Okay. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Steve Byrne. I cover chemicals for B of A, and I have the pleasure of my colleague, Vivek Arya, covering the semiconductor sector. So we both came here, and we've got about 15 people with us here. We toured ESI's assembly R&D lab. That's how I would describe it. We just had a terrific two-hour tour of this facility. We had with me here at the table, it's Ben Gliklich, the CEO. He's been with Element Solutions for about a decade. About half of that time, he's been CEO. Had the pleasure of touring a couple of their facilities in Connecticut a few years ago. We toured the Waterbury facility and the West Haven facility. Also with me across the table is Rick Frick. He is Executive Vice President of Electronics.
Several members of Rick's staff are here with us. We had a terrific tour of this facility for the 15 people that are in the room that came with us. If any of you have any questions about what we saw, Vivek is the one that's asked. Anyway, it was a great tour. Over to you, Ben. We'll go through some slides, and then we'll go through some Q&A.
Great. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Vivek. Thanks, everybody, for joining. Yeah, it was a productive morning, and we're thrilled to share a bit more about the electronics business and what we just talked about, frankly, with this broader audience. A couple of slides we have to share. See if I can get this to advance. In any case, the materials have been posted, but I'll start on slide 3 where we have an Element Solutions overview. This shouldn't be a new slide for any of the folks who are familiar with the company, but Element Solutions is a chemical technology company. Our process technologies and solutions enable performance for high-value products and innovation for our customers. The business is about 60% electronics, with the balance in what we call our industrial and specialty segment.
We'll hear most of our comments today about our electronics business, which is really a critical enabler of performance in leading-edge electronics materials and electronics hardware, with a portfolio of products that speaks to a broader set of applications than competitors and solutions that really enable high-value product performance. The business is aligned roughly with our customers. About 40% of the business is in Asia, 30% in America, 30% in Europe. About $2.5 billion of sales, $480 million or so of adjusted EBITDA last year on an LTM basis that's pushing $500 million. And based on the guidance we gave last week, at the end of the second, at the end of the first half, about $520 million. 5,300 people around the world close to customers. People really are the source of our moat. Our business is a professional services firm that happens to bill for chemistry.
By that, I mean our innovation works in tandem to solve customer problems, and our technical service exists to support our customers' manufacturing processes very close to them, in fact, on site with them. The electronics business you're going to hear about today, about $1.5 billion in revenue in over 30 countries with many thousands of customers across the breadth of the electronics hardware supply chain, from printed circuit board fabrication to electronics hardware assembly. And in the semiconductor market, semiconductor fabricators and increasingly packagers of OSATs that are innovating around package design. It's a very exciting, high-growth, and high-value market for us. The electronics business has been growing nicely, notwithstanding what's been a pretty difficult cycle over the past couple of years. Last year was the worst electronics market we've seen in a generation.
Through the cycle, this business has grown 5% from 2019 to 2023, with a real acceleration that we're seeing into 2024, and with a disproportionate amount of that growth coming from our semiconductor business, which has grown from being about 5% of the portfolio to more than 10% of the overall business. Notably, we've been outperforming our end markets. You can see that on the top right here, where you look at MSI, you look at PCB square meters, you can see how there's been a drawdown over the past couple of years, but our business has actually grown, notwithstanding that significant trough that we saw in the market over the prior 18 months and a trough that we've clearly bounced off of as we enter and perform through 2024. Two hallmarks of our business are stable profitability and stable, strong cash flows.
What you can see is, in various demand environments, this is a business that's been able to preserve profit through its variable operating cost model and generate very substantial cash flows because less than 2% of sales is in CapEx. In a down market, we're releasing working capital. So we actually generate more cash flow in weaker demand environments. But you can see the stability of margins in various volume environments, both gross profit and EBITDA, and strong through the cycle, trough-to-trough EBITDA growth, given the last trough before last year was 2019. With that backdrop, I'm going to turn it to Rick to take you through the electronics business in a bit more detail.
