Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Chris Schott at J.P. Morgan, and it's my pleasure to be introducing Elanco today. From the company, we have Jeff Simmons, President and CEO, and we're going to have the company's CFO, Todd Young, join for the Q&A as well. So with that, Jeff, happy New Year, and thanks for joining us.
Great. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Chris, and J.P. Morgan for the focus on animal health. We will reference on slide two the forward-looking statements. We did drop this presentation in an 8-K earlier yesterday, so now I'll go through some of the informative stuff a little quicker. Let's get started, and I'll just say that we're entering an exciting era of Elanco, something that we've been working on for many years. We've got a compelling value proposition that we will highlight and dig into today, all with really the tailwinds of this durable animal health market that we continue to see even in volatile times externally, the durability of the industry. We're well positioned, and we noted this on our November call, to be set up for mid-single-digit growth in 2025 on a constant currency basis.
That top line is going to accelerate into value as we go past 2025 into 2026 on the bottom line and throughout the balance sheet. Before I get started, let me be very clear. Last year, we were a story of late-stage approvals and a regulatory research story. We have quickly transitioned into Elanco in 2025 as a launch and a growth and a commercial story. And we are looking right now at a diverse portfolio of six potential blockbusters that are in launch mode at this point in time that will be the key drivers for the accelerated growth going forward. Let me highlight a few of these updates that are since the November earnings call that we put right up front so that everybody can see the kind of key new important information. The first one is we are launching Credelio Quattro this month here in January.
We will be shipping and launching the product, and this product will be entering into the fast-growing, large, broad-spectrum endectocide US parasiticide market, and we'll be doing that ahead of the parasiticide season. Secondly, as we have moved our DTC campaign for Zenrelia, our new dermatology product, up into January, we've seen nice momentum with this launch. We've seen efficacy and convenience and price value resonating with customers in a pretty significant way. We're adding several hundred new clinics every week to Zenrelia, combined with, we saw an acceleration of reorder rates in that fourth quarter as well, and that's led to just net more clinics purchasing Zenrelia on a monthly basis. And I'll get into a little bit more details on that in a minute, so we believe now is the right time to go direct to pet owners with a DTC campaign.
Third is we're adding AdTab, an incredible launch in Europe, a pet retail product. There's more OTC kind of access in Europe, and we've seen between 2023 and 2024 the acceleration in the trajectory of AdTab to actually be a blockbuster product. And as a reminder, that's $100 million on the animal health side. Mentioning blockbusters, additionally, Experior, our cattle product, has reached blockbuster status in US alone. You add Canada on top of that, and that was really catalyzed by a late-year clearance and other regulatory approval for us for heifers, about 40% more cattle market access with that clearance. And then additionally, and lastly, and we've had a lot of questions about this new market that we're creating, is we have a key goal we had in 2024 was to set up a carbon inset market in cattle.
And this is where, from the contracts of CPG companies going through a spun-out company that we've created that actually monetizes carbon to actually an on-farm database for dairy farmers that anything they do that lowers their footprint, they will get economic gain. And we have distributed in the fourth quarter $10 million that that carbon inset chain has back to US dairy farmers. So in summary, these six innovations, the progress on these key milestones really will be the accelerator of growth and moving us to this mid-single-digit growth. We had 1% constant currency organic growth in 2023. We've had guiding to 3% in 2024, accelerating to mid-single-digit constant currency growth in 2025. Our base business has stabilized, which is making that growth become accretive, the innovation growth. We also are winning and growing shares in the markets that we're leading in, farm animal and pet retail.
And we've seen good success and a really strong market in 2024 there. So 2024 was a very productive key year with critical milestones getting achieved, setting up a very strong 2025. And I've been pretty consistent on the earnings calls inside and outside the company. We have three priorities in this company: growth, innovation, and cash. And I'll touch on that as we go forward here. So just quickly, just an overview slide here on the next one is just kind of a setup on slide four. It's just a high-level summary of a few things here. We're positioned well in this durable market for sustained growth, not just in 2025, but beyond. We have been on a strategic journey that's really been methodical to set up this independent company, really focused on an innovation capability and a launch capability as we come into this era.
