand care offering.
In a simple nutshell, what this does is creates a zone around the patient's bed, and gives each healthcare provider wears a badge that is RFID-enabled, that gives you almost a seatbelt reminder. Like when you get and start your car and you get the beep if you don't fasten your seatbelt, you get a seatbelt-like reminder to sanitize your hands at the most important moment of truth, which is right before and right after you touch a patient. This is an example of an installation that we did two years ago across five hospitals, 1,600 beds, two to 300 beds per hospital, if you will, and 130 million dispenses of hand hygiene later over that two-year time period.
We've driven an almost 40-point improvement in hand hygiene compliance rates, holding them at the 87%, 88%, 90% compliant rate, driven a 30% reduction in hospital-acquired infections, and delivered real savings to this customer, not only from a $4 million savings in the sense of paying for additional treatments and things to address the fact that somebody got an infection they didn't walk into the hospital with, but also freeing up patient beds. Because patients who acquire HAIs stay in the hospital longer at lower or no reimbursement rates, effectively giving them more patient throughput and therefore higher revenues. An example of taking a category that was highly competitive and pretty commoditized, transforming it with this addition of technology and smart insights and onsite service to transform it to growth. Hand hygiene isn't our only offering.
We have a series of programs through which we're taking this type of an approach. We talked about hand hygiene. We also have our OR program. As I said, about 15%-20% of U.S. hospitals operate at negative margins, and the operating room is the heart center of the hospital, and it's the profit generator by several multiples. Here, we go in and teach and train and audit and digitally enable cleaning faster, cleaning better, which improves turnaround time in the OR. When you clean faster, you can turn more ORs. Reduces infection rates, and ultimately drives considerable labor savings and consistent cleaning in a labor force that, again, not unlike some of the dynamics in Bobby's businesses, is hard to find and turns over at 30%, 40%, 50%.
We also have a similar program in patient rooms, where we turn rooms faster, meaning they increase revenues through patient throughput, reduce infections, and again, clean consistently and more quickly every time, generating, on average, $700,000 of savings per hospital. Then last but not least is the Central Sterile program, which is probably most important. This is where surgical instruments get cleaned. It's important in and of itself, but what Central Sterile really does is enable the OR to function on time because you can't do a surgery if your instruments aren't clean, sterile, and at the surgeon's bedside. This is not only an important driver of efficiency savings in and of itself, but important enabler of the OR.
Really flipped our approach, if you will, and flipped these products and categories to growth by focusing on digitally enabled programs which deliver savings and infection reduction. A second piece of that two-thirds of the portfolio that's quickly growing are our partnerships with big Original Equipment Manufacturers. Quite simply, you can think of these folks as, so much of what's happening in healthcare is procedures and surgeries are becoming minimally invasive. Also with the focus on early detection, early health, much heavier use of diagnostics, whether that be an ultrasound procedure or the like. As surgeries shift to more minimally invasive, robotically conducted, and diagnostics become a bigger piece of the play, these big OEMs need custom-designed, single-use draping technology.
For example, for an ultrasound procedure, you might put a sleeve on the ultrasound or for an Intuitive Surgical robot, you literally have to drape the entire robot so that you maintain a sterile barrier. Here we win by forging high-wide-deep corporate account relationships and leveraging our proprietary abilities to design and manufacture these devices, they are classified as medical devices, in a safe and compliant way. While this is an elephant hunting exercise, as I mentioned, it's been a nice high single-digit grower for us. For example, we just renewed and got additional volume out of a major player in the robotic surgical space for a five-year period. In addition to our innovative technology, they loved our quality and compliance infrastructure.
Now we have to are out finding five, six, 10 more of those relationships. Lastly, the Anios acquisition for us, which was closed in 2017, was a very big bet, certainly for the company, and obviously a big undertaking for healthcare. This has been everything we thought it would be from an investment thesis perspective and more. As I said, the Europe business is growing in the mid and accelerating single-digit rate, and we are continuing to invest in and double down in multiple growth bets here. Adding firepower to sell more throughout Europe, East, and Russia are huge opportunities for us. Expanding into new segments and categories, so taking Anios' endoscopy solutions to Northern Europe and taking our surgical solutions to where Anios was a bit stronger.
Obviously leveraging the outstanding talent that we acquired in that acquisition and adding to our R&D manufacturing and innovation capabilities there. This has also been key to that piece of the business that is international sales growing 15%-25%, because Anios had technologies, distribution partnerships, and registrations around the world, and what we bring is infrastructure so that they can grow even faster. This will be an area that we will, and are, continuing to invest in, both organically and through M&A. In summary, a big market with the wind at our back, if you will, in terms of aging populations and rising middle classes, continuing to invest and really focus on growth, on digital, and feeding and driving and accelerating that two-thirds of the portfolio that's growing in the 5%-7% range.
Continuing to build out the global franchise, both Europe, North America, and abroad. Last but not least, getting that portfolio mix, the gravity of that to work to our advantage, and shoring up our execution everywhere else. That's my overview, and now I'd be glad to take any questions.
Yeah. Hi, Gary Bisbee, Bank of America. That all sounds interesting, and yet the performance of the business has been pretty inconsistent, I'd say for years below the company's long-term aspirations.
What's created that volatility in the growth rates and performance? Is that 35%-40%, has that been declining or I know there's been fits and starts with the program-based approach over time, but are we at that jumping-off point where you actually think this can be a more consistent grower? Is the expectation that given the various parts of the portfolio, it continues to be choppy? Thank you.
We think over time this could continue to be a more consistent grower. If we run the math, if we can grow that 60% to 65% of the portfolio that is performing today 50 to 100 basis points faster per year over the next three to five years, and even if we assume that everything else stays flat, grows nothing, we can be in that aspirational 6% to 8% range in three to five years, again, depending upon if it's a 50-basis point growth per year or 100-basis point growth per year. We've done that math. The team knows what those big growth drivers are. We've made the investments in our growth drivers.
We're all over the digital work, and that's really what we're banking on to not only grow those pieces, but in so doing, shift them to a bigger, more material piece of the portfolio over time.
John Roberts, UBS. Is there a parallel here between your business and pest elimination, that they deal with macro-sized bugs and you deal with micro-sized bugs?
Yeah.
I don't know what a hospital does once they've got an infection. Do they need qualified professionals to come in and deal with an acute situation? The bulk of your business would be maintenance, which is what you're doing, preventing infections from occurring in the first place. There must be sort of an emergency response requirement that healthcare facilities need once they have a problem.