Thanks, Ben. All right. So to try to give you some overview of what we do in our electronics business, we'll start with a very high-level simplified version of what happens creating an electronic device. So it starts with the wafer, which is the semiconductor. The wafer is patterned. It basically has copper. The copper is part of our product line. It's then cut into a die and then moves into semiconductor assembly, where the wiring on the wafer is then translated into a chip. The chip is molded, and then it's assembled to a circuit. And that circuit board then goes into an electronic device. Different types of circuit boards, different types of chips, memory, logic, graphic processors. So where we play. Our materials are materials that are left on the wafer. So there's a lot of materials that are used in the process. There are sacrificial layers.
There are other materials that actually end up in the wafer. So if you think about all the metals that go on the wafer and all the attachments that are made, those are where we play. So there's really two value streams that we play. And one is in the semiconductor manufacturing and then the packaging of those semiconductors. So at the deposition layers, where they're depositing copper, that's our ViaForm product line. And we get into semiconductor assembly and wafer-level packaging. That's as the actual wafer is cut and put into a die, which if you open up a computer and you see the black polymer-based chip, that's what's going on underneath the black polymer base. It's all the wiring. And we play there. We then play in the assembly of the PC or the PC board, so circuit board assembly.
So we're actually attaching the die to the circuit board. And then in another business, our circuitry business, we're actually participating in the PC board market. So the actual creation of the substrate and the copper wiring in the substrate are all products that we develop and produce and provide to our customers. So every position on the map where a product is put on the wafer, attached to the die, attached to the board, and the actual board is an area where we play. So we've gone through some change in the business over the last couple of years in terms of how we're thinking about the business because our customers are thinking differently. And we've went from a regional structure where we had regional businesses that kind of focus on the region to a business unit structure.
The reason we did this is because we want to focus on the jobs the customer is doing. The customers are becoming more global and moving. There's a lot of geopolitical stuff moving around. When we focus on the job that we were doing, we can look at not just a specific material set or a specific product. We can look at all the materials used around that job. So when they're doing wafer-level packaging, we don't do one product. We do several products. We continue to look at other products we can add that solve the customer problems. Semiconductor assembly, same thing. We're doing wiring. We're doing attachment. We're doing adhesives. We're doing paste. Circuit board assembly. We're doing sintering. We're doing wiring. We're doing soldering. Then in the circuitry business, the boards are getting more complex. They're getting thicker.
So the wiring and the schemes that they're using in the PC board manufacturers are coming from a very different market. It's not workhorse materials anymore. They're looking for new materials to improve their yields and have better products. And then we have a memory disk product, which amazingly is a very good market because all of your data centers, rather than using solid-state memory, they use memory disk. There's only a few memory disk suppliers, and we're supplying to all of them. And then Film & Smart Surface Solutions is a smaller business that we're developing, which really focuses on automotive molded plastics and in-mold electronics. So this is just a picture diagram of a board assembly with a die on it and then with a thermal. And if you go through the color coding, you can see in the Assembly Solutions place.
Our materials play an integral part all across the board. In Semiconductor Solutions, we're in the wafer. We're in the most advanced wafer-level packaging applications in the world, leading those markets. Then Circuitry Solutions, all the board designs, which are becoming more and more complex. And we're really in the forefront, I think, before we're developing technologies and launching new products to solve the problems that the larger chips and the more high-powered chips are causing with both power densities and thermal. And this is why things are becoming more complicated. We talk about Moore's Law, and the action used to be in the scaling of the semiconductor. So how small can you get basically the positive and negative charge? How close can you make them sit together? So you can have more circuits in the wafer, right?
With more circuits, you have more power, more processing power, right? So that was the game. That's changed, right? So as you're kind of advancing, those are still doing that to some extent. But now they're packaging a lot more chips closer together so that the electrical connectivity is better, and they can drive different processing units rather than have one giant processing unit. So they use chiplets and other chip designs. So if you go to this heterogeneous integration, you'll see the chip density is extremely high, which means that they have to attach these chips to the board in different ways. They've got to deal with thermal expansion differences between materials. They've got to deal with adhesives. They've got to deal with heat.
A lot of our R&D, a lot of the products we're introducing over the last several years are products that address the challenges of heterogeneous packaging.
Cost savings in action. Motion light. What does this all mean? We've tried to move quickly through these slides so we can get to Q&A and answer your questions. We've tried to boil this down. We've got a broad portfolio of electronics materials and process technologies to solve emerging customer pain points. Some of these businesses the investment community might be more familiar with because they've been around for a long time, like our circuit board assembly business and our Circuitry Solutions business. Some of them are growing in terms of their size in our portfolio. It might be newer technologies.