And really, we've got the tailwinds of an attractive durable animal health market that continues to become durable and attractive and continue to grow. Our broad portfolio has high-impact innovation. We believe that'll gain share. That'll put us back in leadership in a lot of these key categories while against an infrastructure that Todd can share a little bit more on that's really a goal of optimizing and creating much more bottom-line leverage in 2026 and going beyond. So we believe the expectations of accelerating growth that will lead to further deleveraging set up a really compelling multiple expansion for us. If we look briefly for those maybe not familiar with the industry very quickly, Elanco is one of the few global players that is set up to be a leader in this $41 billion market.
Simply, my kind of perspective on animal health after three decades is this is a durable cash market that's been growing mid-single digit, priced at about 2%-3%, and the added volume growth. Most all of the major markets are expanding and growing, especially as you look at it through a global lens. It's a market that rewards innovation. It's loyal to brands. It's driven by value because it is a cash market, and it really needs direct access and influence to farmers and veterinarians globally. There's three dimensions of complexity in animal health that make it durable. There's multiple species. There's multiple geographies inside with multiple channels and multiple therapeutic classes. On the pet side, $16 billion market, really, I think these three trends are the ones that we see most material: the global humanization of pets, the increased compliance.
Even though visits have been down, we believe compliance, being able to have more pet owners because it's easier when it's dropped to your door to be more compliant, will more than offset any decrease in visits, and then, of course, innovation in and outside of the vet clinic. On the farm animal side, look, you go into any major protein company anywhere in the world, protein is growing. Even with a movement in the new administration, protein's going to go up as carbs and processed food goes down, but the challenge here is going to be do it more sustainably. That's what the next generation of consumers wants, and that's a top priority for all the protein customers, and we'll get into that here in a minute.
As you go forward here to slide six, we have set ourselves up as one of the only couple of companies that can reach the world's animals independently. And that's something that we've been on this move for quite some time. And what does that mean? That's local expertise, especially from a sales standpoint and a regulatory standpoint, and having those local teams that also have the regulatory, the supply chains, the SAP systems. We can do that now in over 90 countries, 200 brands, 9,000 employees, and we've narrowed our focus this year on the five major species that are most important. So on our 70th year, Elanco here, we believe all of us that making animals' lives better makes life better from pets to protein.
Elanco's now opening a third door on the environment side, really setting up a One Health platform of value that's being offered by Elanco. Very quickly, it has not been an easy road since the IPO, but it's been an intentional one. It's been one of persistence. It's been one of preparation that's really led to this blue year, this pivotal time, this next era that I opened up with. We set up an IPO in 2018. The whole idea there was to become independent from Lilly, set up our own systems, SAP systems, all aspects across the value chain. But then we quickly knew that we didn't have the size, the scale, enough pets, the right mix, and that led to a major acquisition of Bayer and Aratana. Then over the last three years, our real focus has been on innovation, very much like our parent company.
And we leaned in heavily on this with Ellen and the team, the Kindred Bio. We're one of only two companies that has monoclonal antibodies into the marketplace, and we brought this late-stage pipeline. Now we're at a pivotal time of sustainable growth, top line, bottom line, and sustainable flow of innovation. That's what 2024 marks in this next era that we're coming to. The strategy's been consistent for the five years. So that we've been on this journey are six years. With this IPP strategy, we show the progress Todd and I at every earnings call, the consistent flow of high-impact innovation. Ellen's heavily focused on the early and mid-stage pipeline now, optimizing our portfolio. Every portfolio we have is more stable and creating higher quality growth than it has in the six years.
We're gaining share in the markets we're leading in, and then the continuous focus on productivity. This just shows a little bit of how the diversity and the durability on slide nine has shown this consistent trajectory of growth. I would just say that the diversity and the quality of growth that we have today is better. Again, we see the trajectory of moving to a consistent mid-single-digit growth rate is something we can do with the innovation that we have in hand today. As I go forward and just look a little bit at the market we serve, first through the pet lens, a kind of key aspect that I would focus on here is on the pet side, it's all about healthier, longer life, more active life of pets. Something we've been very intentional on is adding this fourth dimension to our portfolio.
Vet clinics want and desire full portfolios to work with fewer companies, more robust portfolios, and by adding Derm, we've added this fourth dimension. We are now the only two animal health companies that can offer all four dimensions across these key areas. We believe this is critical as we go into this next era of growth. We've actually done the same on the farm animal with intentionality by adding sustainability as something that we believe is absolutely critical. As I said, a comprehensive portfolio on the farm animal side matters. We hit all of these areas, and when you're in a boardroom of a major protein company, they desire all of these, and all of these have an economic bent, especially from a protein standpoint.
