U s from anywhere around the world, remotely. We were forecasting for some rain, today. Well, the weather is perfect, here in Minnesota. We'll see how long that lasts. I guess that'll be the name of the game, for the year and for the year before us, and the years to come as well. When we think about last time we met was October 2023, a lot of things have happened, in the world. A lot of things have happened differently than we had expected, and I was discussing with some of you as well, this morning, how much time we're spending in planning for the year that's to come. And then the year starts, and the world is different, and we adjust, and we still keep delivering as expected. And this is the Ecolab way.
This is the way this team is delivering, and that's why if we're here today with the results that we've been delivering so far and will be delivering in the years to come, it's because of the team that you will see today, that you'll have the opportunity to interact with, the broader team as well at the Innovation Fair and over lunch, as Andy mentioned as well, but also the 48,000 people that are fighting for our customers to help them make sure that they improve their operations every single day, and that's the magic of the company.
Before we jump in with all the various presenters, I thought I would share with you some perspective on who we are, for the ones who are a little bit early in our story, but also where we are and where we're going, most importantly, and starting with our purpose, which is guiding us every single day, whatever happens out there. Our purpose is to protect what's vital: people from infections, natural resources, while improving business performance of our customers. And that's been true for a 102 years, since 1923 , when we started as Economics Laboratory, as an economic idea, which is still true today. We have the means for our ambition. We have the capabilities.
We're 48,000 people serving millions of customers around the world, with 3,000 people in R&D, in data science, supporting everything we do every single day, anywhere around the world, and we have a reach that no one else has. We've been protecting, in 2024, 1.7 billion people from infection. We've protected a third of the world's food production, a quarter of the power that's being generated, which is gonna be so essential because of the new technologies that we will need in the months and in the years to come as well at the same time. We have a very resilient business model, which is so essential for us, for our customers, and obviously for you, our shareholders, for four key reasons. The first one, it's a recurring model. We sell annuities, we sell consumables. It's a recurring business.
90% of our sales are recurring. The second is we serve 40 different end markets. The third, we serve 172 countries with our people around the world. So not all businesses, not all markets, are gonna be in the green at the same time, but the vast majority will be and are today. And the fourth reason is, once again, our team. Some of them that you will see and meet today, and many that are behind the scene while selling today, helping our customers grow and helping us create value, obviously, for our shareholder and for our future. This is a super global team, a super diverse team, a team that's super engaged as well at the same time, and that knows how to adjust to whatever conditions are changing today on a daily basis, as we all know.
Which brings me to the three key messages for today. We're blessed with the momentum we have as an organization, delivering double-digit earnings growth for a very long time. The second is that we have plenty of growth engines that can accelerate our growth and at the same time protect any growth, depending on the economic conditions as well. This is true for today, this is true for the years to come, obviously, and the third message is the 20% OI margin we talked about at the last Investor Day in 2023. We feel more confident than ever to deliver this 20% by 2027, which is much less than the five years that we had planned a few years back, and our eyes are focused on what's beyond the 20%, because we're not gonna stop there.
So let me jump in and unpack each of them one by one. First, we have good momentum in a pretty complicated world, to say the least. Since we last met, the S&P went up 72%. That includes, obviously, the MAG7 . As we all know, Ecolab grew close to 100%, during that same period of time. When we think about the macro growth trends that have been helping us, obviously, for many, many years, but they're shifting even more towards our direction. Talking about climate change, talking about water scarcity, talking about the risk of infection, we're all experiencing that on a daily basis in most places around the world.
This is gonna intensify because of one key reason, because of the name that we've heard for just a few years now, like a couple. AI is gonna need even more power, even more water than we had planned initially. We estimate that AI will require the power equivalent of the whole of India by 2030, and will require for cooling and generating the power that's required, the equivalent of the drinking needs of the United States by 2030. That's four or five years. You saw the trends before, you saw the gaps that we have by 2030. That's making it even more extreme, and what we do is even more required by our customers. When we think about AI, for us as an organization, it's a source of growth. This is the main focus for us when we think about AI.
We think about operational performance. We're certainly gonna hear it from Scott a little bit later, but first and foremost, it's a growth engine for us. It's four different components. The first one, we need to help build that infrastructure. We need to help produce the chips. We'll talk more about that, obviously, today, because of all we do and the position that we've just announced as well a week ago. It's to help produce chips in ways that require much less water, which is a huge challenge. We need to cool the data centers more than ever, and you're gonna hear more of that as well today. This is generating new growth, new businesses. This is the first one. The second, while we use it for our own operations, and it's working very well.
As you'll hear it as well today, I think it's moving faster than we thought. We've been maybe a bit conservative on it. We wanted to make sure we could learn, we could get ahead, and we are ahead, and we'll stay ahead, as you'll hear it more as well, so from Scott, in a minute. The third one is, well, we can sell our digital services. For thirty years that we've been in digital technology, it's always been part of our programs, our offering. It's been for free for our customers. That has changed a few years back, and we've started reporting, as you know, the sales that we're making in digital technology.
And last but not least, obviously, by capturing all that data, all those insights from the millions of locations around the world, we get insights from 40 industries in 172 countries that we can use and leverage with our customers to help them get to a higher level of performance. So four ways for us when we think about how AI can create value for the company and for you, our shareholders. Our total available market keeps growing as well. We've been working on that for many, many years. This is not new. We started that 25, 30 years ago when we added Pest Elimination to our portfolio. We added Water in 2011. We added Life Science.
We added Biotech with Purolite, and we just added Global High-Tech just a few years back, and especially with the latest acquisition from last week as well. We have now a $165 billion market opportunity. We have roughly 10% of that market. This is what we're trying to strive for, always making sure that we have a small share of a very big, growing market, and what's really interesting is that $60 billion of those $165 billion, well, that's an opportunity that we have within customers that we already have a connection with. It's a penetration opportunity, so to use a different term.
Our model, as you know, is generating demand, because the way we provide value for our customers, it's to bring expertise, technology, chemistry, data insights, to help them produce better outcomes at a lower total cost because they use less natural resources and labor. This means that they get a return of what they buy from us, and the higher the return, the more they buy from us as well at the same time. So it's a very good virtuous cycle that we've been practicing for many, many years. And while we do that, while we grow, we grow our impact as well at the same time. We made a commitment in 2015 that we will reach by 2030 , and we are perfectly on track to get to those objectives.
Last year, we protected 1.7 billion people from infection, enough water for the drinking needs of 780 million people, and we've helped our customers reduce their cost by $9.1 billion, and those are numbers that we align with our customers every single year when we look back and we plan for the year to come, as we do every single time as well.
We have this very special model of growing by growing our impact and growing our team that we've been practicing for many, many years, which has helped us deliver steady performance, especially from an earnings perspective, which is my number one priority, making sure we're always within the 12%-15% earnings growth, that we get to over 20% OI margin and get beyond that as well after 2027, while driving top line as well, keeping in mind. That's the beauty of our model as well. In order to get the other two on margin and earnings, 3% is good for it as well. 5%-7% is even better, obviously, and that's the beauty of the model that we have, where we can fuel the future of our company or increase our earnings as well at the same time.
Building on a great trajectory and history of a great track record that we've had in terms of earnings for twenty or thirty years, well, or as you can look, it's been a very strong, steady, solid story all the time. So we have good momentum, and this is our best friend, obviously, in the world that we live in. Second, we have good opportunities to accelerate growth and to protect growth as well at the same time. The best way to look at how do we think about growth as a company is to look at it in three different ways. The first one is our core business, our traditional businesses. It's 80% of our company. It's Institutional, it's Food & B everage...
Those are the traditional core businesses that we feed first and foremost as an organization, and we expect to grow the business roughly 2%. We add to it 2%-3% of value price. Nothing new. This is something we've been discussing for a very long time, and we add one to two percentage points from new growth engines, and I'm gonna come back in a second. That's how you get towards these five to seven, and that's how we protect as well the trajectory that we have now, whatever happens in the world out there. Today, 80% of the company is already growing at 4%. We have one drag because Paper and Basic Industries, two businesses that are not in the red, in the green today. We're working on them. There will always be businesses that we can improve.
This is the way we run the company, making sure that all the businesses in the green stay in the green, and the ones that are a little bit more challenged because demand is harder, well, we work on them, and we improve them, and we have a great track record at doing that for a very long time as well. In terms of price, the 2%-3% is something that we've been delivering this year, we'll be delivering in the years to come, and the growth engine are already adding a percentage point today, and we'll be moving towards the 2%, over time as well, at the same time. Another way to look at our growth. Out of the $16 billion, $13 billion is growing low single. Good.
Same time, we have $3 billion of whole businesses, Pest Elimination, Life Sciences, Global High-Tech, and Ecolab Digital that's growing double digit. Those are the businesses of the future where we invest as well in making sure that we have core businesses that are strong, steady, generating great margins and cash flows while we build as well the future of the company at the same time, and this is working very well. Let me go a little bit more in detail, starting with innovation. We've been delivering very good results in innovation. We've accelerated it over the last few years. I've been very transparent with you as well. We've been renovating a lot of our products over the many, many years. The last five years, we've changed the game in the way we look at innovation.
We've said we need to renovate, obviously, the products that our customers are used to. We need to do that every single day. This is our job, our duty. At the same time, we need to bring breakthrough innovations. Started a few years back, you can see in 2022, 18% of the pipeline was breakthrough innovations. Today, it's 50%, and you will see four today at the innovation fair, and we have 19 of those in the pipeline. Not all are gonna be successful, but the vast majority will be. That's the game of innovation, obviously. I'll make just a few examples here. AI data centers, they need way more cooling technology in order to shift the power that's being used from cooling to compute. Usually, 60% of the power is used to compute, 40% is used to cool.
Well, when you're power constrained, you'd like to shift that balance, and that's exactly what we're doing, and you're gonna hear more as well, as the day goes on. Second, circular water for microelectronics. One of the top microelectronics manufacturers in the world uses, in one day, as much water as one of the largest food manufacturer uses in one year. One day versus one year. This is not gonna work. Obviously, longer term, we need to be able to reuse and recycle water in a fab. But here's the catch: this is water that is thousand times more pure than the water that's being used in drugs. So it's a lot of water at a super high quality. This is a typical Ecolab play, and you're gonna hear more, not today, but, in the months to come on that project as well.
Our customers in the restaurant industry, difficult to find labor. Labor is getting more expensive. They don't have huge margins, as we know. We've developed together with Microsoft, a unique platform to manage the operation and drive their performance. More sales, less labor, better margins. We call it RushReady, and it's coming on the market as we speak. Pest Intelligence, you've heard a lot about this one. You're gonna see a lot as well today. This is game-changing for that business going forward, and our Life Sciences team working on Biopharma Solutions in order to help produce drugs at the highest quality, at the lowest cost, which is the name of the game, and you're gonna hear more as well today about those ones, so that's one, growth driver, so for us. The second one is by adding value for our customers. We call it Total Value Delivered.
This is the way we've been delivering to our customers for a very long time. We formalized it across businesses, across industries, across the market. We have the same language to all customers, all our businesses. It's about how do we improve business outcomes? How do we improve operational performance? How do we improve their operational environmental impact? And how does it add up ultimately to a number that's aligned with their P&L expectations? At the same time, while we do that for millions of customers around the world, well, we know what best-in-class performance is, what the best restaurant is, what the best hotel, what the best data center, what the best hospital, and so on, in the forty industries that we serve. We can share that information with our customers without obviously sharing from whom that is, but they can know what's the best-in-class performance.
We've been delivering it, obviously, since those are actual numbers, and we can help them understand how far are they from a best-in-class performance if all the locations were performing at the performance of their best location. And this is the best-in-class approach that we are using with our customers around the world, starting with our largest customers, our corporate accounts. And if we look at our top 35 customers, they represent an opportunity, a growth opportunity, of $3.5 billion, with some of the biggest names, obviously, of the industry, the ones who have helped us shape that concept of best in class, with whom we're working together in order to deliver best in class to them, for them, and for everyone else in the industry.
That translates into Total Value Delivered, and as you know, we take a share of the TV that we're generating for our customers. That translates into value price. We don't look at price like list price in our company. We look at it as a share of the improvements that we are delivering to our customers. This is a revenue stream, obviously, at 100% margin. It's a great part of our business model. As you can see, in 2025, we expect to deliver over $9 billion of cost savings to our customers. This is the base of last year, so it's gonna be more than that, and we capture $3 billion out of pricing as well out of it. Good deal for our customers, it's a good deal for us as well at the same time. The next one are the growth engines.