There are opportunities, frankly, in each of these business slices for market outgrowth because there are new needs, whether that's from thermal management or new applications, technical requirements in automotive electronics, for example, or the opportunity and solutions that are driven by the non-standard approach from heterogeneous packaging and new package designs. Each of these businesses plays a part in solving a new customer challenge. Of course, there are divergent market growth rates. Our Circuitry Solutions business, which is the process chemistry that is used in turning a laminate into a printed circuit board, it's about a third of our electronics business sales. The 5-year market growth expectation, and this is using market research and market forecasts, is about 7%.
We see 2-3 points of outperformance in that market because where we play in that market is faster-growing, higher technology applications like package substrates, where printed circuit boards are quickly becoming almost semiconductors driven by heterogeneous packaging. We also have innovative, more sustainable metalization technologies that are solving OEM needs around environmental concerns. And so this is a market that's also bouncing off the bottom, right? A big end market for our Circuitry Solutions business has been smartphones, and we've seen a significant trough in demand that's starting to see a recovery. So that's how we get confidence in the five-year growth expectation and also our outperformance. The circuit board assembly business, which those who are here with us today saw a lot about, is a 4%-5% market grower. It's got a more industrial exposure than our Circuitry Solutions business, hence slightly lower growth rate.
Again, we see 2-3 points of market outperformance, really driven by innovation in both alloys. So what types of materials are we converting into solder pastes and our, again, sustainable capabilities, right? We're recycling materials, solving OEM needs for environmental concerns. The semiconductor assembly business, right? So this is what Rick was talking about, where we're putting die into packages and where there's been a huge amount of innovation around advanced packaging designs, is 11% of sales, but growing from a market perspective, 15%-20%. And based on our offering and capability for this subsegment, we see 10+ points of market outperformance. So this is a business that will grow from 10-ish% of our electronics business to a much more meaningful contributor at very attractive margins.
Then the wafer-level packaging business, think about that as copper deposition and front-end capability, where we're growing in line with MSI from a market perspective, but based on innovation we've brought to market subsequent to the ViaForm transaction we did last year, where we see 5%-10% points of incremental outperformance. Putting this all together, you've got an electronics business that's growing the high single digits over the next five years. That's before any significant contribution from the Kuprion transaction we did, which is a little bit harder to underwrite to with certainty in the very near term, but has huge potential. The incremental margins in this business are quite attractive. So putting that together, the electronics business should be growing north of 10% on the EBITDA line for the next five years.
Making that a little bit more immediate, the last slide is just our guidance. So last week, we raised our second-quarter guidance from approximately $125 million to approximately $135 million. That's driven by two things. The first is our margins have been sustainably higher, driven by our ability to hold some of the price that we had to take over the past couple of years and a declining raw material environment, with a bit of help from MIX because our circuitry business and our wafer-level packaging businesses have really accelerated. That's driven by AI applications and a healthier electronics environment in certain pockets. Those are higher margin businesses, thus further helping the margins.
As we look to the full year, we took up our full-year guidance from $515 million-$530 million to a new range of $530 million-$545 million on the back of that increase. We'll have better clarity around second-half dynamics on our second-quarter earnings call, which will come at the end of July, early August. All in all, the things we were talking about today, both in this presentation and on the tour, that are propelling the electronics market, they're here. We're seeing them in the P&L today, and we have a greater conviction than ever in their durability. We're very excited to continue to support our customers through their innovation and their growth. So with that, take some questions.
Maybe I'll kick it off. You might jump in with questions, and I'll repeat it for you. You just had a slide up there, Ben, that really caught my attention, where you looked at the market growth projection in the various sub-businesses in electronics. Then you had your own expectation for outperforming each of those market growths. Without going through the math on all of that, what's your gut feel over these next five years about your level of excitement about this business of yours? Is it the end-market growth recovery? I mean, you said worst electronics year in a generation. Is your excitement about the recovery in the end market and the growth, or is it your potential for share gains?
We talked about a lot of things on that tour where there were comments about, "This is nobody else has this." So which of those drives your optimism over the next five years?