I want to just double-click on this carbon market very briefly, and I want to emphasize that the force behind this, and this has been quite a few years in the making, we have a long history in farm animal, and it's an area that we lead in in a lot of ways, and this new market, we believe, is a $2 billion market. It's really driven by two economic forces. On the CPG side, think major animal protein companies on the dairy and meat side. They're desiring to please consumer preference and create brand strength. On the dairy side, for less than 1% cost, they can create $20 worth of value to a dairy farmer, and so what we've done is we've proven this model. It's set up independently, verified by the environmental organizations, and again, not driven by Scope 3 or ESG. It's driven by that.
Dairy farmers, we have robust demand by dairy farmers for actually executing this to pick up a second stream of income besides a milk check. They're getting a carbon check. Again, that happened in the Q4. This opens the door for Bovaer, that we see as the next $200 million product in dairy for Elanco, and we've got Experior and Rumensin that are already being executed on today. As you look at innovation and Ellen's kind of agenda, very clearly, we've had this late-stage pipeline that is robust that I'll show here in just a minute, but she's heavily focused right now on really two ey objectives. It was exiting this late-stage pipeline into the marketplace. We're now doing that globally, which I'll get into here in a minute, and also leveraging our monoclonal antibody capability and platform from manufacturing to R&D.
This has been the real key thing: to actually we've got the robust, probably the most robust pipeline we have from early to mid-stage and some of the key biggest areas that are noted here as well as some emerging areas as well. This is the pipeline. We've actually made some adjustments since the November earnings and just put the blockbusters on the pipeline. So we have the six above the line that are actually in the marketplace with the announcement of Credelio now launching this month, all in launch mode, all differentiated, all going into markets that are growing, and candidly, all of them really with limited cannibalization. There'll be a little bit in the parasiticide area, but otherwise none. Then we do expect our IL-31, our second monoclonal antibody, the IL-31 short-acting derm product, differentiated, to be coming this year here in the US.
So this is our agenda here in the near term and in the medium term to drive growth on the top line and bottom line, all of them also with strong mix and higher profit profiles than our core portfolio today. This just gives you a little bit of the progress we've made on. We said in late 2000 that 0we would have our 2020 going into 2021, we'd have $600 million-$700 million of innovation by the end of 2025. We hold to that commitment. The last slide is validation that we have multiple paths to get there, and that calculates to a little over $200 million of growth from innovation between 2024 and 2025. The exciting thing is this hits all segments, which helps all portfolios: international, US, farm animal, pet health.
I want to take just a double-click very quickly on a few of the big products, starting with Zenrelia. The global dermatology topical derm market is $1.8 billion. It's growing double-digit, continues to grow double-digit. This will be 100% accretive to Elanco. This is our first entry into that market with a JAK1 inhibitor. It adds this fourth dimension to the portfolio that I mentioned. And I would just highlight efficacy and value are what is resonating with customers. Recently, we published our head-to-head study against the market incumbent showing the efficacy advantage, and we're now seeing that in real-life conditions. Zenrelia has been put in some of the toughest non-responding dogs in derm, and the efficacy profile is what has driven increased clinic penetration, as I said, several hundred per week, a reorder rate that is climbing, and more clinics overall per month ordering.
Vet surveys also from October to December have shown a nice increase in vets willing to prescribe the product. So with this data, we've made a decision to move to go direct to pet owners with a direct-to-consumer campaign that starts this month before the season, the actual peak season of derm and itching dogs. And I think this slide just shows this is a major problem. Number one reason pet owners take their dog to the vet: 17 million dogs here in the US, probably 6 million that are untreated today, a high percentage of non-responders. And we see a great response from KOLs, vets, and now even on Chewy and others, you can see pet owners' reviews as well. So that's the update on Zenrelia. You move to Credelio Quattro. Credelio Quattro is entering the largest market.