Yeah, I would say there is. Clearly, if you've ever had anyone that you know or a family member impacted by a C. difficile or a MRSA, it's pretty devastating for you both personally and then, of course, in the hospital, they have to do a thorough clean. Really the direction we're trying to move the industry towards, particularly with our digital focus, is predicting infection. Part of our OR program as well as our patient room program, we gather data around product usage, training results, audit results. We actually go in and ourselves as well as train our customers on how to audit the patient room to ensure that the high-touch objects that are the frequent culprits in transmitting infections are cleaned efficiently and effectively every single time.
We gather that data through a mobile app and then move that along with those other pieces of information that I talked about into the cloud to begin to predict with 90%, 95% confidence where an infection outbreak is likely to occur. If you're a 100-hospital system that's dispersed and you've got people all over the place, that's a really important technology for you to head that off at the pass and be able to identify the two to three hospitals that look like they're highest at risk. Our big focus where we, yes, come in and support our customers with thoroughly cleaning and sanitizing a room after they've had an outbreak, are also very focused on predicting that long before it might be prone to occur.
That's fine. Andy Wittmann from Baird. I just had a question on the 40% of the business. You talked a lot about the 60% that's growing more rapidly. On the 40%, can you talk a little bit more detail about what that is? It sounds like it's mostly in the U.S. Even where you've had tough industry conditions in some of your other businesses at Ecolab, innovation has always allowed you a degree of growth. Can you talk about how innovation and our pricing, things of that nature, are driving growth even in those slower growth markets?
Yep. Yeah, a larger portion of that is in the U.S., where you see a more consolidated distribution environment and a more consolidated group purchasing organization presence than you do in some other parts of the world. I think our approach, first and foremost, is a little bit of what I talked about in the hand care example. Hand soap on a standalone basis was not a growing, margin-accreting aspect of the business for us on a standalone basis. What we've done through that hand hygiene compliance monitoring approach is take innovation in hand care, which we'll continue to do, and combine that with our digital capabilities to bring that predictive capability and drive sustainable, repeatable reductions in hand care.
The first thing we've done to that 35% or 40% of the portfolio that's not growing as fast is say, how can we use innovation, whether with digital or chemical innovation, to transform that to growth? There will be other parts of the portfolio where we may have to focus on, where innovation may not be as big of a lever on taking cost out, so that we can get that stuff through the GPOs. Anyone who competes in any facet of the healthcare industry today has to do that. It's really what I would characterize as flip it to growth, trying to leverage digital as plan A. Plan B would be fit for purpose in terms of right mix of product, right cost position, right approach with channel and distribution players.
If neither of those works, just try to do the best we can to manage the situation. Those strategies thus far, we like what we see.
Time for one more.
Good. Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you. I am pleased to turn it over to Larry Berger, our Chief Technical Officer. Thanks.
Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm Larry Berger, and I head up R&D and digital technology for Ecolab, working in close partnership with all the commercial leaders that you've heard from already today. What I'd like to do is give you a brief update overview of our innovation programs. I will say brief because you'll have opportunity to see much of it during the trade fair, and I understand many of you also have signed on to participate in the tour. I encourage you to do that. That is really the best way to see and understand technology in action here at Ecolab. I think you've already heard too, that our enduring competitive advantage at Ecolab is rooted in industry-leading service, combined with best-in-class technology. When we think about technology, it's really all-inclusive. We're talking about specialty chemicals, unique form factors, super concentrates, dispensing system to do controlled dosing.
Increasingly, a variety of ways to collect unique data streams through embedded sensors, product consumption data, a variety of data inputs that allow us to put together proprietary algorithms to help optimize operations at our customer sites and deliver best outcomes. Indeed, we practice that model, as you've heard already, across the entire enterprise. This year, we will launch our largest innovation pipeline at $1.3 billion. That's forecasted revenue in year five. The cumulative revenue over that period is roughly two and a half to three times that. That is led by a team of roughly 1,600 scientists and engineers with unique and specialized domain knowledge in application areas across different fields, who are working in cross-functional new product development teams. You'll see those listed here. I won't go through those.
I would also add that, innovation is often the best way we get pricing opportunity and often the best way we take share. We do a lot of work in and around portfolio management to get a good return on this investment. We optimize the portfolio both within divisions and naturally across the enterprise. We operate in a target-rich environment. You've heard some of that today in terms of tailwinds. I would simply describe it by saying customer pain points are rich opportunities for us. We hunt for those. That's the way we often help our customers best. In food service, for example, both upstream, you've heard that from Tim Mulhere and from Nick Alfano, and then from Tim Mulhere and Bobby Mendez, what's going on in food service and food retail. Fundamentally, consumers are expecting a lot more around food safety than simply compliance.
Those big drivers around on-site preparation, locally sourced, transparent sourcing, creates a rich opportunity set for us, and frankly, changes the risk profile for many of our customers. Naturally, labor shortage, worker training, and churn. Bobby also indicated stalled starts for restaurants because you can't even hire people in some instances. Jill covered healthcare. I would also say this whole area around water management, it's not simply reducing, reusing, and recycling. We love that. We do a lot of it. It's also finding ways to do more with less water, not just managing with less water. I'll show you some exemplifications of big productivity gains we've helped enable our customers to achieve with dramatically less water than we could even imagine, frankly, five years ago. You've heard us talk about our mantra, best results at lowest total cost.
I would add here, again, we tend to be a relatively small part of our customers' spend, but we're a very potent way for them to manage their overall performance. When I say total cost in performance, we do a lot of work helping our customers drive top line as well, and I have a few examples to show that. We've talked a little bit about our circle-the-customer strategy, and historically, we've approached that with largely tangible product solutions derived from multiple divisions. Increasingly, we're using digital technology. This is data-driven, digitally enabled solutions to also circle the customer, and we're doing so in a way that we are capturing unique data streams.
I won't go through all of those, but I would say that we're in a privileged position in capturing product consumption data, a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic data that we can bring together in unique ways to do a variety of different predictive algorithms that help our customers optimize operations in ways in which they couldn't previously see. This whole idea of delivering more with less is very much enabled with digital. I will walk you through now just a handful of examples. This is always a bit of a dangerous thing if you put a technical person on a stage with a microphone and slides, and he's passionate, and you give him just a short period of time. I will do my best and encourage you naturally to ask questions as appropriate offline as well.
The first example is one in our food retail and our quick service business. This looks at trying to help bring into real-time management the food preparation program and food safety. The state-of-the-art historically has been paper logs, which are both inconsistent and incomplete. There's no way really of learning or capturing, if you will, a risk score or benefiting from an event feedback optimization loop. These are largely done, I would say, sadly, most of the time when I've looked at it, well less than 50% of the time. People go through these food safety logs as part of a requirement. What we've brought is a shiny flashlight to help illuminate what the issues and what the opportunities are. Here we have simple, easy-to-use applications that are customizable and configurable for different locations.