The answer is yes, right? I think that, again, our conviction in our ability to support our customers and their customers and win together is as high as it's been. And we've built a track record over the past several years of outperforming our end markets, right? And the data bears that out. And that's been through pretty volatile environments. And our capabilities are only getting better. As a team, the solution set that we have is better than it's ever been. The customer intimacy is better than it's ever been. We've done a couple of highly strategic transactions. And as an organization, we focused our R&D and commercial efforts using some new tools we brought in. And that has been working. And we're at this really attractive inflection where the end markets have bottomed.
And we're seeing a recovery from a cyclical perspective, but also very rapid change in technology that's supporting a secular demand driver from AI, automation, and new emerging technology applications, all of which is additive to the base business in smartphones and in industrial electronics and internet infrastructure and data centers. So you've got this base business that's recovering and this new growth vector where we are very well primed to participate in with.
I think that was a good answer. Let's go to the next question.
On slide 10, you guys highlight that you have a 2-3 multiple uplift on the dollar value content when it comes to heterogeneous integration. But is there any offsetting dampening effect from a lower unit production that comes from heterogeneous integration versus if it just stayed in the prior form?
I think I just met an operator. Could you hear that fine?
Yes, we heard that fine.
Okay, thank you.
Chip volumes are going up, put most simply. So you've got a more complicated chip at the core as a core processor. There's still plenty of chips around it. It's not displacing chip volume, I would say. I think it was actually increasing chip volume.
Yes. If you think about, you talk about industry buzzwords, and maybe 5, 7 years ago, we were talking about system on chip, right? Where they were trying to do everything on a single chip. Now they're saying, "Well, we can't do that anymore." So now they've got a processing unit, memory, graphics processor. So they're actually using more chips in their design. Now the chips are getting smaller and the pitches are getting a lot tighter. But I think the chip volume is just naturally going up because of this phenomenon rather than down. Whereas before, when we were talking about system on chip and Moore's Law, it was all about not only scaling the chip to do more, but also getting cost out, right? And so they could fit more chips on that 300-millimeter wafer.
Now the processing power they need and all the other things that they need to do, they don't have that. And so the chips, they use the logic processor, graphics processor, and they put lots of chips around it to do other parts of the electronics need. And so more chips, faster devices, and frankly, cost savings because they don't have to scale through EUV down to 2 nanometer if they can.
Great. Thank you so much for having us. So we recently had an industry trade show, COMPUTEX in Taiwan. And the two observations, first is just how the ecosystem is coming together, whether it's the foundries, whether it's the fabless companies, right? Just the whole electronics. And secondly, how these roadmaps are accelerating. What used to be this classic Moore's Law 18-24-month cadence, now people are talking about a one-year cadence of bringing out. So I'm curious, Ben, as you look at your kind of partnership and collaboration, how early do you get involved in the process? So should we be thinking about this year you're partnering with the ecosystem and chips that might come out a year from now, two years from now? So talk to us about the collaboration you have with these different parts of the ecosystem.
So I'll start and I'll pass it to Rick. But I think the primary observation is that over the past 3-5 years, we've been working to create one MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions business. Historically, these were discrete businesses. We had a circuit board assembly business. We had a Circuitry Solutions business. We had a semiconductor business. There was a lot of discovery value when we brought these businesses together and started doing roadmap exchanges with these customers. And they're beginning to appreciate the breadth of what we can offer. Just do that again. And so our seat at the table has improved. Then we did the ViaForm transaction last year where we went from being a manufacturer and innovator to actually having customer touch at the largest semiconductor fabricators in the world. And that further enhanced our access, if you will.
Today, I think it's very clear that our value proposition and breadth of offering is appreciated by the critical specifiers, if you will, in the industry. Rick has anecdotes about very senior executives in this supply chain spending hours at our labs doing applications work. Rick, if you want to.
Yeah, I mean, one, you're absolutely correct. The market, the design cycles have completely changed. It used to be if I was a fabless, I'd just call up TSMC and say, "Hey, make me a chip." Now they want to know what's in that chip, and they want to accelerate, and they want it on its package. A year back, TSMC's packaging being their bottleneck in some of their most advanced chips. But see, all of a sudden, you've got it's really more of a three-legged stool where the material provider, the customer, the tool provider, and the customer can be two things could be an OEM or the actual manufacturer. And they're all working together because the problems industry is facing are more pronounced, where you say, "Speed scale." Now we've got power density, so you've got heat problems. We've got all kinds of different things we're working on.