The fastest growing and probably the biggest trend has been you've got a $3.8 billion parasiticide, tick, flea, worm market in the US. Of that market, you've seen in the last couple of years this broad spectrum endectocide a couple of products actually grow pretty significantly and now represents close to 25%. We're entering that market. We're entering really notionally with a small base. We've got about $300 million in that market. So we see minimal cannibalization because we're notionally smaller. And we have three modes of differentiation that are highlighted here: a broader spectrum with four active ingredients. We actually get tapeworm that none of the incumbents get. We actually have heartworm prevention on month one of control, which one of the incumbents doesn't have.
Probably what's got the most traction for Credelio today is the speed of kill of ticks that is superior to the other two market incumbents. Again, adding Zenrelia to Quattro will also be advantageous. We're moving that product to the marketplace and shipping here this month. Then Bovaer, I've already mentioned we've got strong consumer product, good demand, farmer demand. We've set up the carbon inset market. The real challenge now for Bovaer is really a ground game, state by state, farm by farm, feed mill by feed mill. The good news is we're creating a new market that's sticky that will stay and be recurring like we've seen with Experior. I'll just kind of wrap up here. The third pillar is our productivity.
Very important to just highlight that we had a big year in 2024 led by Todd, and really we've reduced our debt by approximately 25%. Our stand-up cost really decreased in 2024. The cash accretion of the company increased. Our number one allocation priority is paying down debt. We also narrowed our focus and sold our aqua business, and that allowed us also to accelerate debt paydown as well. I will also highlight all employees' bonuses are tied to TSR-aligned objectives of EBITDA growth over last year, not versus a plan, as well as beating the cost of capital on the cash side. This was the slide we ended our November earnings with. We continue to see some of these similar pushes and pulls.
We've talked a lot with investors today that we'll continue to monitor the FX situation and that impact we'll highlight in our guidance we'll give at the end of February, but I think the focus here is we continue to feel very good about the $600-$700 million of innovation and the constant currency mid-single-digit growth. So I end by saying it's our 70th year as a company. It's a year we've been going after for a long time. I would say our purpose has never been more significant as we look at this One Health platform. Our potential has never been more clear inside and outside of the company with a growth innovation cash focus, and our people have never been more engaged. We're at a six-year high on internal Elanco employee engagement. We know that we have to launch well.
Our heads are down and focused on that, but there's multiple paths and a lot of innovation in a lot of major markets, so we're confident in that. We expect accelerating revenue growth this year, and then that will get levered in the income statement going forward, and we believe our strategy will drive meaningful value for you, our investors. So with that, Chris, I look forward to some discussion with Todd and I.
Okay. Thank you for those comments. Now to transition over here. I thought I might just start the Q&A with just a little bit more digging into Zenrelia a bit more. What can you tell us about the initial pet owners that are adopting the products? Are there any specific characteristics that are standing out? You mentioned tough-to-treat animals, but these like atopic failures or the novel patients. Just help us a little bit there.
It's a challenging category. If you even look at the existing labels, it'll say on the existing labels only a percentage of the dogs will respond. So this is atopic dermatitis is a challenging one, and I would say whether we wanted to or not, we quickly got thrown into the cases on dogs that it did not work or whatever the product was. And I would say that's probably the headline out in the field is this product is working extremely well in cases where other things did not work. So that was kind of our entry point. You always have the early adopter segment as well, but as we said, the first 100 days was a vet-to-vet strategy. So we did a lot of vet-to-vet learning. We published our booster data on additional research. We've recently published the head-to-head data.
I think it's been a scientist-to-scientist KOL, but I would say there's nothing more effective than a room of 12 veterinarians, maybe three or four that have used it, all from the same community, exchanging with the other eight or nine, and that's helped with the conversion. I think value is important. We priced it at a lower value, but to vet clinics, that's probably secondary. That'll probably be a lot more beneficial as we start to go direct to pet owners themselves.
Great. And just on that initial piece, what percent of a pill users from your research have struggled with the product? And how big a percent of the market could that be?
Yeah. I mean, Todd, you can build on this, but the label has a limitation of, you can say, 68%-70% on that. But that can vary by case. But I think every vet clinic can say, "Hey, I've got some dogs that did not respond. I've tried different mechanisms, even steroids. It didn't work." And that's the cases we've been put into. But what I would say, Chris, is as we looked at the Q4 , probably the least quarter where you have itching dog issues, we continue to see the acceleration of reorder rates. Several hundred new clinics coming on, but when you hand out 90 pill bottles at one per day, it takes a while, but the early testimonials have led to vet clinics saying, "Hey, I'm reordering. I'm upping up for more." So that's where we think that.