As mentioned before, it's four key ones that we have started within the last five years: Pest Intelligence, Ecolab Digital, Life Sciences, and Global High-Tech. They represent roughly $3 billion in aggregate, growing double-digit with margins that are north of 20%. This is where the company is going, building on our core businesses, making sure that we have new engines as well for the future, and we keep improving those ones. As mentioned before, in our High-Tech business, one element was essential for us to provide the Circular Water within microelectronics. Ovivo, the company that we just announced a week ago, we need to close. Hopefully, it's gonna be done by the first quarter of 2026. It helps us produce ultrapure water that we can reuse and recycle within the fab. This is game-changing for microelectronics manufacturers. You're familiar with those names.
They're not many out there. There's one fab being built every single month today for the next 10 years. `100 new ones are being planned and being built as we speak as well at the same time. Ecolab Digital, we've created that new business 12 months ago. Today, $380 million annualized sales, growing north of 20%, with very high margin, as you can imagine as well, and we're gonna report the margins as soon as we can do it, making sure that it's done in a GAAP way. Obviously, we report the growth. We'll be reporting as well the margin whenever we're ready. But what's most important is all our current customers that are currently using digital technology were to pay as the ones paying today, well, it's a potential of $3 billion.
So we're moving from 380 million to 3 billion with customers that are using that technology today, that are enjoying that value today. And every time we get an innovation, well, we move from premium to premium, and we do it in a way that's good for customers, as we've always done as an organization. So at the end of the day, I feel good about all the growth engines that we have that are helping us protect the growth and accelerate the growth that we have in all our businesses. So we have good momentum. We have plenty of growth engines for the future. And third, this confidence in the 20% OI margin.
I'm focusing my time on looking at not only how do we get to the 20% in 2027 in a world that's changing pretty fast, but at the same time, thinking about how do we get beyond the 20%. Here's a fact: two-thirds of our businesses are already at or beyond 20%. You can see the names of those businesses, and we have a third of our business that is below 20%. As you can see, Life Sciences and Light and Heavy includes Global High-Tech. Those are two businesses where we are overinvesting for the future, which means we know exactly that the underlying growth margin performance is way higher than what we report. We do it consciously, so that's gonna be an easy one to bring beyond 20% in the years to come.
And you'll hear it from Scott in a second as well, that we feel good about the building blocks that we have to get to 20% by 2027. We promised 18% for this year. Feel really good about this one as well, getting to 20% by 2027, and we expect that beyond 2027, we'll improve our margin between 100 and 150 basis points by. So between 2027 and 2030. More to come from Scott on this one, but when I think about innovation, our growth engine, value pricing, and One Ecolab are all feeding into that margin improvement in the years to come. Last but not least, I feel good about our future. We're in a place where we've worked hard to get to where we are today, in a world that's changing every single day.
We've done that for 102 years. Really proud of the track record that this team has delivered in good times, like in less good times. We feel good about the commitments that we've made. For me, the number one is really delivering double-digit earnings growth, 12%-15% or better... every single quarter, every single year. This is my job. This is our job. This is our commitment, getting to a company that is having a margin that's beyond 20% by driving top line, as we've always done, and will do even better in the years to come. Like the momentum that we have, like especially, the new engines that we have to drive the growth, in the months, quarters, and years to come, and getting to the margin that is fueling our future as well at the same time.
I hope it gives you a bit of an overview of who we are, where we are, where we're going in a world that's changing all the time, and that's fine. This is something we're used to. This is something that our team, as you will see today, can deal with and can deliver as well, during any time that we can face as well out there. The program today, Darrell is gonna join me just in a second. Our President and Chief Operating Officer, talking about how to execute behind all those commercial priorities, done in a very good way, in a very Australian way. We have a great partnership together. We've been working together for 15 years. We know each other very well, which is a huge advantage. We don't always see things the same way. This is a strength.
We have real discussions, we talk about the real challenges, the real opportunities, and we'll build this company together. This is a blessing, so for me. We will have our four business leaders, our group presidents, as we call them, share with you where they are, where they're going, what are the growth engines that they have in mind in the years to come. We'll have Scott present the financial targets and the financial plans as well. We'll have a break as well in between. We'll see when time is best for that probably during the segment overview. Then I'll do a quick close around 10:00 A.M. until 10:15 A.M., and then we'll move to the Q&A. It's gonna be an opportunity. We have half an hour.
All the group presidents are gonna be here together, with Scott, Darrell, and me, and to get through your questions. We're gonna have half an hour. We're gonna have the lunch as well, where you have plenty of opportunity to talk to our team. We'll have the innovation fair, where you have another opportunity as well, and we'll go around the hotel as well for the One Ecolab tour between 12:30 P.M. and 2:00 P.M. Plenty of opportunities to learn, to interact, and to get your feedback as well during the day, and we'll close sharply at 2:00 P.M. this afternoon. Great day. Looking forward to sharing more with you, and with that, I have the pleasure of welcoming on stage my partner and friend, Darrell Brown.
Okay, good morning, everybody. Great to be here. I'm gonna talk to you today about One Ecolab and how One Ecolab is accelerating not only our growth, but our value through best-in-class. We have an amazing opportunity. In actual fact, we have a $60 billion opportunity for growth with our existing customers right now, today. One Ecolab unlocks that growth opportunity for us through best-in-class, and I'll talk to you more about that as I go through the presentation. And lastly, we have a great team, and we're gonna leverage that great team that we have in the field, both corporate accounts and field, to enhance our performance. As Christophe said a little earlier, the opportunity we have is absolutely enormous. We're operating in a $165 billion market where we have $16 billion worth of sales today.
We have an $89 billion opportunity in unsold customers. We have a $60 billion opportunity with customers who already know and love us today, which is a real blessing for us, and of course, in that $60 billion parcel, we have a $3.5 billion opportunity with our top 35 customers, of which today we have about $2.8 billion worth of revenue. So a big, big opportunity for us. So I'm gonna talk to you about the three pillars of One Ecolab: One Customer, One Field, and One Company. Scott Kirkland is gonna talk more about the One Company side, and I'll concentrate mostly on One Customer, One Field. So as I think about One Customer. So One Customer is driving best-in-class at the enterprise level, unlocking, for us, $3.5 billion worth of growth opportunities.
One Field is delivering best-in-class at the location level, at the unit operation level, which is actually giving our teams much more time to sell. And One Company is delivering best-in-class operations across the globe, which is unlocking $140 million worth of savings, which again, Scott will talk about a little later on. So let's go to the videotape now, where we look at One Ecolab delivering best-in-class performance for the company.
For more than a century, Ecolab has protected people and the resources vital to life. Building on this legacy, we have big ambitions to grow our partnerships with our customers, strengthening our impact on people, planet, and business health. We are sitting on $60 billion in untapped potential within our existing customer base alone. As a partner to millions of customer locations across 40 industries in 170 countries, only Ecolab is positioned and trusted to collect and provide our customers with performance data showcasing what best-in-class looks like across their enterprise and in their industry. True best-in-class performance is when customers experience the full value of working with Ecolab multiplied across all of their locations.
We can achieve this by combining Ecolab's people, innovations, and data-driven insights to help customers make every facility, plant, hotel, restaurant, and data center their best location. Elevating our customers' enterprises increases the total value we deliver, as well as the extraordinary impact our customers have on the world. We're taking best-in-class to the next level through One Ecolab, an enterprise-wide focus on enabling growth, performance, and enhanced experiences. Through One Customer, we win big by working as one team for our customers across our businesses to deliver best-in-class performance at the customer's enterprise level. Working together to bring the full breadth of our enterprise capabilities, including breakthrough innovations, we can unlock the untapped potential that exceeds $3.5 billion among our top customers alone.
Through One Field, we bring the right expertise at the right time to deliver best-in-class performance at the customer's unit level with unprecedented connectivity to drive speed. We're equipping our sales and service teams with new technologies that complement their experience, allowing them to focus on what matters most. New value selling tools combine the power of their relationships with AI-enabled insights and assistance, solving problems faster than ever before. And through One Company, we deliver as one for our customers through best-in-class operations and simplified processes that make it easier to work with and for Ecolab. Alongside AI-enabled technologies, we're scaling to capture growth, streamlining operations, and better collaborating across functions and regions as one team. From a service technician to a billing specialist, we demonstrate we are truly all in sales.
We're revolutionizing how we partner with our customers to deliver unrivaled value, turbocharging our growth and global scale. Only Ecolab knows how to deliver true best-in-class performance. As One Ecolab, we will fulfill our purpose of protecting what's vital, faster, and more effectively than we ever imagined possible.
Okay, so let me take you a little bit deeper now in terms of One Customer and how that drives best-in-class at the enterprise level to unlock this $3.5 billion worth of growth opportunity that we have. So if we think about Ecolab and our global reach and our global footprint, there is no one in the world better positioned than us to try and understand exactly how many locations we serve across how many countries in so many industries, where we can get a view of what best-in-class looks like. We can see that because we have connected devices all around the world, all sending information, data, up into the cloud, into ECOLAB3D, which we turn into insights and predictive and prescriptive analytics for our customers. This then gives us the insight to understand what best-in-class looks like.
Once we understand that, we can then get that view across the totality of the enterprise and then build a plan to make sure that every single location that that customer has gets to a best-in-class position. What it does, of course, for our top 35 customers, is it allows us to unlock that $3.5 billion worth of opportunity on top of the $2.8 billion of revenue that we have today. We also have a unified customer experience now. We have our top 35, which now get to see everything, and I mean everything, that Ecolab has to offer.
They get to see our Pest Elimination offerings, they get to see our water offerings, they get to see our institutional and specialty offerings, and they get to see our Life Sciences offerings, all in one unified customer experience, driving growth and driving value through best-in-class. I have an example here of a hospitality customer. It's a customer we have today where we're already delivering $50 million worth of value. If we take that customer to a best-in-class position through driving business outcomes, operational performance, and environmental impact, it's a value multiplier for us. It takes $50 million worth of value and turns that into $250 million worth of value. We know business outcomes are important for hospitality customers. We know guest satisfaction matters. We know from an operational performance perspective, profitability and productivity matters, efficiency matters.
We know from an environmental impact perspective, they're looking at water saving, energy saving, waste reduction, all of that enabled by the fabulous tools that we have at Ecolab and the amazing innovations and solutions, which I think most of you are going to get blown away with today when you go to the innovation fair and see what we have on offer. It's a fabulous way for us to multiply our growth for the organization, but also multiply the value that we deliver to our customers. Let's just talk about One Field. One Field is delivering best-in-class experience at the location level. This is at the unit operation level, which is actually giving our team more time to sell.
So if we think about the visibility that we have at Ecolab through all of our connected devices, this happens to be a U.S. example, but we have this across the globe. We see that we have visibility to every single customer location right across the U.S. We know every single one of those locations, whether they're operating at best in class or not. If they are operating at best in class, great. If they're not, how do we get the rest of those locations to best in class with the first-class, state-of-the-art AI offerings that we have as an organization? That's the task for the team: to get every single location that we have to best in class to deliver that fivefold increase in value. From the example I showed a little earlier, from the $50 million to the $250 million.
How do we do that, and how do we enable our teams to get that done? You need some tools, and we have some fabulous value-selling tools. We have fabulous value-selling tools for our corporate account team, which basically roll up at an enterprise perspective so they can see today exactly how much value we're delivering to that enterprise. We can also see how much projects we have in our value pipeline, and we can also see the potential if we get every single one of those unit operations to best-in-class. But more than that, our field team now have this information in their hands on their mobile devices. They can walk into a location, they can look at that location, know exactly the value they're delivering at that location.
They know exactly the pipeline they have in place, and they know if they get that location to best-in-class, what the value multiplier is. So growth multiplication for Ecolab, value multiplication for our customer. We know for our top 35, we've got great momentum there. We're moving nicely with them against this $3.5 billion opportunity, which gives us great confidence to say we can now tackle the $60 billion worth of opportunity in existing accounts who already know and love us. We can then take the work that we've done on our top 35 and move that across to the $60 billion worth of opportunity in existing accounts. So finally, we've got a great opportunity for growth, particularly with existing accounts who already know and love us. $60 billion worth of opportunity there.