So everyone's got to work together, so it's more dynamic. And a lot of these customers see it as a real strategic advantage if they can figure this out, right? Whereas before, they wouldn't think as much about it. So we had a very large customer who plays in the automotive industry in our Singapore facilities. And it was a C-level person who spent four hours in our Singapore lab just trying to look at data and look at how we looked at things. So this is getting another customer who I go way back with, but he's the most senior R&D person in the packaging side of this company. He'll call me up the other day and be like, "You guys want to have weekly meetings with you.
Keep on working on this stuff." So I think the market's changed the behavior a little bit, but it's also because we do have the breadth of products we have. And we've invested in the lab facilities. We're able to be a participant at a higher level, right? We're not talking about the spec of our copper product. We're talking about how the copper product enables this specific in combination with something else. And that's a conversation the customer wants to have, is, "How do I do my job better?" And that's why we reorganize around customer jobs versus product lines. You'll see a lot of our competition just talking about, "Well, this is my adhesives line. This is my copper line." Don't think that way when we think about the solution.
Maybe one more thing to pick up on. You mentioned power density, and I think that's become a really important buzzword in semis as we are going towards these more advanced GPUs that do a lot of computation, but also suck up a lot of power along the way. So maybe talk to us about what specific products, right? What part of your work is exposed to addressing that issue? And is there a roadmap in place of new technologies that you think are going to help the semiconductor industry?
Sure. All right. Well, first off, we're in the wafer, right? So our ViaForm products, the Damascene products, they were kind of workhorse products for a while. But as you get to these lower nodes or these faster processors, yield becomes a real issue, right? And so we're continuing to develop products that are improving the customer's yield, improving the layers that they can use the copper on. So they want to use plating wherever they can. But as you get to the lower layers, you can use physical vapor deposition or something else. So we're developing products that can address that. So in that chip stack, we're there. Now, all of these advanced chips you talk about then use advanced wafer packagings, so copper bumps and RDL pillars, kind of buzzwords you can look up.
But that means that the traditional kind of wire bonding and things they were doing, they're moving more of that to wafer, right? So they'll put a packaging layer on the top of the wafer. All those advanced chips do that. And we have leading products in that space. Then you get into the PC board side. And I was telling the group here, if you get into there's pictures of them out there. So you look at the Nvidia chip stack and how close they are and how much energy they use. And a PC board, it's on a plastic substrate, right? Plastic substrate's an organic material. So when it gets hot, because there's that much power going through it, it'll melt and it'll warp, right?
And so the work we're doing with thermal processing on the PC board, trying to do finer or larger lines to move more power on lower layers, there's all things that the customer care about and we're doing today. Then you get into the die attach, right? You think about people used to use lead to attach things to boards, and it just doesn't work when you have that much of it, and it melts, right? And so we're in a silver sintering. We're in a copper sintering. We're into all different things that provide better thermal conductivity, but also a more robust board design, right? Because now a board just sitting in a laptop, okay, if it breaks, or in a car driving a sensor that's steering the car, it's a big problem if it breaks, right?
So reliability and all those other things that people are doing becomes more and more important. So we're spending a lot of time and energy in that space as well.
Maybe one follow-on on that, and that is you just kind of described that whole supply chain. How much wallet share do you think you can gain by having really critical technology in part of that chain and to be able to leverage that to get more wallet share out of your customers? How meaningful is that?
So the hallmark of this business is that our materials, our solution, represent a fraction of the cost of the finished good. That's where we want to play. We don't want to play in high bulk, high-cost materials. We want to play in high-value-add niche materials. What we found is some of these solutions can dramatically improve yields for customers. We're very good at selling on value. So if we're improving yields for customers, we're saving them a great deal more than we could possibly price. The value proposition that we represent to the customer is very compelling and creates a win-win. So when you think about a lot of the things Rick was just talking about, we're solving customer pain points where, and the thing about yields, right? In all aspects of electronics, it's not just in chip manufacturing.