Yeah. Excellent. On the DTC program, how quickly do you typically expect a response from when you launch that to when it starts to pull through?
It takes some time. And DTC today is different than it was two years ago, right? It's very targeted, multi-channel. We're using all the most advanced. We brought in a lot of expertise over the last three years on multimedia and digital and to take kind of the next-generation approach. So it's more efficient for Todd, but very effective for Bobby. And so this will take some time, but that's another reason to do it in January. We see this March to July window being really critical, and we want to make sure we're having full effect by then.
In terms of competitive response, anything surprising so far or anything you'd note?
No, I expect continued. It's a competitive segment, but I think what's exciting is every major market in animal health is growing significantly. I mean, derm, $1.8 billion headed to a $2 billion market. This broad spectrum parasiticides, 1.2. I see the 3.8 overall market going over 4, so price value, volume value, market expansion, and then it's even probably bigger than that when you look at it globally. I think that's the positive in this animal health market.
All right. And I'm reaching on another one, the competitive front. I think Merck expected to come into the market this year. What does a third player do into the space? Does that change pricing dynamics or anything you think about there?
We've seen this in parasiticides, other segments paying. There's been multiple players. I think if vets want differentiation, vets want multiple options. Veterinarians are very creative, and every case is looked at a little differently. So it all comes, I think, to this was expected by us, and so we continue to play our strategy.
Great. On the label, talk about the path to improve the label given some of the data you've generated.
Yeah. No question. With the efficacy profile, the convenience profile, and value that we see with Zenrelia, we will pursue this with life cycle management, Ellen's team, like we do anything else, but with the value we see, so there's multiple paths. We've had the good engagement with the FDA, and we'll look at the multiple paths both with what things we can do with existing data, with new data, with language of the label or a change of the label, and all of that is well underway and moving nicely, and then the international approvals, I didn't say, but we'll be launching in Canada this month, and we're in Japan and Brazil, and we expect to be in Europe and Australia this year as well.
Got that angle coming in. Maybe one last one on the derm. Just updates on IL-31, just kind of timelines around that and your additional color on how to think about that program.
Yeah. Great product. Differentiated from the market incumbent, another monoclonal antibody from Elanco coming through the same manufacturing facilities. We're putting CapEx to expect to have the approval in 2025. And again, that's a USDA-approved product, not an FDA-approved product.
Excellent. Shifting over to Quattro. Just way to start about launch here, how should we level set just the ramp and what to anticipate as we go into this year?
Yeah. I mean, we planned we wanted to be in the marketplace before the season. There is a little bit of a seasonal aspect going into the spring. The three dimensions of differentiation matter. We do believe that having both a derm asset and parasiticides, and again, the Credelio momentum we've seen both in the US and Credelio Plus internationally. We have a broad spectrum internationally. With the tick kill, with the broader spectrum, we think we'll do well, but it will be a straight-up competitive play. We'll obviously go direct more to pet owners. It's a little bit more of an uninvolved category. Vet clinics are much more interested in talking about surgery and pain and derm than maybe ticks and fleas. So we will get the pet owner engaged more earlier.
Another one, just talking about competitive dynamics. I know this market segment's been growing really nicely. How do you think about competitive? How difficult is it to just launch here in this space?
Yeah. I think the big news is I haven't seen in a long time a segment get created so fast than the broad-spectrum endectocide market. So I think a lot of people want to talk about the head-to-head, but I think the overall pie, is this going to blow through a $4 billion size? Yes, it will. And internationally, it's the same thing. And I think this convenience of a broad-spectrum oral that's effective will continue to grow. So I think share is going to come a lot from the legacy brands. And that's why I mentioned notionally we're a little bit smaller and don't see quite the cannibalization that these others have.
Maybe one last one on the kind of the pet innovation side. What's next? What are you guys most excited about as you think about the next wave of assets?
I think I'll get Todd about here. We've leaned in pretty heavily, and Ellen has on this consistent flow, but we like the monoclonal antibody platform. We've invested pretty heavily in that to talk and speak to, and we definitely want to make sure we win. Derm is new to us and accretive. Livestock sustainability, we believe, is a $2 billion plus market, not environment, but economics. We think that's really important. We've answered a lot of those questions today and playing to our strength. Then, yeah, we will use the monoclonal antibody to go into some of the new spaces as well that have been talked about. I don't know anything on the FX or the investment.