Our customers' workers can go through and do their food safety compliance routines now, and in real-time capture that. We can assign a risk score, if you will, and a visualization of opportunities and mismatch of food standard compliance delivery and what actually is being achieved. We've been able to take food compliance management programs from well less than 50% to above 90%, typically in a few months. This is a big step forward in helping reduce food safety outbreaks. Tim alluded to this, too, and I won't say much here other than say we're doing an awful lot of work now also with artificial intelligence, collecting information that helps point to where we think a restaurant is at risk in and around a health department violation. I would say the smart money today could probably predict with fairly sophisticated software around 20%, 25%.
The work we're doing takes that to well over 70% now. You'll see the data points because we have a very rich data library of experiences, and so we can find hotspots that typically lead to department violations. The second example is in Water Safety Intelligence. Probably all of you are familiar with Legionella. Has a high morbidity rate. This is a bacteria that's airborne. Cooling towers are open. Organic matter gets in there. This program, Water Safety Intelligence, stands on the shoulders of a great chemical program. Here we have the industry-leading portfolio for scale and corrosion inhibition, but on top of that, a rich variety of different biocides specific for applications where we can control microbial growth. Again, I would say that Legionella is a naturally occurring bacteria.
If you went, and you were smart, and you looked, and you tested, and this is typically a 10-day offline test. It's notoriously difficult to act on it quickly. You would probably find Legionella 10%-25% of the time. Frankly, these models get better and better. There's a natural evolution. They get better informed. They're complemented by a lot of offline laboratory work as well. Now we can do a very good job of predicting the conditions which are supportive for Legionella growth in about 75% of the time. That helps you pinpoint and isolate high-risk areas and do an intervention before you have an outbreak. The third example is one in our heavy water, and it speaks to power plants. Probably most of you have heard and understand all the transformation that's going on from coal-fired plants to cogen plants.
This one's really a neat example. It's a methane gas plant where you have both steam generation as well as a gas turbine. The magic of these cogen plants to get the high efficiency is to be able to manage the steam generation part, obviously treating a lot of water. I would say the condenser, which governs the heat exchange performance, is notoriously difficult to operate precisely. You can't see on the inside of it. We have put unique sensors and looking at scale growth and microbial growth. It gives us a little bit, if you will, an X-ray into how the condenser is operating with an early intervention to be able to treat the water. We've been able to improve the thermal efficiency for the steam generation part of the plant by 25%. That is enormous.
You can see the output then of the plant is getting higher production. You get more power generated when you get better thermal efficiency, and you do that by consuming less energy. I'd say this is sort of the trifecta of benefits. We're doing it broadly across power plants. We're really excited about this technology. We've launched it just in the last 60 days. The next example is in our downstream business. Here, the challenge is trying to isolate different cuts. The way refiners typically try to maximize profitability of this asset is they take crude oil, which is a mixture of a complex set of hydrocarbons. They try to isolate it during a refinery process. It's a difficult process to control the temperatures and do a mix enrichment strategy where you can isolate, for example, preferentially jet fuel versus gasoline. It's more valuable, of course.
Here, what we've done is we have a data library of really decades of work in the downstream business, billions of data points that allow us to understand how best to control the crude overhead unit. Again, this program, too, I point out, stands on the shoulders of a great chemical program. The digital enablement allows our customers to run, in this case, at lower temperatures, several degrees lower temperature of the refinery with confidence. Why is this important? Everyone has known for a long time, you can run at lower temperature, but if you do, you run the risk of fouling and corrosion. These are expensive assets. They're difficult to manage. 90% of the corrosion happens in less than 10% of the time. Pushing the process window without having companion confidence and being able to manage this well, basically, is the trade-off customers can't make.
We've allowed them now to operate with a different performance window, and you can see the benefits here are enormous. We've increased the throughput as well as the output of jet fuel in this refinery example. Here's an example in our paper business. In paper, customers are routinely trying to get to stronger boxes, lighter weight, with less fiber. Right. Stronger, lighter with less. The board manufacturing business is a profitable growth business for us. The state-of-the-art historically has been liquid additives to promote adhesion between fibers. We developed really a breakthrough technology in this space that uses dry polymer. You'll recall, we practice dry end concentrates technology across the Ecolab and Nalco portfolio.
We brought this expertise to bear in our paper business, so now we have a dry additive that uniquely adsorbs onto the surface, promotes fiber adhesion with lower basis weights. Lower basis weights means less paper, lighter weight. Again, I would say this sort of has the trifecta of benefits. 1 is we get higher throughput and performance. 2, because we're using a dry product versus adding a lot of water. Typical paper mill might have 5 tractor trailers coming per day. I mean, this is voluminous quantities of material that are added. The dry product has less than one-fifth of that volume, and so you don't have to de-water or refine, as it's known in the industry. The dry product allows you to put in less energy to make the paper, as well as be able to run a lot faster.
We really are excited about this opportunity. It has sort of triple benefits for our customers with pretty substantial savings as well. You've heard a lot about innovation, and I thought I'd just share maybe one way to think about in terms of new product innovation and how to quantify this. This is a look back over the past three years of our pipeline. Again, these are the forecasted revenues in year five. You can see, just back in 2016, the contribution of digital, which is shown in the green area in those bar charts, was relatively small. Digital is really outpacing the overall growth of the pipeline. Fully today, 25% or in excess of our pipeline is digitally enabled.
It's really, for us, a very exciting way of delivering on our mission of best results, lowest total cost, because we can further optimize at each location our customers' operations, and that's true in hotels and hospitals and power plants, and a variety of different end-use applications. With that, let me just summarize by saying we feel very good about our innovation pipeline this year. We're teeing up equally well a very strong growth pipeline next year. We typically launch about 100 new products a year off of platforms, so we get a lot of leverage and cross-pollination of technology across the enterprise. With that, why don't I open it up if there are any questions?
Thank you. Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley. This might be a bit outside of your zip code, but you kind of got to it tangentially. One of the knocks on single-use plastic is the recyclability rate, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the collection is extremely contaminated. I guess sort of two ways to think about that. One, is there something you can do to improve the recyclability of the plastic, or B, improve the ability or reduce the cost of cleaning it, which obviously involves a lot of water in the separation process? I don't know if there's anything you have to say around that.
Yeah. I think, Vincent, in your question is embedded, we're not big plastic users or producers other than largely in packaging. Obviously, our downstream business does support plastics manufacturing. I'd say the biggest dog we have in the fight, though, frankly, are concentrates. We've made a huge step forward in reducing packaging waste, going from more solid high-density polyethylene to some shrink wrap. You can see the institutional business is probably the prima facie example of really radical step forwards over the last five years. We continue to move to more solids, less water, packaging innovation. We are using a hell of a lot less plastic than we ever have. When we use plastic, we use more recyclable plastic and then plastic that is more easily sorted so that it can be further recycled.