If something's not working, you have to make it to figure that out. So they're throwing out finished product. Some of the issues that folks are struggling with that are damaging yields, there isn't a great material solution for you. Where Active Copper's value proposition is so compelling, right? Some of the other innovation we're bringing in the ViaForm market is so compelling. So we're not after wallet share broadly defined. We want to win in our niches and capture the value that our innovation and technical service represents. We'll do more than fine in terms of delivering on our commitments and our outgrowth if we're able to do that. We're not solving for absolute revenue dollars, right? We're solving for profit dollars and delivering above-market growth.
It's also, I mean, I think, again, the business organizational changes we've made over the last two years, it makes an impact because if you're a regional structure and you're kind of a single product line, you walk to a customer and say, "Hey, I sell copper Damascene," right? It's a different conversation if you walk to a customer and say, "Hey, I work on every job you're doing across the electronics manufacturing team. And we have products in these spaces. This is what we can do for you. This is how they work together." And getting that level of conversation with the customers, it's really advanced over the last two years. And they want to have a conversation with us. So you talk about pocket share, market share, wallet share. It happens because we're at the table and flexing our muscles as a $1.5 billion-dollar electronics company.
And the customers want strategic suppliers. They know they have high-quality systems, and they know they have the right products to solve their future needs. So being at that table helps us a lot. And we look at pipeline growth. We look at win rates, and all of that has been improving quarter-over-quarter.
I think that that's a fair point, which is there are certain niches of the market that we have a toehold in that we're trying to drive share in, right? We talked about conformal coatings as an example and some of the more polymer-based opportunities under fills and edge bonds. We're a small player there, but because of the materials compatibility aspect we've talked about today and how we can show our materials work together, we have a lot of addressable market to go after there that's not relying on industry growth.
There's a lot of ongoing kind of tension between the U.S. and China, right? Especially in the field of semiconductors. So curious, how much has it kind of helped or impacted your business so far?
Trade restrictions around American companies doing business in China have been around for several years. Those restrictions are in the P&L today, right? There are certain things we cannot sell into China, and we do not sell into China. But our model, by and large, is to buy, manufacture, and sell locally. We're supporting not just the semiconductor industry, which is actually somewhat small in China relative to its presence in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, but also the printed circuit board market and the assemblers. They are present in China without trade restrictions for the most part. What we're seeing is a China plus one approach. Large tiers and customers, even Chinese customers, are building manufacturing capability outside of China in Thailand, in Vietnam, in Malaysia, in Mexico. We have a global footprint and ability to support them as they stand up their manufacturing.
So it's required some incremental innovation and applications labs and on-the-ground technical service. We're getting there before the customer's getting there because setting up a PCB fab takes a lot longer than setting up an applications lab for us. And so it's driving share and opportunity our way. We are absolutely seeing that trend. And so it has an impact, but it's one we've been navigating for several years.
Got it. And the other side of that coin is just the various government incentives, right? There's a U.S. CHIPS Act. There is a European version of that. There is, I think, a Korean version of it. There is a Japanese version of it. So how are you taking advantage of all these incentives that are coming into the industry?
Yeah. So it's stimulating incremental investment and capacity. We're very well positioned to win more than our fair share of that incremental capacity. We have incumbency in many of these markets. We're participating in certain CHIPS Act funding opportunities because we have very valuable IP that's supporting some of this innovation, particularly in advanced packaging. It's a tailwind for us. It's a tailwind for us.
You want to talk about who you compete with? Who would you consider to be your most significant competitors? You kind of got highlighted here recently when DuPont disclosed they want to spin out their electronics business, which competes with you in some capacities. That's a couple of years from now. But how would you position yourself among your competitors?
So we've talked about having the broadest portfolio of solutions in our niches and being market leaders in the niches in which we participate. And so there isn't one competitor we compete with in all of our different businesses. And importantly, the electronics materials landscape is a very big landscape. And the right way to look at it is not as electronics materials, but it's in these niche slices based on customer applications and what the products are doing. So our Circuitry Solutions business competes with some of the businesses that reside in what will be DuPont Electronics. It competes with a business called Atotech that was acquired by MKS several years ago. It's got some competitors that are Japanese and some competitors that are local Chinese. The assembly business has a completely different set of competitors. There's some Japanese, some Chinese privately held companies in the Americas and Europe.