One, Ecolab unlocks growth, but it also unlocks value. The growth and value equation for us, as it relates to best-in-class, is absolutely game-changing for us and also for our customers. And lastly, we have a world-class team, and we're leveraging that world-class team at the enterprise level with our corporate account teams, but also at the unit operation level with our field teams, giving them the tools in their hands day in and day out to drive accelerated value for our customers. With that said, I'm gonna hand over now to my friend Greg Cook, who leads our Global Institutional and Specialty business. Greg?
All right, well, thank you, Darrell, and again, I'd like to say welcome to everybody here and all of those online that are able to join us here today. I am both excited and proud to be with you here today. First, I'm extremely proud. It was two years ago when we met in Naperville, when we talked about what had happened to the business, and we talked about what we needed to do, and we committed on what we would work on. I am extremely proud, on behalf of the thousands of our associates around the world, to of the job that they have done, accomplishing those objectives and delivering on our targets over the last couple of years. I'm equally excited to be here because the best is yet to come.
We've got an extremely strong team, a very proud team that is focused on winning, and we're excited to continue that trend, and we feel extremely confident given the position we're in and the ability that we've shown on how we can adjust and adapt and be agile in very challenging times. And with a world-class service organization, we are gonna do that by leveraging innovation and the digital tools to continue that strong momentum into the future. So, as I shared, we're extremely proud of the ability to recover during a market recovery and take advantage of competitive gains to drive volume. We have also executed extremely well on delivering pricing over that time period. Value Pricing, as has been mentioned, is the way we're delivering that, and we will continue to focus on that with a laser-sharp focus on delivering on our long-term targets of the Core Six .
As Christophe mentioned, we're proud to be one of those businesses in the 20+% operating margin business, but we're not done. We see opportunities to improve that. You see the improvement from when we last talked in 2023, from 15% to the 22%, and we're focused on delivering higher than that as we continue to grow. As a reminder, as the market leader, here are the segments we serve across the institutional and specialty segments. We serve the full-service restaurants, quick-service restaurants known as QSR, food retail, the lodging segment, lodging, the long-term care and acute care, as well as public spaces. We do that by delivering on core platforms such as warewashing, laundry, surface hygiene, floor care, audit, and training with a world-class service organization.
We do that to deliver guest satisfaction, driving labor automation and environmental impact, i.e., Total Value Delivered, which has been very well received by our customers. We do operate within a segment that continues to grow. We've got a 11% market share, and we've got great opportunity to grow within that market, split 60/40 between customers that we do not sell to today and existing customers that we work with, where we have opportunity to sell additional opportunities. Which has me excited as this pie continues to grow, as we continue to expand in new spaces, digital being one of those, and you'll see more of that later today. We are perfectly positioned to change or to drive in a changing environment. This is an industry, for the last 100 years, I would argue to say, has seen very little change in general.
COVID changed all of that. We talked about that. It turned the world upside down. We talked about it being a new norm, and it has been a new norm, but we're taking advantage of those market challenges. Labor is less prevalent than it has been historically. It is hard to find labor in these segments today. The cost of finding that labor has gone up. No better example than in the QSR segment that was built on high school labor, minimum wage, and driving rapid experiences through the restaurant. Good luck finding a high school person to work in QSR, and if you do, and you're in California, you're gonna pay $20 an hour. That is not what the model was built on. So we're adapting, and we're adapting to that model and driving innovation to help them.
There are new channels that exist within the segments that didn't exist pre-COVID or were not as prevalent. The dine-in and takeout, the curbside delivery, the Uber Eats, have changed that segment permanently, but those are changes that we are adapting with our customers and driving innovation to help them with, and the digital revolution, which I would argue was very little, if at all, talked about pre-COVID, is one that is top of mind of every person in this industry. I cannot go to a National Restaurant Association board meeting or a CEO top to top and not have this topic be one of the top items on their agenda, and it's not just on the agenda, it's things that are being driven and actions that are being taken, and we feel very well positioned in those conversations, so let me give you one example.
An example of an industry or a segment that was probably affected the most. I'll use the institutional U.S. food service business as an example. We all know during COVID that restaurants closed. Many of them never came back. So if you look to the far left of the chart, we'll talk about the market units. Think about it as restaurant locations. Restaurant locations did not recover. More closed than opened, and they are still down 7% compared to where we were in 2019. That did affect us. We were not immune to that. We had locations that closed, but we went and grabbed competitive gains, and we have gained market share, and we have recovered more than the market has recovered, taking market share from competition to drive location gains.
If you look in the middle, I talked about the Uber Eats, the market demand in a location. We like to call it the seats in the seats. People that are dining in restaurants are down still almost 38%. That's not that far off from what we talked two years ago. We knew it was a new norm, and we adjusted to it. Despite that, with competitive gains, solution penetration, and pricing, we are up 125% in that segment. And while doing that, we have adjusted to market demands, we have taken advantage of investments we've made in digital solutions for our teams, and we have driven leverage at the SG&A line, which has all led to that strong operating margin growth that I showed you earlier.
So extremely proud of the team to be able to pivot, take advantage of market conditions, and then drive growth and drive value to our customers. So I'm really excited about some of the future growth opportunities we have here. If you look, we are building on existing anchor technology we have. I'm gonna talk about each one of these three in a little more detail. A dish machine, a pool and spa, a laundry facility. We are driving new innovation and new technology around those core competencies, i.e., anchors, to drive more labor automation and more value for our customers. We are expanding from that core competency into additional spots within our customers' locations by driving digital innovation, driving operational performance improvement, and then we're tying it all together, as Darrell mentioned, as the best-in-class customer.
Drawing from our digital insights, drawing from our expertise, drawing from our cross-divisional programs to tell our loyal customers which location is their best location. I mentioned I'd talk about each one of these. I think you are gonna be blown away by the tour today in the facility as well as the innovation summit, and one of t hese are some of the things that you're gonna see. The dish machine, which is the anchor of what we do in the food service, food service business, anchored by our service capabilities, is we're expanding on that. This is one of these things out of COVID, where we developed in China, with competencies in China, digital technology to give us insights of what's going on within the dish machine when we are not there. Very akin to what happens in Nalco Water with 3D TRASAR.
Common technology of giving insights. We are able to spot things, notify our customer, take care of problems within their operations, maybe with us not being there, or allowing them to do that, or allowing us to do it remotely or predictably, and we are reducing labor, we're reducing rewash, we're adding value at the location. In the pool and spa space, hotels don't have the same engineering staff that they used to have pre-COVID. People are checking on pools where that's not their primary responsibility. They might be the receptionist, they might be working in the laundry, and they have to test pools twice a day, so we are working with them to do that now remotely with technology to give them insights and actions that allow them to act or allows us to notify them.
Again, driving greater compliance and driving utility savings across the board. And then we're also expanding it into the laundry and taking the thought out of it. We have line checks, we have shift management, we have remote temperature monitoring. These are all programs that exist today digitally, that we're incorporating to give insights to our customers. We are expanding on those digital offerings to give even more insights with our newest addition to the KitchenIQ family, which is called Ecolab RushReady. Again, you're gonna see this in the showcase, and I think you're gonna be blown away by this. But to give you a little more insight of what RushReady is, we have a brief video.
A GM's day starts early and ends late, constantly battling back-of-house chaos, service disruptions, labor challenges, rising costs, and razor-thin margins. They make critical decisions without a centralized tool to streamline operations, striving to balance operational costs with guest satisfaction. Ecolab can help. RushReady is the newest program within the Ecolab KitchenIQ digital platform. This platform helps to streamline food service operations and improve efficiencies. RushReady is an AI-powered partner that cuts through the chaos, transforming scattered data into clear, actionable insights and recommendations, helping GMs adjust staffing, prioritize tasks, and streamline workflows. It turns simple data into impactful action. The after-action report highlights key metrics like speed of service and sales per labor hour, helping GMs identify wins and areas for improvement.
As part of the program, Ecolab leverages its expertise and differentiated service capabilities through its performance coach, helping to guide store leaders in data-driven decision making. RushReady is more than an innovation. It's positioning Ecolab at the forefront of AI-driven restaurant performance, opening up new opportunities with its customers. Ecolab RushReady, helping every GM operate like your best GM.
It's a program we're really excited to introduce or incorporate into our KitchenIQ family, so I have been asked before I go through this slide, as you go through the property on the tour, and as you look at the showcase, the innovation showcase, put yourself in the position of a hotel manager or a restaurant manager, where you're dealing with the chaos of the day, or you're dealing with being responsible for the entire hotel property, or maybe you're at corporate, and you're responsible for thousands of locations. This is what we're thinking about when we innovate for our customers. How do we help them manage the chaos? How do we help them reduce cost? How do we help them manage their labor challenges of the day?
We have more data and more insights about what goes on with our customers at their location than anybody in the market. When you think about Pest Elimination, you think about Nalco Water, you think about our EcoSure programs, you think about the whole family of offerings we have, that is what's laddering up to best-in-class, and as Darrell mentioned this, in a very large hospitality customer of ours, we are currently today providing them $50 million of TVD. When you look at the Ecolab Solutions, Ecolab AquaIQ, KitchenIQ, and the suite of offerings we have there, Water Safety Intelligence, Ecolab DishIQ, Pest Intelligence, our core competency in chemistry that is still extremely differentiated in our world-class service. These are all programs that, when pulled together, do drive business outcomes, operational performance, and environmental impact.
This is what differentiates us and allows us to talk to a customer in a way that does deliver the best-in-class or their best-performing location. So I will finish where I started. I am extremely proud to represent the thousands of people around the world in our Institutional and Specialty business. Like I said, I'm equally as excited about what we've done and what we are gonna continue to do. We do feel very well positioned in this market to be able to adapt and adopt new things, and we're leveraging the innovation and the digital momentums to drive that further growth. And we are laser-focused on delivering our targets. Four to six in operating income is where we start the conversation, and we work back with how we're gonna do it. So thanks for your time. I think now we have a 15-minute break.
I would hurry back because you've got Soraya, who's gonna go through some exciting Pest Elimination business. So thanks again for your time. Appreciate it. Please take your seats. The meeting will resume in two minutes.
Please take your seats. Our meeting will resume in sixty seconds.
Please welcome EVP and General Manager of Global Pest Elimination, Soraya Hlila.
Good morning, everyone. I'm excited to be with you today and share how Pest Elimination business. Pest Elimination has been on a journey of growth, and today we are building on this track record of high performance to take it to the next level and unlock the next chapter of growth with Pest Intelligence. Pest Intelligence. This is our AI-powered connected solution. It's a game changer for us. We are shifting the way we are going to the market, and we will deliver even better outcomes to our customers and drive significant margin expansion for Ecolab. And we are uniquely positioned, thanks to our capabilities, to keep gaining share in a growing market. When we look to the history of performance, this business has been consistently delivering over the years. There's a long history of performance. Our growth has been strong and steady.
Even if we are investing in Pest Intelligence, we're maintaining our high-teens margin of 19% in both 2023 and 2025. We have a clear path to expand way beyond 20% as we keep gaining share, thanks to One Ecolab enterprise selling and gaining efficiency with Pest Intelligence. When we look to the pest industry, what makes us unique is we don't control pests, we eliminate them, and we do that with our science-based innovation, data insights, but also through our service expertise. Our solutions are tailored to each industry, from food service to Life Sciences, and this is how we deliver this outstanding performance, and we drive for higher margin and growth, and we enhance the Total Value Delivered.
From opportunity perspective, we do operate into a $15 billion global commercial market, and within our Ecolab existing customers, we have $3 billion of opportunities, that we can unlock, thanks to One Ecolab Enterprise Selling and Pest Intelligence, and I will tell you a bit more here, starting with the firepower of the One Ecolab Enterprise Pest Elimination business is $1 billion. We have the opportunity to unlock an additional $3 billion if every Ecolab customers offered our solution. Every customer has pest challenges, and today, with One Ecolab Enterprise selling, we're solving them together as one. Our best sales talent from Pest Elimination are embedded into our customers' teams, with a focus on the major accounts, to make sure that Pest Elimination solution is part of Ecolab program from the very beginning.