Thank you.
Good question.
Hi. Rosemary Morbelli with G.A. Research. Of that $1.3 billion of innovation pipeline, how much are you going to lose in terms of cannibalization of existing product lines? What would be the net revenue?
Yeah. I will answer that by saying, first, that's a good question. We are very aggressive about cannibalizing our own technology. Roughly 60% or more of this pipeline is new revenue growth, and typically at a substantially better margin. We do obsolete ourselves. We don't wait for others to do that. That's sort of an enterprise average. In some places, it's substantially higher. In some places, we've been pretty aggressive. We have this Vitality Index, which is a measure of the new products that we've brought to market over the last five years. That's typically around 30%. It's higher in some divisions, lower in others. We ultimately try to optimize the value creation from our new products, the synchronicity and the delivery of that really is timed to maximize value extraction. Other questions? Okay.
With that, I'll say thank you and turn it back to Michael Monahan.
Well, thank you, Mike. Yes, my lunch was excellent and the conversation was productive, so you get one positive report. Yes, I'm Dan Schmechel. I have been with Ecolab for almost 25 years. I've been the CFO now for seven years. I guess all of that together officially makes me no longer one of the young guys on the team. I'd like to welcome all of you here to the Ecolab Investor Day. Look, I'd start here, please. As you can perhaps tell by all the conversation that has gone on this morning, we're very proud of what we've accomplished since we were together with you last in September of 2017. It's been busy. Doug has given you a lot of the highlights of what we've been after.
The net, though, I think that we have delivered, we've continued to invest in the business, and importantly, we're very well set up for the future. Doug and Christophe both showed this chart. This is the quarter-on-quarter EPS since the last time that we were together. Had a bit of a conversation on this with the team that I was gathered on at lunch, right? They said, "Well, how do you feel about it, and how's this time played out differently than you might have expected?" Well, I feel great about it, right? The time since we were together last has played out very differently than we expected, in ways that are both bad and good, I would say. I didn't really anticipate at the front end the continued significant inflation across the raw materials and logistics space.
The energy downturn was a little bumpier and more prolonged, maybe, than we expected. There've been some good things, too, of course. We did get after, in a very timely way, efficiency initiatives to help us deliver the results that you see here. Had some help in the early parts of these quarters from tax reform in the U.S. happening a little earlier than I would have expected. Interest rates, of course, remained historically low, and the U.S. dollar net has been a detractor, but that also has shown some volatility. I look at this chart, and my high-level interpretation of it is that it's a great track record of a team that has consistently found ways to win, beginning really on the top line.
If you look beneath the numbers, the consistency. Let me say at the outset here that I've taken out the upstream energy business from the sales progression charts here, mainly to give you a better understanding of what is going on across the other businesses. Perhaps to point to the future. This is everybody else, the sales growth that they have delivered quarter by quarter. This has been the consistent story of our EPS delivery. Behind it, too, there's this, which is a continuing improvement of our operating income margin. This being driven also by the increasing focus on pricing initiatives to offset the increasing raw materials and logistic costs in the marketplace as we encounter them. In the later years, the contribution of the efficiency initiative that, as you know, we have been on.
I thought I would include this chart, too, on improving ROIC. Here's where we see a bit of a dent from our efficiency initiative. You know, we've been very upfront about targeting ROIC improvement of 100 basis points a year. We delivered between the full year 2017, when we were last together, and the full year 2018, about 60 basis points. We actually added more than that, saw a little bit of a dent from FX. If you think about the pattern on our return on invested capital of our efficiency initiative, the expense obviously comes before the benefits. We saw a little bit of leakage from efficiency initiative. That, of course, will flip and drive increasing ROIC improvement as we go forward. Very proud of the work that we've done with the balance sheet.
Those of you that know me well, and we talked at lunch, this is a wonderful business. I've always described Ecolab as a high-quality growth company that is also a cash and return machine. We pay a lot of attention to cash flow in the business, and also, we're proud, I would say, of the strength of the balance sheet and the flexibility that it gives to the business. You see on the top chart here, the stretch that we put on the balance sheet when we did the Nalco transaction communicated our commitment to return our leverage number to a net debt to adjusted EBITDA target of about two. I think that we have done that very consistently.
We have also taken full advantage of the low interest rate environments in our financing activity to continue to extend the weighted average maturity of our debt portfolio, while at the same time, maintaining a consistent weighted average coupon. I think in the two years since I saw you last, we've done a good job tending to the balance sheet and making sure that we're good financial stewards of the capital strength of the company. We've invested a lot in digital. You've heard about that all morning long. The blue is the ramp on digital spend. Green, as Doug mentioned, our continuing investment in SAP technology. In the bottom, global HR.
This is really technology that we've invested in to give us much improved capabilities to track and monitor, and frankly, develop the talent in the business, which is really the source of the growth and particularly the future growth of the company. More than just the dollars that are represented here, I would encourage you to think about all of the activity that is behind this spend. You get the sense from this morning's conversation about some of the complexity of integrating digital technology with our commercial models to continue to drive benefits for the customer and productivity benefits for us. The green bars, anybody here who's been close to SAP deployment will just have an instinctive sense for all of the work that that represents, even in addition to the dollars. If you haven't been close to it, please just take my word for it.
There's a lot of work represented on that chart, in addition to a lot of spend. Christophe summarized our approach to digital, really across the finding ways to continue to enhance our customer value, to increase our field productivity, and to drive operational performance. Let me just say that in my life, in the finance world, we're very much at the right-hand side of this chart, right? We're about increasing operational performance. I thought I'd take just a minute to comment to you how the SAP expansion is giving the finance team a much better toolkit to continue to play the vital role that we play within the business. The secret sauce of Ecolab finance is really not the work that I do, it's the work that is done by the finance teams that work shoulder to shoulder with the corporate account groups and the business leadership team.
We have, with this SAP technology, much improved tools to help do what is required to continue to drive profitable and accretive growth, including deep analysis of customer contracts and product profitability to come up with pricing strategies and arrangement to continue to capture our fair share of the value, right, that we're delivering to customers. Clearly, with 80% of the business now deployed, we've got great visibility to or improving, going to great visibility of the business around the world, making us more effective corporate account finance support team, and also supporting more efficient channel management. Let's pause here for a minute, talk about the upstream energy spin. We announced in February the planned spin of Ecolab's upstream business.
We included in the announcement the dimensions of the business based on 2018 information, so $2.4 billion in sales, about $340 million of EBITDA, and we do expect that this will be completed in the first half of 2020. It will allow, importantly, each company, this is the strategic rationale, to continue to focus on what we do best, right? Allow the upstream business, which is, let me just take a moment and say, an absolutely terrific business within its space, a prize asset with great product technology, great customer relationships, and a terrific management team to focus on what they do best and allow the rest of Ecolab to do the same. We expect that this will be accomplished in a tax-free distribution to Ecolab shareholders.