The semiconductor business, there's some overlap, but not entire overlap. So we do compete with a business that resides within what will be DuPont Electronics, but also a different set of Japanese companies and Korean companies. So there's no one that can do the breadth of what we do. And again, being able to speak to that breadth is highly differentiated. We're going after, in that polymer business, a completely different set of competitors. So we're unique in that value proposition to the market. And I believe from a business quality perspective as well, real formulation-driven IP and technical service supported capabilities. The folks that I mentioned as competitors, they also have broad, different portfolios, but they don't have the same attributes as our businesses.
Where would you put Merck KGaA and Entegris upon that?
Entegris was a co-supplier of ours until last year when we transacted to terminate a distribution agreement we had with them. Entegris is more focused in the semiconductor market and has a split of CapEx-driven revenue and OpEx-driven revenue. Just about everything we sell is OpEx at the customer level. So we're not selling capital equipment. Entegris's portfolio does not compete directly with ours, but they do have high-purity chemicals, gas chemicals, electronic gases that are consumables, just not in the same solution set that we represent. And Merck, similarly, has a concentration in the semiconductor market, also gases from their Versum acquisition, and then a lot more in OLEDs and display than we do.
You mentioned capital goods, and it makes me think of the machines, the tools that some of this material gets applied with. You're not really in that. You sell the materials, but not the machine. Is that a disadvantage to you?
It's an advantage for us that we're not in those markets. So in the circuit board business, for example, the tool is we can provide the same solution our competitors who sell equipment provide without wearing the capital intensity and cyclicality of an equipment business, right? There are many companies that are happy to provide the tool in a package with us. It is not a disadvantage by any means. In the semiconductor market and in the IC substrate market, the tool matters. We've got partnerships with the tool makers. And the fact that we're not competing with them in any capacity is actually helpful. Rick, you can talk about the three legs of the stool.
Yeah. I mean, we're the material provider, the tool provider, and the customer, right? So we have to work with all three in our use to be the material provider. So we spend a lot of time with our tools. We consider them partners, tool providers. We have some contractual relationships with them for certain things where we've become process of record. So it allows us some versatility, but it also allows us to be on the forefront of technology because if you look at some of the customers who have the material and the tool, they've spent a lot of R&D dollars on their tools, right? So they're not investing as much in their materials. Where in our case, your tool providers are more than happy to have us spend more money investing in R&D and the materials so they can improve their products.
They can spend time on the tools where they're specialists. Again, we spend a lot of time working with these companies, a lot of time fostering the relationships. We have technology roadmap sessions with them regularly where they're in our labs, we're in their labs. Works out pretty well.
You had a useful slide that kind of just showed from the wafer to circuitry and printed circuit board, the whole thing. Where you had business operations, were there any holes in there that would be complementary to you to move into those voids or those areas where you're not currently?
It's very hard to enter a new customer application organically, right? These are businesses with very, very high barriers to entry, high switching costs. And if you're not doing it today for a customer, they're going to be skeptical that you'll be able to do it in the future. And that provides a lot of the moat around our businesses and the margin or the margin entitlement, if you will, that our businesses have. When we look for M&A, we look for businesses that look like ours where we're solving a customer pain point that's adjacent to something we're doing today. Business that we deeply understand because it's in the same supply chain. Business we can make better because it's inside of our company versus outside of it, meaning there's some synergy. Those niche businesses do exist.
That's the type of thing we look for when we look at inorganic growth. Electrolube and what we did there is a case study in that. We took a toehold because it was a new market for us, and we didn't know what we didn't know. But it was a business that had marquee customers regionally. So we knew that technically sophisticated customers were buying this product. It was family-owned, didn't have a global footprint, couldn't bring its capability to market everywhere. And so we've been working with that material and proving to ourselves we can win, right? And then we could make incremental acquisitions in that area once we know we can win and we've proven an ability to execute there. That's a good case study for how we think about that. Importantly, there's nothing missing. There's nothing that puts us at a strategic disadvantage, right?