Yeah. I think we're very excited by the monoclonal antibody platform we're building and the opportunities both in farm animal and pet health. W e continue to lean into R&D on the farm animal area. It's been a real strength for us in the last year. We're growing double digits in our US farm animal space at the end of the year. We expect we'll be number one in the US in cattle, in poultry, in swine, and with Bovaer, we'll get to number one in a few years there as well. So again, a place we're looking to win and win big as well as bringing the innovation on the pet side.
When, as we transition to the farm animal, I was noticing one of the slides. It seems like as you think about your pipeline, how that's built out, it's been pretty balanced in terms of the revenue contribution from farm versus pet. As we think about the next five years, is there a balance or does it pivot more towards pet as we think about the growth of the company?
We will go where the growth is. We'll go where the pipeline is. But I do think that if you look at animal health, there's a lot of ways you can cut it up, but I would say farm animal, we've continued to grow our leadership there. We continue to see a little innovation in every portfolio has really stabilized the base. We've got more price growth. We have the best farm animal year we've had in maybe five to seven years in 2024. Pet retail with a Bayer acquisition, that's done really well.
There's still a third of pet owners that don't go to the vet, and being able to also be in a dollar store all the way to Costco to online really matters, and we are the number one player in that segment. We continue to see that as a strong, and the pet vet where we've been maybe three or four and had some erosion, this is where the innovation's coming, so I would say we will go where the innovation is and not force some kind of a breakdown, but we like our leadership, and sometimes a little life cycle management in a portfolio or just one addition, as we've seen that, especially farm animal, it stabilizes and continues to grow.
On the farm animal side, 2024 was a great year for you guys. How much of that was Experior versus the rest of the portfolios? Help us understand the kind of drivers of that growth?
As Jeff said in the comments, over $100 million of Experior sales in the US, also nice growth in Canada. With that, our portfolio really comes into play. We pulled back more Rumensin. Rumensin's been on the market, I think, 55 years, and we grew both price and volume in 2024, five years into generic competition. That innovation brings the rest of the portfolio in a way. In the poultry side, we brought Tyson bacti omnivores. Keeping chickens healthy has real value, and that changed and grew our poultry business. Then on the swine, we've got a vaccine called Prevacent for PRRS, and that again helped out the swine portfolio. Again, it's multiple products driving a portfolio approach. Experior, clearly the big one from a straight growth perspective and excited.
In November, we received clearance for heifers, which represents about 40% of feedlot animals and just expands that market opportunity for Experior.
Bovaer, just how do we think about the launch curve for a product like this and how should we think about uptake?
Yeah. So as I said, I think it's going to be one that will come nicely, but it will take a little bit more than maybe a pet adoption curve. And we saw a little bit of that with Experior. But I think the good news is we had to have three critical success factors in 2024. We had to create an on-farm capability, not just a database, but it's got to be certified independently.
So any dairy farmer, and right now we've got close to a million of the 9 million dairy cows covered with a database that if a farmer with all of his data has any intervention that lowers his footprint, he can turn that into value. So Bovaer used over the course of a year creates one ton of carbon or $20 of net value to a farmer. That was milestone one. The other was CPG contracts with this independent company, Athian, to want to buy the carbon from an inset market. So a CPG company straight to that dairy farm, that's all lined up and those contracts are signed. And then to validate the carbon market, which we did in the Q4 . Those three objectives were accomplished. Now, Bovaer, probably the most substantial one product move to lower footprint and lower methane can create a lot of economic value.
It's going to be 2025's objective is getting more farms on. When farmers want it, it will be about the feed mill. Every state has different regulations for this. So it's going to take time. But once you get it, it stays. Once you put a feeding regime in place to a dairy farmer, it's very unlikely they're going to change for some time.
I'm just pivoting to financials from here. I know you had some comments on the Q3 call around EBITDA for 2025. Just remind us how you're thinking about this year and any changes relative to how you're thinking about this few months yet.