Likewise, that importantly, I think, that Ecolab will continue to maintain its cash dividend even post-spin, and that it is, of course, subject to customary approvals and approval by the Ecolab board of directors. I dimensionalize here a little bit the impact of the energy spin on Ecolab. On the left is Ecolab today, actually based on 2018 actuals. Doug gave high level the impact of the spin on what Ecolab looks like. I thought I'd give you a little bit of focus down below. The OI margin you'll see accelerating by about 180 basis points, just reflecting the fact that the upstream energy business in total has a lower OI margin. Net income, you can see the improvement, and likewise core ROIC because the energy business is higher invested base against the return that it generates, we'll see something like a 300 basis point acceleration in ROIC.
Related to this in some ways, we announced a $200 million Efficiency Initiative in the second quarter of 2018. We increased that to $325 million when we did the spin announcement. Look, this was very intentional. We need this additional traction to continue to cover the stranded costs at Ecolab that we will have once we spin the energy business, and also to cover the $35 million of anticipated public company costs for Upstream Energy. The net of this, with the expansion of the Efficiency Initiative, is that we will still deliver net $200 million of savings for the benefit of Ecolab shareholders on the base Ecolab business. Talked this a little bit at lunch as well. Just to orient you to the chart for the moment, right, the gray line is total Ecolab. The blue line is excluding the Upstream business.
You can see that the overall trajectory of the lines is maybe the same, but it sure is a lot smoother path if you just focus on Ecolab upstream. We talked at lunch about the joy it was to be in the upstream business in 2014, and then the kind of payback in some ways of that joy in 2015 and 2016. The net of it, as noticed here, is that the benefit of our being a more focused business model is continued more sustained delivery, more consistent financial performance, and frankly, I think a much clearer view for all of you into what is really a terrific business model that has sometimes been masked or obscured by the more cyclical energy performance. Net post spin, Ecolab will continue to be a terrific high-quality growth model.
We will be continuing to deliver financial performance, which is highly consistent with low capital intensity. We'll continue to drive improving margins and to generate strong returns. Thought I'd take a moment just to remind ourselves of the great record that we have of generating consistent strong returns. 11% over 10 years and 11% over 20 years, target at the midpoint of the range, 12% for this year. I did not show the five-year CAGR here. It's depressed, right, for all the reasons that you're familiar with. You can see the flattening of the EPS progressioning in 2015, 2016, which is part energy, part strong U.S. dollar, the beginnings, at least, of raw material inflation, that the five-year CAGR is an 8% number. Here's the good news in that, though, we continue to focus extensively on free cash flow generation all during this period.
The CAGR on free cash flow is actually 10%, right? We have delivered a net free cash flow conversion of 94%, meaning that 94% of our net income that we capture in any one year shows up directly in the bank account. We'll continue to be guided by very consistent cash flow priorities or cash use priorities, and we expect that this business will continue to be a very moderate consumer of capital, something in the neighborhood of 6% of sales. We've shown what we anticipate would be a continuing split with the strong component of that really being offensive capital, being merchandising equipment that we're essentially installing on the walls of our customers to continue to drive new sales. We're very proud of the fact that we're good stewards of shareholder capital. It's not a cash-intensive business, and it is a very strong cash generator.
We are committed to continue to increase our dividend in line with our net income growth. Our view of share repurchase is that we will repurchase shares to offset the dilutive impact of share-based compensation programs. At the same time, we view share repurchase as a very efficient way to return cash to shareholders if it is more than we can deploy in the business. We'll continue to do it. You note here that we've returned in total, like $5 billion through share repurchase and $3 billion in dividends to shareholders over this time period. I mentioned our financial objectives are very simple, and we're not going to change them. We'll continue to be targeting 15% EPS growth and 100 basis points of improvement to return on invested capital every year.
We'll continue to manage the balance sheet at a number that's about 2 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA. This is very consistent with the idea that we want to preserve balance sheet strength for the future, including for transformative M&A, should an opportunity present itself. We'll continue to be very much guided by our consistent cash priorities to grow dividend in line with EPS growth to make smart acquisitions, which are terrific bolt-ons and very accretive to OI margins as well as to the top line. Share repurchase, frankly, is what we think of as being the sort of optional swing use of free cash flow. I thought I'd just show you this chart. I had a little bit of a conversation at lunch today, too, about the role of finance at Ecolab.
I've talked about our job working closely with the business partners, and particularly corporate accounts teams, to make sure that we are generating great returns and contract structure. I spent a lot of time looking at business performance at the contract and product profitability level. I always think that that's the hard work that gets done by the Ecolab finance team. For me, this is like a dream finance job, to be part of such a powerful organization, such a sustainable contributor, to work with great business partners like you've seen here today. From my point of view, the financial strategy of the business and the consistency in how we think about it, and frankly, the same points that I articulate in terms of how we think about financial management of business were written on the wall somewhere when I arrived 25 years ago. They haven't changed.
They shouldn't change. Our finance position and our strategy is a direct reflection of the business strategy. It's all based on consistency, predictability, transparency, I would also say accountability. I'm very proud to lead this team, which is very strong, and increasingly, I think we got the right focus and we're equipped with the right tools. I'll just end here, which is a little bit of I showed it last time and frankly, the time before that, the testimonial to what I think that the finance team at Ecolab is all about. We are partners in the business providing rigorous operating discipline. We view ourselves as stewards of strong financials, of cash flow, and of returns. We've got this very sustainable and proven strategy to deliver top-line growth.
We will be full partners in it, not only in building a great EPS story going forward, but making sure that it's pulling along with it a lot of cash and that we're investing cash to deliver increasingly accretive levels of return on invested capital, which is our commitment to the shareholder. With that, I would pause and please ask any questions.
Dan, John Roberts here from UBS. You pick up 300 basis points of ROIC from the spin separation.
Yeah.
Do you increase your longer-term target? I think it's been aspirational to be 20% for some time, or because you're not there yet, do you just hold that target?
Well, I'll take the 300 basis points as a head start on the 20, then we'll see on where it goes from there. Look, prior to Nalco, for years and years, this business delivered returns in the 20% and a little bit plus. There's a natural limit, of course, you've got to deploy assets in the business, they're not going to be infinitely generating. I view the 300 basis points as kind of the accelerated payback of the dip that we took on the Nalco transaction. Okay. I thank you for not asking the RevRec question, by the way. Anyone else? One here.
The 15% excuse me, EPS growth. Could you just give us the buckets of where that's coming from? You're going to get top-line growth-
Yeah
you're going to get margin.