Pest Elimination is crucial to unlock the full potential of the best-in-class solution through brand protection, through providing a clean, healthy, safe environment. Clean, healthy, safe environment are also a massive major component of the Total Value Delivered we provide to our customers. Now let's look how Pest Intelligence is also helping us to unlock this future potential growth and this massive opportunities. When we look to the industry baseline, they are at 90% of pest-free environment. We, Ecolab, are already at 94%, and with Pest Intelligence, we're aiming to 99% of pest-free environment. How we do it? It's our AI-powered solution, our connected services that monitors customer sites real time, 24/7.
We don't go on schedule, we go when it matters and where it matters to our customers to make sure that we protect their brands and their operation, and to give them the peace of mind. This is where it really gets super exciting. Today, we spend 95% of the time checking empty traps. With Pest Intelligence, it's the opposite. We will use all that time to having value conversation with the customer, solving their problems, and more importantly, to sell more and grow more. This is tailored solution, smarter, faster, and thanks to our predictive model, AI predictive model, we are able to anticipate and to predict when the issues will happen, and if they do, we are able to respond faster.
So this is giving up, you know, a firepower and freeing up a great capacity to grow more and create more value to the customers. And here, I want to share with you a real example from real life, from one of the biggest global retailer in the world. They were facing brand harm risk, regulatory issues, and then we partnered with them, and thanks to Pest Intelligence and our AI predictive model, we were able to identify the root cause of their issues and come up with a tailored solution that kept their pest risk in health and helping them in their journey towards 99% pest-free environment. And in the process, we helped them to save $7 million of labor that they used to generate more business and growth.
Brand protection, health and safety environment, improving the operational costs of our customers, and all of that leading to 99% pest-free environment, and here we are leading the game in the industry. Pest Intelligence is not only great for our customers. It's also great for Ecolab, because we are creating the value, and we are capturing the value. So that additional value we're creating is driving for us margin expansion and growth through the value selling. But it's also helping to improve the health and safeties of our associates in the field, and you know, for Ecolab, safety first. So this is making the job of our field associates healthier, safer, and much easier to perform from a physical perspective. And here, thanks to the huge amount of capacity and time we're freeing up, we're creating that SG&A leverage.
Remember, we won't be spending 95% of the time checking empty traps. That time will be allocated to generate more growth and more margin expansion. This is, again, a super exciting story, yeah, because we will continue to grow, to expand our margin, to consistently hit our long-term growth target of 6%-8% organic growth. We are deployed in 10 countries, but the opportunity to scale is just massive, and we're just about to start, and the best is yet to Pest Elimination business is a story of success, of a business that is built on a strong foundation of performance, and now with Pest Intelligence, we are taking it to the next level, and we will continue to gain share in a growing market, a market that is growing mid-single digits.
And you will see that we have a clear path to expand way beyond 22% OI margin as we continue to gain share and to continue to drive efficiency and creating value for our customers. And all our capacities are putting us in this unique position to continue to win. What I can tell you, I'm confident more than ever in the future of this business, but not only our entire Ecolab business. And with that, I'm thrilled to introduce Josh Magnuson, EVP and General Manager of Global Water. Thank you very much.
Hello, and good morning. I'm Josh Magnuson. I lead our Water Solutions Group, and I'm here today to talk to you about all things Water, but most Global High-Tech business. It's one of our fastest-growing and most exciting businesses in the entire company, and it's rooted in what Ecolab has always done, which is continue to perform excellent and deliver those great results to our customers across all of their locations around the world. As Christophe led off this morning, AI is changing everything that we do, and it's changing Water business as well. It's creating entirely new opportunities for us to grow in water, specifically in delivering better value to our customers through leveraging the tools and insights that AI can bring, but also through the investments in the infrastructure that is being built to support AI.
Whether that's delivering water circularity in microelectronics fabs or cooling the AI data centers, all of this is opening new growth opportunities for Ecolab and new opportunities for us to innovate, and you're gonna see a lot of that innovation today in the showcase, as well as we'll have some discussions here now and in the future about what we're doing to support the AI boom and how the impact that we have can help accelerate that. The great news Water businesses has an incredible foundation of success, and we're continuing to build on that success with new growth engines that will return this business to the target 5%-7% sales growth and 19% OI ratio by 2027.
It's gonna be rooted in our core Food & Beverage business, as well as our growth engines, to help us accelerate and continue to perform outstanding delivery through the next several years. To refresh everyone on the water portfolio, it's made up of six different industry verticals. Each one has its unique opportunities and challenges, but they're all rooted in the common theme of productivity, environmental impact, and product quality. We can impact all three of those through our outstanding programs and our innovations, delivered with a holistic approach of digital automation, services, and chemistry to make sure our customers are receiving the best outcomes at the total, total lowest cost, delivering that value in return for what they're putting in. So we look across all six, and we see tremendous opportunities to continue to grow and accelerate.
Specifically today, we're gonna talk about the High-Tech division. The good news is we have a huge share to go after. $26 billion of remaining opportunity in customers that already do business with us today. So you heard Darrell talk about this in the One Company initiative. As we look at selling our entire suite of solutions into those customers who we already work with, who already know us well and have experience with our solutions, we think we can continue to gain share in a big market. And just as importantly, we're expanding that market every year through new innovations in our growth bets, such as digital and high tech. We continue to have market expansion so we can get a bigger share of what is gonna be a bigger pie in the future.
And we started the conversation this morning to talk about AI, and Christophe set it up nicely on how AI is changing the world, how AI is changing what we do every day as consumers of AI. But AI is also having a significant impact in Water business. It's creating more strain on the scarce resources that are there, and it's also unlocking opportunities to leverage those AI tools to deliver greater value. So when we think about the water portfolio, it's really about those divisions in the water portfolio that are enabling and unlocking this AI potential to keep up with the demand.
Think of our Mining business with precious metals, or our Power division as we think about the power infrastructure of unlocking trapped capacity in the grid or building new sources of Global High-Tech business, supporting the build-out of the microelectronics customers that make the chips that fuel AI, but also those data center customers that are building and constructing brand-new data centers that have to rethink how to cool those data centers because of the enormous amount of heat that's been giving off. But then we have our Water business in our F&B divisions, which are using the tools developed with AI backbone.
So if you think Water Quality IQ, Water Safety IQ, these are both offerings that we've developed using artificial intelligence to help provide insights to our field faster, to deliver greater value to our customers and greater growth opportunities and margin expansion for us. So getting deeper into AI and what we look at in the future, we think there's gonna be about 50 gigawatts of computing power demand over the next five years, and this is an enormous amount of power that's gonna be needed to fuel that computing demand. So either these power customers are gonna have to optimize and be more efficient and bring that power into the grid, or they're gonna have to build new sources of power, new power plants, new nuclear plants, and we're seeing these investments occur, which is helping our power business continue to grow and support our customer base.
All that power is going directly into the data centers, and you'll hear about it today in the showcase, but those data centers, 1,000 new AI data centers, are gonna be needed to fuel the demand that's coming with AI, and those data centers are not the old warehouses with air conditioning. These are AI data centers that require liquid cooling. That liquid cooling uses much more energy to keep the computer and the IT equipment cool, and so those data center opportunity opens approximately $2 billion of business opportunity for us. That's growth potential that we can go get and help support and drive our customers' expansion into the AI field, but all those data centers have to be filled with chips, and today there's not enough capacity to make microprocessors to fill those data centers with chips.
So there's between 70 to 100 new fabs over the next 10 years that will need to be constructed, as I think Christophe said, one per month for the next 10 years, to keep up with the chip demand to fuel the AI boom. Each one of those chips that are being produced uses 50% more water than the historic chips because as they get smaller and more complex, they become more water-intensive. So this opportunity to continue to grow in the microelectronics sector is on the back of that demand coming from microprocessors. As I said, these 70 to 100 new fabs that are gonna be built use more water, and that is forcing our customers to rethink about how they programmatically use their water today. So historically, they used to have a linear approach to water.
Water in, water gets processed, treated, used in an application, and discharged. In the future, they're gonna move to a circular approach to water. Being able to take the water that is used in the fabrication process of making chips, reuse that water, recycle that water, and return it directly to the process to be used again. This is going to be a requirement. There just isn't enough water to keep up with the demand to make the chips. And that's one of the reasons that we're so excited about our recent announcement of our intent to purchase Ovivo Electronics. Ovivo Electronics brings to Ecolab two key capabilities that unlock this potential of water circularity. First, it's their world-leading ultrapure water technology. Ovivo produces the purest water in the world, a thousand times more pure than water used in pharmaceuticals, high enough purity to manufacture two nanometer microprocessors.
In addition to the ultrapure water capability, Ovivo brings water recycling and reuse technology. This is the technology needed to remove all the contaminants from that water, so that same water can be recirculated directly back to feed water for ultrapure water processing. So Ovivo's technology, along with Ecolab's capabilities in water management, in digital, and in services, really unlock the full vision of water circularity for microelectronics and allow us to provide that solution to our customers to help them scale, to help them build new fabrication sites faster, and fulfill the demand for AI and microprocessors now and in the future. So now we have all these chips that are made with less water, and they're gonna get put into these data centers. Challenge becomes, every one of these new data centers uses more power than the old data centers.
Every one of these data centers creates more heat because of processing power than the old data centers. So it's forced the data center industry to rethink how they design, engineer, and manage and run their data centers of the future. Instead of a warehouse with an air conditioner, now you have a complex almost industrial-esque application, where millions of gallons of coolant is pumped and recirculated through the IT equipment to keep the IT equipment cool. That has significantly increased the energy demand in cooling alone in these new data centers, but also created a challenge for data center operators on how do they know that the coolant is performing properly. So we've expanded our legacy 3D TRASAR platform, recently launched this summer, into 3D TRASAR for liquid cooling.
This allows us to tell our customers real time, twenty-four hours a day, the quality of their coolant, the performance of their coolant, and is it cooling the IT equipment sufficiently enough to protect their assets and optimizing the process of cooling? When we bring together our liquid cooling technology, inclusive of our cooling distribution unit that you'll have a chance to see this morning, along with our 3D TRASAR tagged coolant technology and our legacy knowledge on how to run a utility system, we can now optimize the cooling performance across the entire data center and return 10% of the energy used to cool directly back to the data center operator to use for computing power.
Now, that may not sound huge, but when you start to multiply $10 million per 100 megawatts, and we're talking about 50 gigawatts of computing needed, that could be a $500 million value driver for the data center industry over the next 5 years. So it's a significant improvement. It helps drive the scale and efficiency while reducing the environmental impact of every one of these data centers. So we're really excited about our High-Tech business overall. We believe with the addition of Ovivo's technology, our innovation around liquid cooling, and the emergence of the data center market, we believe this could be a $1 billion business for the company by 2026, continuing to grow at over 20%.
So with High-Tech being $1 billion and growing really fast, this will add 200 basis points of total growth for Water business over the next several years. So we take this great High-Tech business, which today is only 5% of our total water portfolio, growing fast. Add in Ovivo, it becomes 12% of water. That will lift us from our 2%-3% legacy growth in water up to that 5%-7% target growth we have in the water solution sector. So overall, as we said from the onset, AI is driving a revolution in the industry, but it's also propelling Water business into the future.
Through digital tools and technology to help optimize our customers' process, create more value, and unlock opportunities for our growth, while also helping our customers scale to meet the demands of AI in both microelectronics and data centers, we believe Water business overall will achieve the 5%-7% growth target and hit 19% OI ratio by 2027. Thank you all for the attention. Look forward to further discussions later. I'm going to now bring up Hayley Crowe, my friend and colleague, runs Life Sciences business. thank you.
Good morning. My name is Hayley Crowe, and I have the pleasure Life Sciences business today. I'm excited to talk to you today about the journey that we're on growing the Life Sciences business. So first, as Christophe mentioned, we've been strategically investing into the business over the last few years to really drive the growth of this business for the years to come. We've been leveraging our investments in innovation, capacity, and in our teams, and you'll start to see that come through this year. Secondly, the Life Sciences market is a major market, and it's growing in the high single digits today. And last, we're well on our journey to building a double-digit, high-margin growth engine for Ecolab. So let's take a look at the history in terms of our delivery.