Yeah. I think overall we feel really good about the base business and how we finished the year. The one item to note, when we said low single-digit EBITDA growth expectations in November, that was on FX rates as of the end of October. The dollar is generally strengthened against most currency. The dollar index has strengthened about 4%-5% since then. So when we give our official guidance in February, we'll take into account FX rates as of that time. But fundamentally, feel very good about the EBITDA underlying base performance. One thing we noted in November, we did buy back a plant in the U.K. It was in bankruptcy. That'll create a $25-$35 million headwind that we weren't expecting. But nonetheless, it protects 160-180 million of our farm animal revenue and a very good cash-on-cash return for the $25 million we paid for that facility.
So overall, feel very good about our underlying fundamentals for growth and expect that in 2026 we'll start to grow our EBITDA faster than sales as we move forward. And that'll only help on the net leverage side.
Yeah. Thank you. Just elaborate a little bit on beyond 2025. How do you think about that gross margin improvement in business and what the cadence of that should look like?
It certainly improves as we get big products, right? That's why we're so excited about six potential blockbusters in launch mode and then a seventh coming with IL-31. Big products are just, as a general, more efficient, and you get scale that drives higher margins. All of those are higher than our corporate gross margin average today, except Bovaer, and that will improve as DSM brings their manufacturing facility online. So we do expect gross margin to continue to improve. We've generally been taking a little more than 2% price the last few years across our entire portfolio. We expect it'll still be in that 2% range, and we're making targeted choices on price, so our pet retail market, Seresto, our biggest product, we moved that to an everyday price of $59.98 in the US.
We're not taking price on that in 2025 because that elasticity curve is dialed in well, and we're excited about that continuing. Whereas in the US vet clinic, yes, we're taking price much like our competitors are, and then farm animal and species and product driven, but all of those things we do is driving gross margins higher as we do really invest the marketing efforts behind our new products in the pet space, but we've done a very good job. We've got SG&A down in 2025, below the 2021 levels. We've taken a lot of costs out of our enterprise. We've moved a lot of jobs to lower-cost jurisdictions. We've gotten more efficient on our spending decisions, all of which is allowing us to make those investments behind these potential blockbusters.
How do I think about, I know 2025 is a big investment year as it should be with these launches? How do I think about that absolute OpEx space as we kind of roll into 2026 and beyond? Is that a good absolute level of spend, or should we expect th ere's still additional, I guess, nodes of investment you can make over time?
Yeah. I think when you get into that absolute number and then growing off that base, we wouldn't expect to be cutting that as we grow bigger market shares and continue to have a very competitive market space. We've seen the value of it with AdTab in Europe. As Jeff said, we expect that now to be a blockbuster. That's an oral parasiticide using the Advantage name for its brand equity. We've put a lot of DTC efforts behind that and have taken share and allowed us to have a very nice trajectory. And now we're starting to harvest some of the profitability that comes from the sales growth and expect that same thing to be happening in the US market as well with Credelio Quattro and globally with Zenrelia.
Certainly. When I think about the margin story, is it mostly gross margin, or is SG&A also going to be a component of that over time?
Yeah. We're really strong on our G&A management. We'll keep doing that, and sales and marketing needs to be there to drive performance. I think you'll see more gross margin just from these larger products, especially being all of these potential blockbusters, as I said, above our corporate gross margin average. And our procurement team continues to do a nice job of sourcing products at a lower cost point on the active pharmaceutical ingredients. We've got the headwind coming from the UK manufacturing entity, but we'll try to be optimizing that footprint as we move forward and have its ownership again.
Maybe one last quick round of thanks sneaking in here. Just to help with the pet owner as you think about both the RX side, the OTC side, anything notable in terms of just maybe more difficult economic environment? Are you seeing any of that flow through to your business at all?
I would say I've seen it in the industry. I mean, there's definitely some vet visits are down. We've seen that a couple percent the last couple of years, a little bit more shopping online and some of that transition. But as a whole, as I noted in my comments, I believe the opportunity and why are the spaces continuing to grow even with visits are down, compliance, the global markets overall, and the humanization of pets is growing. Innovation really gives you much more price growth opportunity. So that's happening. And I think the bigger companies also just have a little bit more of a value proposition. So we do not see for our company these trends having an impact given that we're probably best suited with the in-outside the vet with our OTC portfolio and now all the innovation that's coming into our portfolio. So yeah.
G reat. Thank you for spending time. Thanks so much for joining today. Appreciate the call.
Thanks.