Yeah
You're going to use capital deployment.
Yeah.
When you think about that 15 over the longer run, how much should be coming from each bucket?
Yeah. The equate, I didn't show the chart, although I might have. Well, I remembered to do it last time. We talk about targeting organic sales growth rates in the 6%-8% range, OI accretion of 50 to 75 basis points a year. That should deliver organic EPS growth in the 11%-12% range, low double digits. The balance really comes from M&A and also comes from share buyback. I would say the balance comes from the effective deployment of all the cash that the business is generating, which can go to, and preferentially, to highly accretive M&A. If not, it will go to share purchase, which is also accretive, although I want to be clear, not why we do it. Okay. Yeah. Andy, here.
Hi. Thanks, Dan. Colin Deschamps with Sterling Capital. Simple strategy, circle the customer, circle the globe. We've got a good proxy for circling the globe with geo-revenue progression over time. In terms of circling the customer, any thought towards increasing disclosure on, I asked it earlier to one of the segment heads, like a same-store sales metric, wallet share metric. It sounds like you're measuring customer wallet share on a portfolio basis. To the extent you could disclose to the outside analysts looking in, so we could measure against a milestone like that.
Yeah.
Why or why not would something like that make more sense against those two pillars? Thanks.
Yeah. I guess my immediate reaction is, we operate across three public segments, and beneath those, there are a lot of divisions that have a lot of variation in terms of their go-to customer strategies, customer size, and growth plans, et cetera. I think that the diffusion of it, in a way, across the segment portfolio would be distracting. It's not really how we look at the business. We tend to look very much at the contract and product profitability view. I guess what I would encourage you, so I'm not jumping at the idea. Let me be clear about that, and would encourage you to think about the best indicator of how that is progressing, is by looking at top-line performance and top-line performance by segment.
I think that Mike and the team, and really all of us, are reasonably proud of the transparency that we provide on how the top line is progressing. We don't back away from things like lost business. We talk very openly about what's driving it. I think it's frankly more meaningful and probably a little bit more analytically helpful.
Thanks. Andy Wittmann from Baird. Dan, I was hoping you could just talk about the gross margin in your business. I think coming into 2019, you talked a lot about pricing and the 3% run rate that you've posted, at least year to date, being additive to that. Gross margins haven't really seen much of a lift yet. I was wondering if you could discuss that and also your outlook for gross margin accretion, post energy spin. Potentially, that's been one of the factors that's held back your gross margins from expanding further.
The spin impact, you're right, first of all. The energy business, the upstream energy business in total, has a lower gross margin. WellChem, strangely, is quite high. There's very little service content in that business. The bigger impact from energy, frankly, is there's some mix. More recently, the decline in the WellChem business has had a quite negative impact on gross margin, just because WellChem products absorb a lot of overhead through the production process, and we talked about that in the second quarter on the call. More broadly, maybe, let me just say this. You're right, frankly, that we have nosed up a gross margin year-on-year improvement and then given a little bit of it back. We're forecasting for the full year 50 basis points improvement in gross margin, and I think we talked about that in our forecast for the full year, too.
We also have talked about how this is supported by absolutely terrific pricing efforts by the team. Let me just say, in an environment where the raw materials are backing off, right, our ability to continue to push pricing at that sustained level is not guaranteed. We'll continue to push it. This is what all of the business leaders understand, I think, the high margin point for gross margin at Ecolab for most of our businesses with 2016. We've worked our tails off to get us to where we are. We know that we have more work to do. This will come not only from pricing, but also from the benefit of innovation and that hopefully you saw evidence of all through the trade show. You're right, we got work to do. Pricing has helped significantly. It can't be the whole story.
Some of this is going to have to be by continuing to innovate new solutions that add more value for shareholders and capturing our part of it. I think we're good at it. We got some work to do.
Thank you. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Dan, you didn't touch on either Q3 guidance or 2019 guidance. Anything in the current trends that give you concern about meeting either Q3 EPS guidance or full year EPS guidance?
Every week is a different week, let me just say that. We put out the guidance, and we're not changing it one way or the other here today. It's a dynamic world, of course. I drive to work every day not expecting all the challenge that I'm going to get. I drive home most days feeling a lot better than when I was driving in.
So.
Time for one more.
Eric Petrie with Citi. How do you measure the return performance of your digital investments, or asked another way, what's kind of a payback period on the $600 million of total investment?
Yeah. Thank you. We talked about this a little bit at lunch, too. Here's what I'll say. I commented, too, when I showed the ramp on that spend, which is significant, so you're right to ask the question. As well as the complexity of really integrating this digital technology effectively into sometimes complex business models, which we drive with customers. We don't charge for it either, by the way. For the most part. There are minor exceptions. The indicator that I would look for in the impact of digital is exactly where you would think it would show up in the P&L.
Which is when you think about what it drives, it is integral to the customer offering, so the additional ability to acquire and to retain customers and to deliver pricing, value-based pricing with customers is the direct payoff of that digital investment, and the same on the parts of it that are designed at improving our productivity. Right? We will continue to be able to add field headcount at rates that are much below the top-line sales performance that we drive. The function spend, like the spend of the team that I represent, will continue to benefit from investment in both field digital technology to automate order process and from transaction processing.
I mentioned on my slide one of the key unlockers for the finance team of this SPA tech or, pardon me, SAP technology is significant headcount reduction just on the number of people who are involved in transaction management. I'd look at it on gross margin and OI accretion. It's going to be absolutely integral. We do not value the return on a platform-by-platform basis. We think it is an incorporated part of the offering. Okay? With that, thank you. Mr. Baker.
Great.
All right. Short and sweet. You guys have heard a lot, seen a lot of charts. I won't kill you with many more. In fact, maybe I won't kill you with any more. All right, here we go. I would say the messages, I think, are fairly straightforward. I was asked at lunch, how do you feel about the business? It's like, what is underappreciated, what's overappreciated? I think by and large, our company, we work to make sure that it's transparent and fairly understood. We are a company that's been around since 1923, but we are still, I believe, very early in the story, and a lot of it is because of outlook. Principally, the outlook of our team. I encourage, but even if I wasn't here, we have an optimistic view of what opportunity is.
I could show share that we have a 20 share instead of a 10 share, et cetera, but I think it's important for us to look expansively at the opportunities. There is dramatic upside in our business. We showed charts with our 10 share. The $130 billion is designed to be representative of what we sell, where we sell it. Bobby, when he was talking about his pest business, mentioned they were in, I believe, 34 countries. Well, we're in 34. All that's in here is the 34 country pest market, not the other 140 countries where we're not. It is designed to talk about what we can access today. Now, is it all equally accessible? No. Of course not. At the same time, it's a realistic view, we believe, of what we chase.