While we've been continuing to grow in the low single digits, it's been against a market that's gone through a lot of turmoil in the beginning of COVID and post-COVID, and I'll talk to you about that in just a minute to showcase how we're doing versus our top competitors in the industry. We are making progress, and we're very confident about delivering our long-term ambitions of 10%-12% in organic sales, as well as meeting our long-term targets of 30% OI in the future, so let me just give you a refresher really quick on what do we do in the Life Sciences space, so we're really focused on pharmaceutical and personal care manufacturers. To put it into perspective, these are manufacturers who make the pills that you take every day and potentially the lotions and makeup that's used around the world.
Additionally, we're focused on biologics purification, and this came to us when we made the acquisition of Purolite back in late twenty twenty-one, and last, with the Purolite technology came a purification technology platform that can be used across industries, and we're leveraging that today to help deliver clean water and clean energy, and so when we pull it all together for our customers, we're really focused on delivering value that matters to them. We deliver process quality, operational excellence, as well as helping them meet their sustainability goals, and when we pull it all together, we're able to deliver total value, and I'll walk you through what that looks like in real terms as we get on with the presentation, so let's talk about the market. Our addressable market today is around $15 billion.
What you'll notice is that we actually touch 75% of the customers in that market today, and the reason is that the 80% of the total addressable market is driven by the top 25 pharmaceutical and CDMO manufacturers today, so we sell at least one solution across our solutions to nearly every customer. To continue to grow, we need to sell the rest of those solutions through our best-in-class solutions approach, so I told you I'd talk about the market and what happened. We all remember COVID. It wasn't too long ago that we all wore masks on planes. Funny how fast we forget that. Back in the late 2019 and into 2020, there was a boom in the pharmaceutical space as pharmaceutical manufacturers stocked up to be able to deliver life-saving drugs around the world, and it was a huge challenge for everybody.
I think we all remember that. But what happened after in the industry was what we call the COVID cliff, where everyone went through destocking, sometimes for a year, in other cases, two years. And we also experienced some of that as we went through the time. But what's been great is that we've leveraged our innovations to gain market share during that time. And if you see, we've been able to grow, while our best competitors have been down, in some cases, double digits, and we've continued to grow during this time, and we continue to grow this year. So let's talk about the investments. We've made strategic, critical investments, which I'm gonna go through in a minute, the details on that and where we are in the journey, starting in late 2022 and still continuing today.
What's great about this is that it's enabling us to grow into the future, and you're starting to see that leverage come through this year. But we're able to strip out those one-off investments to showcase that the business is actually landing in the mid-twenties today, showing that long term, we will meet our target of getting to that 30% margin. So the investments we've made, this is the most exciting part of our business. We've invested quite a bit in capacity to meet the demand of our growing customer base. We've also invested in our innovation, and I'm really excited to showcase that to you now, but then also, as we get into the innovation showcase, we're gonna give you a real tour through a clean room.
Last, as we've been scaling this business, we've needed to invest in the teams to make sure that we have expert teams around the world serving our customers. One of our latest investments, this is actually a picture of our Pharma Enterprise Customer Experience Center. This is in the King of Prussia facility, where I'm located near our customers. In this back picture, you see our bioprocessing applications lab. It's part of that customer experience center. Our customers come to work with us to truly partner on our innovations and how we can apply them into their manufacturing space today. The bioprocessing applications lab is like an extension of their own R&D teams, where we take our latest bioprocessing resins and apply them to their drugs and come up with an optimized manufacturing process done in partnership with their scientists.
Speaking of capacity, as you can see, we've expanded our Wales facility, nearly doubling our capacity of our patented jetted resin technology that's used for biopharmaceutical customers, and you see our Suzhou, China, plant. This is gonna be opening next year towards the latter half of the year, with real impact happening in 2027, supporting the growth in our purification technologies business, so innovation. We've been very, very focused on the biologics industry, and there's a reason for that, so by 2030, biological drugs are gonna make up 50% of the drugs on the market being delivered, and it's needed a lot of innovation to help with that growth. We focused on new resins. We've launched nearly five new resins for biological manufacturing since we acquired Purolite, and that's because the diversity of drugs is growing as each and every one of us start to demand personalized medicine.
Building upon our chemistry technology of the past, we've developed a very specific program for biologics manufacturing, for cleaning programs, ensuring these sterile spaces and also that we're meeting the regulatory requirements of the space. Most recently, we've launched our Pharma Intelligence platform, truly looking at pharmaceutical operations and ensuring that our customers are audit-ready in a digital way. Historically, most pharmaceutical customers are still operating on paper, and so this enables our customers to track and trace their every move when it comes to cleaning, validation, and being ready when that auditor walks in the door. And partnering with my esteemed friend, Josh, on Global Water Technologies, we're also able to now implement the Pharma Water Program across our global pharmaceutical customers. I mentioned new talent.
We've been building this team over the past few years, and on the screen, you can see the latest additions to the team focused in our high-growth areas. We're focusing on expanding in Asia, our digital solutions, ensuring that our supply chain can scale and is ready for our pharmaceutical customers, as well as doubling down in the bioprocessing space as I showcase through the innovations we're building. So let me take you to what does this all look like when we pull it together? I mentioned we potentially sell one solution today, and if we just expand the solutions we sell to the same customer, we can deliver more value. This is a pharmaceutical manufacturing space, and you can see all of our solutions across that space today. Everything from water for facility cleaning, all the way to biological resins used in the purification of the drug itself.
And so when we pull all these together and we look at our best-in-class solutions for our customers, we're able to deliver operational excellence, the product and quality safety needed for these drugs, ensuring that our customers are compliant and audit ready, as well as delivering sustainability goals, which starts at their heart and soul with the innovation and leading all the way into their plant. So I'll showcase a case study. I mentioned that we have a lot of opportunity for growth in this big market. If we take One Customer, this is one of our pharmaceutical customers, one of the top 20 out there, where we sold just one solution today, we were delivering a little over $1 million a year in value.
We worked with that customer to map out all their facilities and all of their programs to say, "Well, what would it look like if we worked together and partnered on all the solutions?" And it came back that we could deliver nearly $80 million of value a year. So it's quite sizable for a pharmaceutical customer who's focused on getting their operational costs down. But what's more important to them is ensuring faster time to market for their patients. And so as we work across the solutions, we pull them together, we're able to deliver better operational performance, operational performance, as well as environmental impact in terms of meeting their sustainability goals. So pulling it all together, I'm really excited this morning to showcase with you at the innovation showcase what we're doing with our customers.
We've been leveraging the investments, not just in the capacity and the innovation, but also the teams, to ensure that we're built for the long-term future and growth of this business. The Life Sciences market will continue to grow. As I mentioned, the biologics drugs market is growing significantly right now and expected to reach quite a few double-digit percentages in the next few years. And our business will continue to grow double digits and meet those long-term goals in the years to come. So with that, I thank you. I'm gonna hand it over to our CFO, Scott Kirkland.
Thank you, Hayley. That is a tough act to follow. It's a great business with an amazing leader. Just wanna take a moment to thank you all for your interest and trust in Ecolab. It means a lot to us. So today I'm gonna go through our financial priorities, as Christophe said. Firstly, going through the clear path to our 20% OI margin target by 2027. But we'll also talk, as Christophe set up earlier, the path beyond 2027 and what that looks like. And I'll also review and give you some perspectives on our strong free cash flows, as well as our balance sheet, all of which is grounded in our commitment to driving outside shareholder returns. As Christophe shared earlier, our target is to deliver 5%-7% organic sales growth, and over the last several years, we've delivered a 6% CAGR.
And the reason I bring that up is because a couple of those drivers, as he talked about, value pricing and the growth engines, are also significant contributors to Operating Income margins. Which is why we're so confident in delivering our 20% OI margin target by 2027. And that confidence has only increased with the 400 basis points of OI margin expansion we've delivered over the last four years, led by value pricing, as many of my colleagues have talked about. But we've also overcome significant DPC inflation during that time. In addition, as Greg talked about, we've had the amazing post-pandemic recovery of our high-margin institutional business, all of which is leading to our record 18% OI margins we expect to deliver in 2025.
And going forward, the value pricing, our growth engines, which I'll talk more about, and One Ecolab-enabled productivity are the drivers that will help get us to that 20% OI margin target by 2027, and we're highly confident in doing that. But 20% is not the destination, as Christophe told you. Our target with those drivers is to deliver 100 to 150 basis points of OI margin expansion beyond 2027. And the lion's share of that will come from gross margins. And over the last four years, we've delivered 400 basis points of gross margin expansion, leading up to the 45% gross margin expansion we expect to deliver in 2025. And we're doing that through breakthrough innovations, the value pricing, and the growth engines, which I'll talk more about.
These sustainable drivers is what's gonna get us to what we believe is the new target of 75-100 basis points of gross margin expansion beyond 2025. As I said, that will be a big driver of that OI margin expansion of 100-150 basis points. We've talked a lot about value pricing today, and we have a very long history of delivering positive pricing. We do that because of the value we create for our customers. But we also deliver value pricing... We've overcome significant DPC inflation, as I talked about, but we also deliver positive pricing even when DPC goes down. We do that because of the value we create for our customers, which you heard today, TVD.
We've been leveraging technology to better understand and communicate that value to customers as we work to deliver the best-in-class performance you heard my colleagues talk about today. That value-based pricing is gonna be a big driver of that gross margin I talked to and expect to drive more than 50% of that gross margin expansion going forward. I mentioned growth engines. As you've heard today, the growth engines combined represent about $3 billion in sales today, including Pest Elimination, Life Sciences, Global High-Tech, and Ecolab Digital. These businesses are not only growing fast, but they have margins accretive to overall Ecolab. Pests and Global High-Tech, as you heard today, both have OI margins already around 20%. As Hayley talked about, Life Sciences, excluding the growth investments, those underlying margins are north of 20%, with a target of 30%.
We have a confidence to get there as well. In Ecolab Digital, Chris talked about earlier, while we don't yet disclose Ecolab Digital margins, as you can imagine, the incremental margins on digital sales are highly accretive. Also helping that OI margin expansion is SG&A productivity, and this has been a great story over the last several years. Since 2019, we've delivered 160 basis points of SG&A productivity, and we've done this while investing in the business, investing in the great innovation you'll see here today. We've continued to invest in digital, both for the benefit of customers as well as for the benefit of our own operations, and we are continuing to invest in the backbone of Ecolab, which is our sales and service teams.
Net of those investments, beyond 2025, our target is to deliver 25 to 50 basis points of SG&A productivity. A big driver of that will be One Ecolab. Darrell talked about One Ecolab earlier, and Ecolab is about growth. It is focused on growth by accelerating the $60 billion cross-sell opportunity that we have with our existing customers that he touched on. The One Company program, which he mentioned, is part of One Ecolab and is focused on streamlining our operational processes to support that accelerated growth. How do we create scale in our operations to support that accelerated growth? We do this by moving functional work from hundreds of locations to our global centers of excellence. We're ahead of pace on this program, and it largely started as a...
What I call an analog program, leveraging some legacy technologies, but largely an analog program. And we've since this year, launched an agentic AI roadmap, including launching our first four use cases this year. And with the benefits of that AI and our operational momentum, we're taking what was announced last year as a $140 million structural savings program by 2027, and we're expanding that. And we expect to deliver $225 million of structural savings by 2027 through that agentic AI roadmap and the operational momentum we have. The costs, as we announced last year, were originally $225 million. They will go to $300 million, but you can do the math. It's both a better payback and a better return. So I just wanna pause for a moment.
We announced last year $140 million of savings on One Ecolab. That is moving to $225 million in savings in the same time period, with a cost going from $225-$300 million. So it wouldn't be a finance presentation if I didn't talk about balance sheet and cash flows, which is near and dear to my heart, of course. We've had a long history of driving double-digit earnings growth, and that has been the backbone to this strong free cash flows, a strong free cash flow conversion. In addition, we have low capital intensity. Historically, our CapEx is about 5%-6% of sales, and about half of that CapEx is dispensing equipment at customer locations, so fueling growth by being embedded into our customers' operations.
We've also continued to optimize working capital, and the combination of those things has resulted in free cash flow conversion consistently above 90%, as you can see here. That strong free cash flow and our disciplined approach to capital allocation has also resulted in what we call our fortress balance sheet. We've targeted for a long time what we describe as A-range metrics. What that means is our target is have net debt to adjusted EBITDA of about two times. And as you can see in this slide, that we've been at that level for many years, and actually in Q2, our net leverage got down to 1.7 times, so below our long-term target of the low 2s. And while the Ovivo acquisition that was mentioned earlier, we don't expect to close until Q1.
If we included that impact at the end of 2025 , just for illustrative purposes at this point, our net leverage, we expect, would still be below that long-term target at one point nine times. So the strong cash flows, the great balance sheet, provides a lot of optionality to create value, okay? Investing in the business, investing organically in innovations like DishIQ that you heard Greg talk about, or Pest Intelligence that Soraya talked about, or investing in capacity for Life Sciences that Hayley talked about. Or continuing our long and strong track record of driving great returns through acquisitions, with the vast majority of them being technology or geographic bolt-ons like Barclay, like Ovivo, we expect, ChemLink, Bioquell, or the many Pest Elimination acquisitions that we've had and been very successful at. Or investing in new platforms like we did with Nalco Water and Purolite.
I want to talk a little bit more about M&A. We have a very disciplined approach to our M&A process and targets. First and foremost, we are targeting double-digit returns well above our cost of capital, and in doing that, we're focusing on our highest growth, highest margin opportunities like water, like Life Sciences, like digital. And in the targets, we are not only looking for strong strategic line, but for strong cultural alignment as well, which is important to a successful acquisition. And M&A has always been part of our growth story. Going back 25 years to the Henkel acquisition that took us from being largely a U.S. business to a global company, or the Nalco acquisition that I mentioned in 2020 or 2011, that transformed us into being a leading water company.
Or, as I mentioned, the many, many bolt-ons, and we do about, over the last 10 years, 40-50 acquisitions, the many bolt-ons in between, all of which that have contributed to the capabilities and the reach of the One Ecolab model. In addition to the great returns on the deals and the operating performance, we remain committed to shareholder returns and returning cash to shareholders. Over the last 10 years, we've returned over $10 billion of cash to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share repurchases, and we've increased our dividend for 33 consecutive years.
I'll finish with our long-term priorities, which we will continue to be guided by, which Christophe mentioned: the strong sales growth and continue to deliver double-digit earnings growth of 12%-15%, maintaining our high free cash flow conversion between 90% and 100%, and maintaining this fortress balance sheet, which provides us the optionality to invest in the business and continue to derive outsized shareholder returns. Thank you, and with that, I will turn it back to Christophe.
I'd love to have Scott's job. It's a pretty cool company to be a CFO. Good momentum, great cash flows, great conversion, very strong balance sheet, and a team that's working very closely with the finance team. We called it finance business partnership, which is core to our model, and that's been true for a very long time. I hope that you had as well the chance to meet our team and understand a little bit better, so how we create value, who is creating value in our organization. You'll meet more of that team during the innovation showcase afterwards as well, where hopefully we will have a little bit more time as well to spend time on innovation, understanding really, so how things are truly working behind the scene.
But we will have as well some time, so for a Q&A, as we always do. So we'll have kind of a half an hour, depending on how many questions, obviously, that you have. The whole team is gonna come here on stage, so feel free to ask whatever question you have for the whole team as well here. But before we get there, just a bit of a quick recap of what you've seen so far. So we have momentum. This is a pretty good place to be in a crazy, complicated world that we all are living in. Most importantly, we have great opportunities in front of us. Our market keeps growing, keeps expanding, and this is the name of the game.
We've always tried to expand our pie in order to make sure that we were seeing how do we capture more growth out there within our customers, starting with the top 35, which are so essential for us to understand what's required for the future. How do we answer their needs? We stay very close to them. I meet one CEO every week. That's my objective. 52 every year. I've met 53 already right now, so it's almost double what I had planned as well for this year. It's been true for many, many years. I wanna stay close to our customers. Darrell does the same.
The whole team does the same as well, because it's our customers that are ultimately telling us how good we're doing or not so much, what they need for the future, what are the great ideas that they might have, that we might have, that we might discuss as well. We learn, we develop, we grow, we innovate together with our customers. You see some of the great names, as well on that chart with whom we're very close to. We have great new engines as well, and this is our role, this is my duty, this is making sure that we not only nurture our core businesses, what's made us who we are today since nineteen twenty-three, but making sure that we're building new businesses that are aligned with the new growth opportunities that are out there.
And really happy to see that even a business like Pest Elimination, that we might have thought this is a core business that's not gonna change much in the years to come, you've heard it from Soraya, it's going through a dramatic transformation, driven by one of the customers that you've seen before, that came to us and said, "I need you to help me to change the way you serve, to make sure that you get to 99% of my stores being pest free in a way that is a 24/7 control." The business is changing dramatically for the better, for our customers, for our team, and for our shareholders, an older business becoming a totally new business. You've heard it from institutional as well, so is Greg. An industry for 100 years that hasn't changed much. COVID changed everything.
Well, they made us more relevant to what they need in the future. That was a good fit of an older business, an industry that is changing for the future, and we get on innovation to answer their future needs. And you've heard it, and you're gonna see it as well, so this morning, even more with the innovation showcase that we have. Life Sciences, a great new business that we started in 2017. Started with less than 100 million. It's almost a billion today, growing very nicely, huge potential, great margins. Global High-Tech, this is something that five years ago we didn't know would even exist. Well, three years ago, we decided to create Global High-Tech as a dedicated business on data centers and on microelectronics. That was exactly the right move, because our customers were expecting that.
Managing water for fabs, as you've heard it, so through recirculation and managing cooling technology for data centers is absolutely what they need, and we've been in the cooling business since 1923. We know what cooling means. We know what cooling technologies can do, and we are innovating ahead of the market in order to serve the market needs, as we always do and Ecolab Digital has been a change for us, because we know for 30 years, or almost 30 years, we always assumed that everything digital is part of our programs, part of our offering. That is changing because the world has changed as well. We all used to pay for our phones. We all used to pay for the apps that we have on our phones. We all used to pay for data consumption, movies, whatever you buy on your favorite e-commerce platform. Well, that's consumption.
Hardware, software, consumption. This is something that we've learned as well from Microsoft, with whom we work very closely, saying, "We need to value that. We need to monetize that." That's how we created Ecolab Digital twelve months ago, and shifted towards a value creation engine for our customers and for our shareholders. All in all, $3 billion, growing double-digit, with very high margin, north of 20%. This is what makes me believe where this company is gonna keep building in the future. Most importantly, we have an unbelievable team. You've seen some of them today. You've seen where they come from, how they're focusing on building new businesses, building new teams. We're a people company. We have always been a people company, serving people's needs. This is at the core of who we are.
Technology, chemistry, services, digital technology is here to support the team, not to replace the team. We believe in expertise, and we believe that technology is enhancing expertise and value that we can deliver to our customers, which is why focusing on the team, building a team, a global team, a diverse team, an engaged team, is our number one priority as an organization. And as you've heard from Scott, we have the path to get not only to the 20% by 2027, but we wanna keep building from there towards 2030, and who knows what's gonna happen after 2030 anyway. But we have all the drivers that we need in order to improve our margins, innovation, the new engines, the value pricing, and obviously, the One Ecolab, which has gone, as mentioned earlier today, and you've heard this stuff from Scott, much better than we thought.
We thought it would be good; it turned great, which is really good, not only for our customers, they have a better experience, for our teams, they have a better experience as well, because technology helps. It helps them ultimately spend more time creating value for our customers, and last but not least, as you've seen, our savings opportunity has gone up as well, quite significantly within just a few years, and that brings us, obviously, so to all that's required to keep driving high performance, with, at the core, the double-digit earnings growth that we've been delivering for a very long time, and that will never change. Driving gross margin, driving operating margin, driven by a top line growth that's driving impact for our customers.
Building on this tremendous legacy that we have over the last five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years, how far as you can see, this has been a great story, and I'm proud with the team to keep building on an unbelievable legacy that we have as an organization. So I'd like to welcome our team back on stage. It's gonna take some logistics to get everyone settled here. We're gonna try to do that in a very safe way, with no one falling off the stage, including me. And we will have two mics. Andy and Andrew, who are somewhere in the room, are gonna help us with the mics in the back over there. You're familiar with them, so just raise your hands when you have a question.
We will have the right time, so for you guys, I want to spend enough time on innovation afterwards, as well, and take the opportunity, obviously, to ask questions to the team. You see me a little bit all the time, and even more, so they're here, for you. So I'm not totally sure where to start here. Dave?
Thank you. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. For Scott. Scott, maybe a few more details on the additional cost savings of $85 million. How are you getting them? Where are they coming from? And how does it relate to normal cost inflation in your business? Is this truly incremental, or is it just offsetting normal cost inflation for the next few years?
Yeah, thanks, David. As I mentioned, the $140 million of savings we announced last year was largely an analog program. This is about leveraging our global centers of excellence, centralizing processes, but with limited technology, and the big driver to this incremental savings is this agentic AI roadmap. Last year, as we launched the program, it was still sort of a new thing, and since we've developed our own agentic roadmap, partnering with Accenture, to leverage the technology, and that's really the big driver of the acceleration on the $85 million. And this is above and beyond what we would do from a normal productivity. And I think more importantly, David, is by doing this, this will create scalability in our SG&A, right?
We've always talked about how SG&A has grown sort of close to sales growth, but this, I think, bends the curve, particularly on the functional costs.
You know, to add to that, maybe a little story. Scott just mentioned that we've partnered up with Accenture to get there. It started with an interesting discussion almost two years ago with Satya Nadella and Julie Sweet at a Microsoft conference, and they were talking about all the new possibilities of GenAI. And I shared with them, saying, "I'd like to become, as a company, one of the pilots for all the new technologies that you're developing at Microsoft and that you're seeing within Accenture, as well. Try it with us. Take us as your trial case." And that's exactly what happened.
The week after, we got together with both partners and said, "Let's try one process," which was the lead to cash process, and using GenAI in order to really improve the performance and the experience of our team and our customers. That was eighteen months ago, and those are the results of what we've been doing. Just wanted to share with you, Dave, as well. So where did it come from? This is new for everyone, and we wanna make sure that we don't just talk about AI, but that we see that AI is driving true cost performance as well. I'm mostly focused on the growth side of it, but the cost performance counts as well, which is what you've seen from Scott today. I'll let him choose, otherwise it's gonna look like favoritism.
Uh, Chris?
You chose poorly. Chris Parkinson, Wolfe Research. You know, Christophe, every single industrial company, chemical company, wants to position itself to be the primary beneficiary of data center growth and cooling and CDUs, and, I mean, we've heard from, I mean, dozens and dozens of them. What differentiates your process, your current positioning with your customers? Obviously, we know you have very good ones, to be clear, but, you know, what differentiators yourself do you need to partner with anybody else to make sure you're the sole beneficiary or the primary beneficiary of getting, you know, your lion's share? You know, how are you thinking about the evolution of that platform, given the fact that you say it yourself, it's only been around for five years?
That's a great question, Chris. Thank you. Let me say a few things, and then I'll pass it to Josh, who is even closer than I am. If we look at the three big components of what's happening in a data center, okay, you have the whole tech stack, the whole microprocessors, computers and all that. You're familiar with the names, obviously, so building that tech infrastructure and software. There's the few, not too many, as we know, that own obviously that space, from chip manufacturing to the hyperscalers. Then you have the power management companies, but they're pretty clear, the ones that are owning power management in a data center. Then you have the cooling. No one owns it today.
It's seen a little bit like an add-on today, where it's general contractor trying to put pieces together. That was okay when it was about, like Josh was saying, heavy air conditioning in a room with a hot computer, in it. That has changed a year ago, where the power went hugely up, and obviously, the heat generation saved time. Technology had to change towards the liquid cooling, which is a very early emerging new technology. Well, some of us are learning on how to master it, as well, at the same time. We've been, as I mentioned before, in cooling technology since the very beginning of this company. We're by far the world leader in cooling, cooling technologies, cooling towers. You're familiar with that, so for many, many years. This is a sweet spot for us. No one owns it.
We're the ones having to own it, and that's why bringing the technologies from the cooling tower to the chip, managing the coolants and the CDU, as you will see afterwards, is emerging. This is exactly what I like because it's all new. We can get ahead, stay ahead, and capture that value. But I'd like to have Josh build a bit on that.