We know there's a lot in front of us, in customers we don't sell in, obviously within customers. In the CTC world, we have continued to drive further penetration. It does get complicated because a number of variables. That isn't important. Yet, we continue to enter new space. We bought Lobster, which is a digital training space. All that increases the market opportunity, and it also increases what we can sell to existing customers, which may look like we never make any progress, but the truth is, that's how we grow. When we look at the macro factors behind the $130 billion, they're much more in our favor than not. Now, I showed you earlier the chart of the green bars, kind of the sideways Pareto chart of our markets, and the blue was how much we had. We may have a recession.
I imagine we will in the next few years. I don't know when it's coming, what it's going to look like. Those blue bars may temporarily, or green bars, shrink. They're going to shrink from the right edge. It's not there's a gap suddenly created that we've got to jump over from our share to the market opportunity. We view the world either way, whether the economy grows 2% or shrinks 1%, we don't believe is going to ultimately dictate our ability to succeed. It's better to have a good economy. We will do marginally better in a good economy, but our ability to go gain share, drive business consistently, especially with our best results, lowest cost formula, is equally as strong, maybe even stronger on a relative basis in a bad economy.
We deliver great value in terms of not just economic performance, but also in ESG performance. We will adjust to the world. We aren't sitting here saying, "Geez, this is how what we've always done. Here's our model." We are continually looking and striving to understand what do we do well and what we don't do well. I was having a conversation coming in from lunch. Okay, we just finished North America. Finish is a strong word. We're through a lot of the execution of SAP North America. I don't know if you're ever finished. You know what? We learn a lot. Some of it is how stupid we've been. You have the shock and awe of learning about how dumb we've been for a while, and then you quickly realize, "Oh, that's a lot of money.
Let's get better, and let's get after this, and let's go fix this. There is a lot to do in this company. We can be a lot better than we are. I view that as positive. I don't want to run a company with eight cylinders all running perfectly. That'll be the exit strategy, I guess. Not really. That's not what you want to invest in. This company, I assure you, has a lot of cylinders. They're not all running perfectly. We have more juice, and the team is who's going to go get the juice out of the business. The best part of these investor days, besides the slides, is your opportunity to talk to the team.
It's certainly our senior team, but you have a chance to see most of our senior team when they're out at conferences, so you're not at every conference. They're out frequently with investors, and we do that on purpose because the strength of the company is the depth of the team. You also had a chance, I hope you were able to take advantage of it, to see the other and the other part of our team that was here who put all this together and did such a great job working to be able to demonstrate how we bring value to customers. I'm quite proud of the team. The team is a heart and soul of a company, and I think ours is well-placed in the people that we've picked to lead the team and that they have in turn picked to lead their businesses.
What's new? I would say several things. We are all over digital. We are investing in digital. We will continue to invest in digital. We do believe it's historic, and we do believe that it's transformational. I believe it's going to double, triple our competitive edge capabilities because I know we are out investing, and I believe we've got a better team on it. That's going to be huge for us. If I'm wrong, we wasted some money. I don't think we're going to be wrong. I think this is going to be absolutely important. Second is we are out searching for new markets. Life science is a great example of a market we recently entered. FRS is a better example of one we entered quite a while ago. We had zero share in FRS. We are by far the leaders in FRS.
I think out of the 10 top retailers, I think we got eight or maybe just got nine now and had zero. We can develop positions and capabilities to go thrive in these markets. We have a number now, and we've been working on it, and the segmentation focus has been purposeful. Finally, M&A. I don't know. Am I begging for a recession? No. There are upsides, and I don't mind a recession every once in a while. I hate the damage and the pain it costs to a number of people. That's no fun. From a purely company point of view, it will give us new M&A opportunity, and I do believe that. We do M&A based on our ability to generate a return. While we can borrow money cheap, we still have to pay it back.
If we borrow $1 billion, it's great that it's at 3 points and maybe going to 2, but ultimately, we still have to pay the $1 billion back, and I need to make $200 million on it. That's how we view it. What's the return on this darn investment we're making over the long term? It's not hard to make it accretive, but accretive can't be the benchmark. It's got to be, can you get a return on this thing? Because in 10 years, people are going to wake up and go, "Geez, that was a bunch of dumb deals you did back then. What's going on?" This business needs to be set up for the future. It's how we've always managed it. That's why we've done so well for so many years, and we'll continue to manage that way. We are committed to our targets.
Our 20% operating income, no, we're not going to take the 20% ROIC up. Let us at least hit it, and then we can argue about it. It will be a fair argument at that time. The 15% EPS growth, we recognize, we put up the charts that say it's 11 and 12 over these horizons. We know we don't regularly hit the 15. I guess the way we're programmed is we'd rather put 15 out there, shoot for it and hit 12 than give you a 10 target and hit 11. That's how we view it. We are not going to do stupid things to hit a target. We're going to manage and invest in the business, and the best evidence is exactly what we've done.
We've pounded in money during an uncertain time period in the digital area, because we know it's transformational and critical to our future. If we hadn't done it, we could have given you a few more points of EPS growth. I don't think the company would be more valuable, and I know for certain our future wouldn't be as bright. That's the trade we'll make every time, continue to invest in the company so it's set up for the future, and I think we've done a good job there. That's my close. We're back to agenda. I'll take any more questions if you have them, and then after that, I think Mike will come up and do the emcee job on where do you go for what tour. Fair enough? Any Q&A?
Hey, Doug. Manav with Barclays. Just on this, if there's a recession, you will do M&A. Presumably, it's the larger deals that you're referring to. Can you give us some flavor of what kind of deals you'd be looking for? Are they adjacent markets? Are they competitors, et cetera?
Well, Manav, we have, I would say, a fairly rich list of M&A targets. Some are clearly, when we look at them, just not really actionable based on how we think the financial performance plays out and given their current valuation. I imagine more come under the line or over the line of actionable in that situation. They would be all kinds. I would say very consistent with what you see from us today. We buy new technology, sell in existing markets. We buy bolt-ons in some cases, right? Some of it gives us geographic scale, like Anios, that we didn't have. There'd be a host of those. There are certainly some that would be in adjacent businesses that we think run a very similar model. Nalco would have been a good example of that. We have examples of all of them.
The way it works, and you know it better than I do, is a number of things have to come together to get one of these things over the line. You have to have alignment between the respective management teams. You're going to have to have financial alignment, like this works somehow, obviously, that's all predicated on strategic or industrial logic fit. I think we've got a good list. I think we know what we hope for. We will be ready to jump fairly quickly if we get there. Our balance sheet certainly is in good shape. I think the market appetite, if we do something smart and we have a good case for it, will be receptive. None of those things hold us back.