Yeah. Just to build on Christophe's point, if you break down the evolution of data centers from the cold room with air conditioning, air-cooled data centers, we took care of over 1,100 of those data centers today. We managed the water process to help cool the data centers that are in existence today. As we've moved to liquid-cooled technology, these data centers are now becoming more like an industrial application, with hundreds of heat exchangers, millions of gallons of coolant that has to be managed. That's what we do across all of Water businesses, whether you think of oil and gas or a food and beverage plant or a mine or a chemical plant. We currently, today, manage the fluid systems and the heat exchange performance to make sure they're effectively done. We're transferring all those skillsets and knowledge into the new data center industries.
So we bring 102 years of experience in managing complex cooling systems. We bring the technology needed to actually effectively measure and monitor, and optimize the cooling performance, and we have the scale to go wherever our customers need us around the world, with direct on-the-ground field sales and service people to help support their data center operations from design to operation. So I think it's very different than the competition in this space because of what we've done for 102 years.
If you take an example, I was in Singapore last week. They've declared eight or 10 years ago, I don't remember exactly when it was, that they would become the data center of the world, with two small issues: They don't have space, and they don't have water. Other than that, they were in a great place to become the data center of the world. We helped them really sort of manage cooling technology within those data centers, that they can have more power while using less water, and today, we manage 80% of the installed capacity in Singapore. It's been a great story over there, and it's the very beginning of the whole story.
Thank you. Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners. A few questions on the Pest business, if I may. Obviously, Pest Intelligence is very new and exciting, but I'm also curious about your geographic expansion opportunity there. Christophe, you reminded us you do business in 172 countries. Soraya, I think you said you're in 10 countries, but you're just getting started. So, you know, what - how important or not is geographic expansion for Pest? And if it is important, you know, how do you get there? Is it organic or through acquisitions or both? And what sort of timelines or sequencing do you envision as you penetrate on intelligence and then build out?
Great question. So let me start, and I'll pass it to Soraya. Geographic expansion is not the primary priority. We want to become really strong, even stronger in the United States, focused on commercial, B2B, not residential, as others do very well, but this is not where we want to focus on. Plus a few select countries. So it's really making the business we have today exceptionally good and managing that transformation towards intelligence is priority one, and second, needs to be thoughtful in geographic expansion. But this is not our first priority. But, I'll let Soraya add a little bit on that.
Yes. Thank you. Great question, indeed. So the focus is in North America, and this is our biggest market. And when I talked about 10 countries, this is where we are implementing Pest Intelligence today. The opportunity is great. Again, it's a $15 billion global commercial market. Most of it is in North America, and this is where we are scaling up and accelerating fast with the ambition to have Pest Intelligence deployed everywhere in the next two to three years' time.
The starting base is a good one because you're strong in China, so we can build around it. Strong footholds in a few critical countries in Europe, as well, that we can build around at the same time. Those are the three major geographies, anyway, for us, where 80% of our sales, 80% of our opportunity, resides. This is where we want to focus. Pest Elimination is a very execution-driven business. We want to keep doing it really, really well. That's the path that we've taken years back, by the way, and we're going to stick to that path.
Great. It's Justin Kleber with Robert W. Baird. First of all, thank you for assembling the team here. Always appreciate doing that. So I guess the biggest takeaway that we had today, I mean, if I go back two years ago, Christophe, you outlined the 20% OI margin in five years. Now, you know, it looks like you're going to maybe be a year ahead of what the original schedule was. And, you know, now, today, you're saying beyond that 27%, the 150 basis points per year beyond that, and I think that's probably higher than most people are assuming that the business would generate.
I was just hoping to get a little bit more detail on the drivers behind that, given that that's more margin expansion than you've been getting for the last couple of years, and that's with the One Ecolab program, so maybe just a little bit more elaboration on that, 'cause I thought that was a really interesting takeaway.
One comment from me, and then Scott is the answer for that. If we were to say we're focusing on beyond 20% and we've never done it, that would be one challenge. As I shared, two-thirds of our businesses are already there today, so we know how to get there. We can debate, is it 20%, 21%, 28%, 29%? Honestly, I don't know yet, but it's showing a direction that we wanted to share with you because we know in many of our businesses already how to deliver that. Let me pass it to Scott.
Yeah, happy to. The first thing I would just say is, over the last four years, going back to the slide I have, we've been delivering 100 basis points a year, the 400 basis points over the last four years, and those drivers are gonna be largely the same ones going forward with the additive of the One Ecolab program. As I mentioned, to David's comment, is it's driving the structural savings immediately, but it also provides the scalability going forward. The value price, we've proven this, is 2%-3%. The growth engines are accelerating as the team talked about, high growth, high margin businesses, that are already north of 20% and including as digital, which is still, you know, $300-400 million of sales with highly accretive margins.
So those, and then you add on that the scalability and the structural savings of One Ecolab. That's where we have great confidence in what we've done in the last four years to deliver the 100-150 basis points.
John McNulty, BMO. Maybe a question for Hayley on the Life Sciences side. Just a couple things. One, it seems like there's a lot of enthusiasm for a ramp, but that ramp has been a little bit elusive, I guess. Can you give us a little bit more comfort on when you're thinking about the timing of when things really start to inflect to double digit? And then I guess the second question would just be: You know, you gave an interesting example where or the case study where you were doing $1.2 million as a target when you all came together of about $80 million.
I guess, how should we think about how something like that can actually be executed on once you, you know, once you do identify that opportunity to the customer that you're working with?
Thank you, John. Hayley, you want to start?
Of course. Thanks for the question. We anticipate that we will get to that 30% OI in less than five years. We have line of sight to that.
As we showed our margins, once we strip out the one-off investments, are already in the mid-twenties, and we've been making progress over the last couple of years to improve those. When it comes to the second part of the question: How do we win? As we map out something like that with a customer, we start with our Pharma Enterprise Solutions team, where they look across all of the offerings of Ecolab and work directly with our customers on project plans to actually execute. And then that brings me to our third part, where we talked about investing in teams.
We have expert teams around the world that are focused on different parts of the business: contamination control, application specialists, and bioprocessing, water specialists from the water side, where we work directly with our customers, either in their plants or in our labs, to actually showcase the value and execute it step by step, so it's pure alignment with the customer, execution plan, get to the results, and then share those back with the customer.
So maybe building on that, there's just a few other players in an industry, great companies. By the way, they absolutely hated the fact that we entered that market. They made it very clear to me personally as well. I take that as a huge compliment that they did it that way. Talking to customers as well really love the fact that there's kind of a new kid on the block with the agility, the flexibility, the innovation power to bring solutions that others were basically not offering, because it was my way or the highway generally.
And the last thing, as Hayley mentioned, the One Ecolab approach, where we can help them, as you will see in the innovation fair afterwards, the environmental hygiene, plus the product quality, plus the product process performance, no one can do that. It's a typical One Ecolab approach, that's very natural to what we do. No one else does it, and the industry is not even ready for it, yet. This is something that we've experienced in the past, serving newer industries. Supply chain in the pharma industry is not organized in a central way. It's much more location by location, obviously respecting the rules of FDA or whatever the institution is, around the world. This is a new way that we are teaching them on how to approach performance with this best-in-class One Ecolab approach. It's very well received by our customers.
The combination of competition, so looking at us as a dangerous entrant, I take that as a plus. The fact that we are the new, agile, flexible partner for the pharma industry, that needs one more than ever since there's so much driven by innovation. The fact that we can provide all the solutions around it. Well, this is making our offering very differentiated versus the other ones early on that journey, but the best is yet to come, and that's why we're investing so much behind that opportunity. Thank you, John.
Hey, guys, James Cannon with UBS.
Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to go back to your comments, Christophe, on nobody owns the liquid cooling space in the data center. And just in the context of there being kind of as we get to these next-generation chips, and we're seeing new chemistries come into play, where there are products in development that aren't just water to cool the data center, how are you guys positioned to play in an environment such as that?
So the core thing, and I'll pass it to Josh, whether there's water in there or not, water is, by the way, so the best way to extract heat. It's just a few challenges as well, so related to heat, when you heat it that much with so much flow as well, going through. We look at it as a cooling technology opportunity. Whether there's chemistry, no chemistry, whether there's water, no water, doesn't matter. It's ultimately helping data centers extract the heat at the lowest power that's required in order to reuse that power on the compute side, since we don't have enough power, as you heard from Josh, to feed all the AI demand that's out there. So we look at it in a very agnostic way and saying it's about cooling the chip.
And even there, that's evolving, and that's why we're working so with some of those partners. You might want to talk a little bit about the discussions we have with the tech companies.
Yeah. We work with all the major chip designers, all the IT hardware equipment designers, as well as the engineering companies and data center operators on how the new chip demands are gonna increase rack densities, meaning the heat produced per rack, and will the cooling performance be able to be kept up with using the existing coolants that are on the market today? The answer is no. Just flat out, I'll let the secret out of the bag here. So we're gonna have to innovate, us, along with our partners, on novel coolant technologies and unique ways to cool that IT hardware down, so it can be run differently in the future. And that's where we're partnering with our existing customers, as well as with new entrants into the market, to find those new technologies to help continue to advance the game.
But I think Christophe's spot on. This isn't about whether there's water or no water. This is about heat removal. It's really thermal management of a data center, and we wanna make sure we're bringing the right solutions to manage the thermal activity that's occurring in the data center as efficiently as possible while returning energy to compute.
John Roberts, Mizuho. I think you said full-service restaurant, Seats in the Seats, is down 38% since pre-pandemic and Ecolab's up 25%. Talk about what kind of share gain t hat kind of reflects? And maybe you just prioritize the drivers. Is it winning with the winning customers? So the customers that you have are up that much more, or is it more content per customer? Is it more, you know, customers that you've added?
Perfect question for you, Greg.
Yeah, I'd love to answer that one. It's a combination of a bit of everything. If you remember back, the Seats in the Seats is one component, but the other component is number of locations. And so I showed that the number of locations in the food service side have decreased, but have not decreased for us as much as the market has decreased, which means we are taking market share, more locations. And despite that, that metric, that's not that different than it was 12, 24 months ago. It's flat. We are growing with solution penetration. We are growing with adding those locations, and quite honestly, we are still protected a little bit.
If you remember, while those dinners may be shifting from drive-through or Uber Eats, the seats in the seats aren't there, but the activity taking place within the back of the kitchen is still volume and value that we are driving in those locations while driving overall price value as well. So it's a combination of all three things, and I'll say, John, to your point, is part of the way we're doing it is that over troubled times, it takes competition or those that say they're good at something and does one of two things: It actually proves that they are good or it proves that they're not.
I would put us on the side of the ledger that said we are good at what we do, and we showed that we were pretty good in delivering for customers, and retention has been good on that side as well.
And maybe a few stories behind it as well, and Greg shared it a little bit earlier today. We've been with those lodging, food service, restaurant companies for a very long time, like over a hundred years. Before the pandemic, when we were talking about technology, there was, John, absolutely zero interest. It's we've done it that way for a hundred years. We're not gonna change it. It's about labor and cheaper labor. That was back then, and everything changed with the pandemic because while everybody left the restaurants and the hotels, let's say it in a nice way, obviously, they were asked to leave. They never came back, and when they came back, they came at a much higher cost as well at the same time. It changed a whole discussion where labor automation is becoming absolutely essential.
Digital technology is not only essential, but guests, consumers, have gotten used to use the app. You mentioned Uber Eats, as well, earlier today, and every other service that you're familiar with as well. We're all getting used to it. We're gonna use more of it, not less of it, going forward, and that's changed the dialogue with our customers in dramatic ways. The last thing I'd say, like guest intelligence, it's easier said than done for most out there. The advantage we have is that digital technology is something that in Water business, what we call our industrial business, while it's something that we've been practicing and developing for 30 years, that we can bring over in institutional, bring over in guest intelligence without having to reinvent everything. This is a huge advantage that we have over competition.
Hi, David Paige from RBC. I had a question, just in terms of the OI margin expansion and targets. How should we think about amortization expense? How does that factor into your targets through 2027, and then beyond 2027? And then just a quick follow-up. Sorry if I missed it, but EPS growth beyond 2027, you're doing, let's say, 6% organic, 125 basis points of OI margin expansion. How does that translate into EPS growth? Thank you.
You want to take it, Scott?
I will give that a shot. To answer your second question, yes, as part of that 100-150 basis points, that equates very well with the 12 to 15. So our ongoing EPS target remains at 12%-15% EPS growth. As your first part of your question on the OI margins. So as I've talked before, that OI margin going forward is gonna be driven by the growth engines, the pricing and the SG&A productivity. I mean, those are gonna be the big drivers, and we're seeing those. Okay? And I think we'll see further acceleration on the growth engines and the scalability from an SG&A perspective.
Thank you. Matthew DeYoe from Bank of America. Josh, you have a little bit of a lift for your OI margin target. I mean, at a high level, we talked about SG&A leverage, some of the things, but specifically in global water, kind of what do you think is needed? What are the key benchmarks for hitting that for twenty-seven? Is it mix or, you know, I'll let you answer that. And then how should we think about the duration of some of the headwinds in the laggard businesses? You know, we talked or we saw early on, you know, minus 1% sales. A decent amount of that comes from global water. So how do we move on that, beyond that?
Maybe so, starting here, and I'll pass it to you, Josh. Since we have three major businesses within global water. One, Water Services are run by Josh. We have our Global Food & Beverage Business, run by Nicolas Granucci and our Global Paper business as well, and all working for Nick Alfano. So he's gonna be at one of the tables as well. So for lunch, if you want to have some more discussions, as well, with him. The beauty of the company is that we serve so many end markets. The thing, as mentioned this morning, not all are going to be in the green all the time. We know that, and we build it that way.
When I think about businesses, you know, like power generation, for instance, it's been kind of a stable business for a very long time, where not much happened. The demand was not exactly going up as well at the same time. So that was kind of a little bit of a sleepy business. We were having good shares, growing our shares, having good margin. Everything changed because of AI. Suddenly, we need more power. There's not enough power anywhere, and everybody's scrambling in order to create more power. That business is changing as we speak as well. I'm glad that we own power generation, cooling for power generation. So, for sure, did not perform great the last few years.
This is true for our Steel business, as well, and the Paper business is not the best business that we've seen, the last few years as well. That being said, 80% of Water is doing extremely well. So that's the beauty of our portfolio, that we have. We'll always be very transparent with you. What are the ones, where we need to work on in order to improve the performance, and that's who we are, and we'll continue doing that as well. That's the way we manage the overall business, the overall portfolio, and the margin as well, because even if you have low growth, you're not allowed to have low margin.
So it's either you have higher growth and high margin, or you have lower growth and you still need to get the right margin, and I think we do that pretty well. Just to explain a little bit, how do we think about water in so many different end markets, which allows us to become very stable, very resilient, always in that business, as we've demonstrated the last few years. But maybe talking about your part of the business.
Yeah, for sure. So I think we're going to see the OI margin lift really with three factors. One is coming from our High-Tech business continuing to grow really fast, which is accretive at overall margins. Two is continuing to bring new innovations to markets in those other divisions within the water portfolio as a whole. Innovations traditionally add accretive margins overall, and so that's going to give us a lift. And then it's the turnaround in those poorer performing businesses, which will accelerate growth, giving us greater leverage, ultimately delivering a step up in OI margins. So we see the path definitely to the 19% OI ratio. It's just going to take a few more years for us to get there.
And one last Food & Beverage Business, we've created Food & Beverage United. We've shared that with you. It's bringing hygiene and water together. We started in the U.S., this year. We'll be expanding around the world. It's a lot of hard work, to get it work. It's working really well. Customers have been asking for that for a long time, by the way. It's hard to do. No one has ever done it. I really like how it's progressing. It's improving the growth trajectory of the business, and margins are going higher as well because of bringing the two together into one proposition. So just to give you the overall perspective on water. We have a few more minutes, so.
Hi, Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley. Wanted to go back to the margin bridge. At least when I look at from 18% to 20%, and the preponderance of that is being driven by the value pricing, which is great, and it's easy to understand, you know, how, how accretive and drop down that is. But if we think out over the next couple of years and into that out years period, and let's say, you know, your basic industries business comes back, let's say, One Ecolab is firing on more cylinders than you think, and total company volume is growing a point or two, more than you're forecasting. What is the incremental value to that from a margin perspective, versus what you have in your baseline?
A lot. Scott?
I guess what I would say, Vincent, that's a good problem to have, and that's why we feel so good about the 100-150 basis points. Right? And why we've also talked about is we think about, hey, the OI margin is about. It's a means to the end in driving the 12-15, and it's really well aligned, but we don't need the 5-7 to get to the 12-15. And so within that, that also allows us, because as we grow, we want to continue to invest in the business. And so there will be trade-offs there as we grow, as we drive additional margin expansion, a lot gives us opportunities to further invest in the business.
There's no doubt that we have more potential. The fact that we're so resilient at delivering these double-digit earnings growth is also related to that. As shared earlier today, we spend so much time planning for next year, which is what we're doing for 2026. Am I 100% sure that everything we're planning is not going to happen that way in 2026? We spent a lot of time for 2025, where we didn't count on the tariffs. When we planned it, everything changed in January, plus everything else as well. The fact that we have so many levers helps us deliver always the double-digit earnings growth, and sometimes, yeah, it can get even better, and as I've shared with you, we decide, either we reinvest in the business or we give it back to shareholders, or we do both. Good problem to have.
Thanks. Yeah, you guys talked about One Ecolab a lot today, so I want to ask a little bit more about that. Maybe I'll send it Greg's way, because Christophe just said it. I mean, he said you've been working with many of the customers in your business for more than a hundred years, and now you've got this new initiative, One Ecolab, where you've decided there's this major opportunity to further penetrate these customers, which I'm sure you've been trying to do for a very long time. So can you just talk a little bit more about, for your business, like, what's different now? What's enabling an acceleration in that penetration rate? What the main pushbacks or challenges are, and overall, how this initiative is progressing? 'Cause I think for your division in particular, you know, there's some very large national account customers.
Yeah, it's a great question. I would say one of the changes around what we're calling the EES model, which is the Ecolab Enterprise Sales team, and it seems subtle, but we have shifted the way our teams are organized from being divisional to being the way our customer views us, One Company, one team, so you have people that are now. We talk sometimes, and too much sometimes, about a division. When you go to talk to a major global customer, you bring in the program, whether it be institutional Pest Elimination, EcoSure, Nalco Water. So the dialogue has shifted as the attention. The other thing it adds is speed of decision making. Getting things done faster, quicker with the customer in mind, it sounds subtle, but it's a big difference.
The other thing I would say, having been in the institutional business for a while, it's great to hear what I'm hearing today. I feel a little bit like the big brother or the big sister. It's like the family is expanding, and the programs that we can talk to our customers about is really exciting. At the same time, it keeps institutional fresh. It keeps us thinking differently on how we deliver new programs to customers. We talk about, you'll see it later, AquaIQ. This is something we've been working on for a while, but it came from Darrell saying: "Have you talked to the Nalco team about how to connect water connectivity?" And that was taken care of within three months. We talked about doing an acquisition. We developed it with our friends in Nalco Water, and we brought it to market within three to six months.
So I say subtle, the team, the EES model, the structure, the focus, the agility to get things done, as well as kind of the program offering growing, is a big contributor to driving that enterprise sale.
And it's been really driven by customers, too. We used to talk circle the customer, circle the globe. Some of you have heard that for I don't know, thirty years. It's been a long time. That was Ecolab speak. Every customer understood it's good for us if they buy more from us. That was an easy sell, except that they didn't like it. Best-in-class in One Ecolab is what's right for the customer. How do we help them get all their locations to the best potential around the world?
That was driven by one of the CEOs a few years back, having exactly the discussion with me and saying, "You should flip, not what you do, but how you talk to us, that it's helping our performance improve everywhere around the world, instead of letting us know that if we buy more from you, it's better for Ecolab." We got that. Shift your language, adjust all the organization, work as one team, One Company, working with another company. It made total sense, except that we had some work to do to shift towards that, and that's exactly where we are, and we are not done yet. Last question?
Thank you. Hi, Jason Haas from Wells Fargo. In the past, you've talked about being able to hit the 12%-15% EPS growth, even if the top line underwhelms a bit, like if it's in the 3%-4% range. So I know that you're not hoping that that's the outcome, but I'm curious if that was a comment that was related just to this year, or you think going forward, if it continues to be a soft backdrop, you're still able to get that 12%-15% EPS algo. And then, since I think I'm the last one, I'll try to throw in another one. I'm curious if you could just talk bigger picture about the timeline to get to that 5%-7%. You know, how long will it take to get back up into that range?
Thank you.
Great question. For me, the objective is always so in that order, it's getting the 12%-15%. That's been true for, as you can see on that chart, obviously. It's getting to the right margin at a healthy top line. What the number is on the top line is whatever is right for that right economic time, as well at the same time. So it's not that we're gonna sell at lower margin in order to get a better top line. And we've practiced that for many, many years, as we can see, obviously on that chart, and nothing is gonna change in the future. It's also to have that differentiated view, as I shared with you earlier today.
While 80% of the company is growing at 4%, today, three billion of our new engines are growing double-digit with way higher earnings growth, as well, at the same time. This is what matters. The fact that we have one or two businesses that are a little bit behind, that's always gonna be true, in a way. It's managing that portfolio in order to make sure we get the right earnings trajectory, the right margin delivery, driving the right cash flow. This is the way we think about it. For you, timing, I don't know exactly how it's gonna be. It's gonna take a few quarters, a few years to get there. We're gonna do it in a smart way. We won't surprise anyone. For me, generating value comes first.
It's never gonna be at the expense of the earnings that we're delivering. You've seen that from us for many, many years. It's not gonna change in the future as well. You've seen how we did value pricing as well. So during some of the extreme times, during the energy crisis in 2022 as well, we do it with our customers, that they can absorb it, that they can live with it, that we can keep them forever, and that's who we are as a company and want to remain in the future as well. So we manage all three, being very clear that it goes in a very clear order: It's earnings delivery, it's margin, and it's top line and that's been the case for a very long time. It's gonna remain like that, and it's looking at businesses in different ways, in different industries, in different geographies.
That's the beauty of a global company in so many markets like we enjoy. So thank you so much. We'll have plenty of time to have other discussions during the tours as well, during lunch. Just, so how we get organized, so for lunch, we'll have, I think, six or seven tables, where you're gonna have. So the whole team is gonna be there. You choose what's the theme that you'd like to discuss the most, you go to that table, and if there's no seat at that table, well, during the One Ecolab tour afterwards, you might meet some of them as well, where you can ask further questions as well. We wanna be here for you. We'll always be here for you, today or anytime as well in the future.
Before we wrap up, so just a quick indication on the innovation showcase, how it's gonna work. It's gonna be four different booths that you're gonna see that are very practical, very real. You can touch, you can see people in each of those innovation showcases. We want you to meet the team. They'll share with you what the innovations are, and you can have a discussion with them as well. We're gonna start off with AI data centers to see what Josh has been talking about on how do we deal with cooling, what have we done, what are we working on, where are we going, and you'll see some very cool stuff that you can experience as well. KitchenIQ with RushReady, totally different setup than a data center, obviously, because it's gonna be more about Coke, burgers, and fries.
Not exactly the same technology, but leveraging digital technology, and you're gonna see, so how do we manage those rushes, that restaurants so have to manage? That's been a great partnership, so with Microsoft to develop, that platform. Biopharma Solutions, you're gonna enter a clean room, as Hayley has been sharing as well with you, that you can see, so how do we deal with environmental hygiene? How do we deal with product quality, and how do we bring it all together in order to optimize the process, in a pharma plant? And last but not least, Pest Intelligence. I don't think there will be any pests around. I hope, but you're gonna see in action the technology, at least how it's gonna be and how it's working, in a retail store. It's gonna be, quite fun.
So we're gonna have, I think, four groups, and you're gonna start at one place. It's on your badge, either the front or the back, I don't remember where it is, that's saying so in which group you are. Try to get to that group. People are gonna help. So just as you exit the room, as we're here, get in your group, and you're gonna rotate, so around the floor. We're gonna have an hour-ish to do that, and then we'll move to lunch, then to the One Ecolab, and we'll wrap up at two. So for everyone on the webcast, a big thank you for attending from anywhere around the world or through a recording as well.
It's been a pleasure to share our story, where we are, who we are, where we're going, and meeting the team as well. We're gonna be here for you at any time today, in the days to come, and in the years to come as well. So thank you for attending, and more to come for the innovation showcase. Thank you to everyone.