At the same time, we aren't going to be so antsy to do a deal that we end up doing a dumb one. You pay too much, it's a sin you can never overcome. Right? It's impossible to fix. Everything else you can fix.
John Roberts, Doug. You keep adding SBUs. Is complexity an issue at some point in terms of how long this list gets of SBUs? Do you need to regroup them into different clusters? Maybe the energy spin is an opportunity to have a different structure for the organization?
Yeah, I would say, more business units, in a way, reduces complexity for those operating the business unit, because what we're asking them to do is focus on either a given market or a given technology. In a lot of ways, it reduces complexity where it matters most, which is closest to the customer. We want focused people delivering great value, and that really comes from know-how, experience, and just knowledge of the market. That's how we think about it. You're right. When you get a plethora of these business units, there is a little more complexity in management. I will also point out it's like three, four steps from where the magic happens in the customer, and I would rather have that trade a complexity. We have recently organized more closely to our public segments.
We have the Institutional public segment, the Industrial public segment, and historically, an Other and an Energy. The Institutional businesses are more oriented under Institutional and industrial-like in terms of management structure, too. The reason we did it was somewhat to get rid of some of the complexity. Two, there's just natural synergies along and around our Industrial business set and our Institutional. Industrial has big units in a few of them. Institutional has many units, and they're small. The technology it takes to address those markets is a little different. Capital sensitivity is different. It's good grouping from a strategic standpoint. That's how we view it. See you later.
Eric Petrie with Citi. As a front-runner, Doug, in digital, how long do you think the nearest competitor could replicate your systems and processes and actually present a fair fight?
Well, I think in this world, I don't believe it's really going to be around the system. I don't think systems and software are long-term advantages, if you will. I think what it is unique data streams and data sets and the ability to access them, which we have, because we've already installed all this equipment in customers. I don't know who you're going to get to go install dispensing equipment that aggregates data in 2.7 million customers in 170 countries. That's a daunting task for any company. I don't know who could do it. That's a big built-in advantage. Then it's the know-how to take the data that you hopefully can assimilate effectively in the cloud, to analyze it and understand what the heck it all means.
If you've got no food safety competency, if you have no HAI or water or corrosive technology background, it's not easy to make sense of it. That's why I like this digital world, because in a lot of ways, I think it puts primacy on data sets and unique data and know-how. The software is going to be ubiquitous, like a field technology to gather data and, or the ability to transmit data. That's going to be, frankly, I think, generic. Just like Word is generic for everybody. Some people really write smart memos, and they write dumb memos all on Word. Word isn't the advantage, it's the intelligence being used. I think that's the world we see. That's what we're trying to create.
I don't think it's easy to go replicate it, because it's not going to be easy to replicate our know-how. That's why we want to get a jump on it and be first. The last thing I'll say is it's just hard to do. If somebody set out to do it, okay, one of our competitors, well, to go take us out, you still got to go install all this stuff. You can't just mail a customer a kit and they somehow put it in their restaurant or their food and beverage account. As a consequence, the field really matters. I say the only way to obsolete the field is have the field. I think quite the opposite will happen.
We put in the data collection capabilities, I think our field advantage becomes more important, not less important, because they're the ones who can close the loop and fix what we learned through all this digital technology.
Doug, thanks. Just was interested to get your take on your thoughts on how we should best measure success against the digital initiatives over time. What one, two, or three things should we be looking to? Secondarily, you talked about valuations being up in your discussion on potential M&A. That also holds true for Ecolab stock. Could you refresh us on your willingness to use stock as currency for deals? Alternatively, how you're measuring return on investment for the repo program over time at these levels? Thanks.
On the repurchase. I guess I'll do digital first and then come to the other question. I would say on digital, we're focusing right now on how we're doing building the capability, i.e., how many connected customers do we have and everything else, because it's vital. You can't create this virtuous circle that we're talking about unless we can get the darn data out of the dispenser into the cloud. I can't do artificial intelligence until we get X data. We know that's an important piece, which is why, I think in Christophe's presentation, he shared these are some of the early things that we're doing and measuring, because it's really measuring the build, as you will. The other metrics you can use, I think, over time, we will talk about digitally enabled sales. I think increasingly, we'll probably come up with other sales networks.
What this needs to do is feed our capability to continue to grow like we're growing and to continue to feed EPS growth, right? You get larger, you get bigger, you have to have new initiatives. We believe this capital spend is going to be in lieu of ultimately other things. When you start any new initiative, you've got to have it's honestly dead capital for a little bit as you're putting it out there. I'm going to get zero return. I had this argument with somebody right now. I said, "Well, nobody will start a business if I got to get an immediate return on capital." I can't do anything. I'm kind of stuck because the first restaurant you build, right, I got to build it before a customer comes in. I have zero return for X period of time until something happens.
We view that early stage is over on digital, and now we're more mature at stasis in terms of, I think we're at the right level of annual. We've gotten that build behind us, and then it's really, can we turn this into money-making and all the rest? It should be in our old-fashioned way. If it doesn't show up in the P&L, I get quite nervous, right? If you don't see OI expansion, sales growth, et cetera, well, then what the heck, right? Where is it? In terms of stock price, I was taught long ago, I can crash a stock price. It's hard for me to increase the stock price, is what I would say. I can just say something outlandishly stupid. I will try to avoid that.
What we work to do is drive earnings in a way that's sustainable. My favorite chart of Dan's is basically, look, our cash flow is equal or better to our adjusted earnings. We try to give adjusted earnings that are a legitimate proxy for what's going on in the company. We think they're more accurate, honestly, than the other, is legitimate. I think tying it to cash flow is the best way to find out, is it fairly accurate? If you look at ours, it's very similar to cash flow. That's what we strive to do. Honestly, the market decides what our multiple is and everything else. In terms of stock repurchase, I can guarantee there is probably no finance committee that goes through more work to figure out, are we doing the right thing when we look at repurchase?
We look at a number of metrics. We have a large shareholder on, which I think has been very healthy for us, investor, right, on our finance committee, which takes a very much an investor view. It's a complicated mix of things. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters on share repurchase is did you buy it cheaper than it trades for? If the answer is no, I can tell you all the perfect measurements we used to show that it was a great value, and you go, "Yeah, great, but it trades at 80 and you paid 100." Right? It's really all that ultimately people look at. We are very careful on that. I think if you look at our history, we've been fairly conservative.
We do try to offset dilution, be wise as we're doing this, and have a relatively constant base. Dan said we don't try to go game it. I would say we typically underspend our budget on an annual basis versus what we say we're going to go do. Simply as we get through the year, we try to be, where are we going to go, and we try to be wise as we go. Right? It's not our primary focus. Growing earnings is, right, the right way. All right. Anybody else? All right.