So where we play, we have the best technology, technical service, innovation, applications capability. There's been a lot of consolidation in electronics materials around us, but nothing has undermined our position and our ability to serve our customers. There's nothing we see that could do that. We won't feel as though our hand is forced into inorganic opportunities. We'll be the proactive party in that.
It seems like an awful lot of your business has to do with electrification and metallization. Just a question about your raw materials. How would you characterize it, and how do you think it could potentially change? How much of it is a metallic material? There was some really interesting discussion on the tour about this copper paste and the silver sintering. And it sounds to me like those have some really meaningful growth potentials. So does that generate even a greater portion of your cost back?
So we're providing conductivity. So a big thing we're buying is conductive metals. And I would say that our costs are split between commodities like tin and copper and silver, and then really niche materials, compounds that we buy in very small quantities that sort of create the magic, if you will, around those commodities. We don't have a large exposure, I would say, that's not in some way contractually managed. So the tin we buy, we pass through. We don't make margin on it. And so we don't have that exposure from metals fluctuation. In some cases, customers want a fixed price. For a year, we'll hedge down. Similarly, silver. And then those niche raws, some of them got harder to get in the supply chain crisis that followed COVID.
As one of the larger players, we've had a very good ability to get what we need to support our companies.
I just want to add one thing to add is even in some of those more commodity metals, we're talking about tin as a commodity metal. I mean, one of the things that probably doesn't come out very strongly, we have an enormous recycling business where we take old electronics, we take everything, and we recycle it into mostly recycled tin, repurify it. And some of our key customers, they want us to sell them only 100% recycled tin, right? So we have a business that there's other people in the recycled business, but we do it for internal use. So we don't just buy virgin material. We buy waste and recycle it. And that helps us with some of the commodity costs you're talking about.
We get a margin on it when we're able to do that. It turns something that could be more commoditized into something more proprietary because of the volumes we can sell of recycled material.
One more I have for you would be just the whole topic of AI and machine learning. Is that more driving demand for your business, or is it also helping you in manufacturing?
It's certainly driving demand. We have found applications for AI in certain of our functions today. We've done some pilots around AI and formulation and R&D. Right now, it's more, call it the finance function, automating some of that capability, integration when we're bringing large data sets of product information and trying to marry it together. We're in the early innings, I would say, of exploring that. It's a huge demand driver. A lot of potential.
Well, this created an incredible inflection point in the market too. Everything's changing. Everything changes when you have that much power going into a chip on a board. So it changes what the customer needs are. I mean, again, circuit boards, printed circuit boards, they were made the same way forever. But now it's a problem area. Customers have to solve for that where they wouldn't even think about it before, right? And so now it's technology innovation required. And that changes a lot of the industry dynamic, and it changes the way the customers think. It creates opportunity.
Jared, I had a question.
A question about the importance of the strength of growth. Related to that, the extent to which you to an earlier question about competitors that may provide equipment and materials, the extent to which you may use equipment financing as a mechanism to generate relationships with customers.
So it was a little quiet. The question was about strength of our balance sheet and its importance to customers and equipment financing opportunities because we have a healthy balance sheet. And is that a way to help drive business our way? So one of the great things about the Kuprion transaction we did last year was that we accelerated the ability for that technology to be monetized because if you're going to choose a process of record for a high-value application, you're not going to use a startup, right? There's just too much risk associated with that. And so we brought in a great technology and immediately lent it market recognition, quality recognition, applications know-how that accelerated customer adoption. So the balance sheet matters insofar as large customers aren't going to want to work with a company that has a risky corporate outlook, right?
That's the first answer to that. We have used our balance sheet both in our electronics business and in our industrial solutions business because we're looking for ways, it's such a sticky business, right?, to win market share through a better value proposition. That better value proposition can be yield. It can be innovation. It can be environmental. And it can be a willingness to help a customer grow. And the printed circuit board industry, right? They're running on thinner margins. It's a fragmented industry with smaller companies that have higher costs of capital. So we'll help a customer grow by buying them a line or a piece of equipment in exchange for a long-term contract and attractive margins where it's a win-win. So that works in the PCB market. The semiconductor market's a different animal, right? These are very well-capitalized and very, very expensive pieces of equipment.
In the PCB market, it's $ several hundred thousand to $1-$2 million investment with a 2-year payback at high margins that's contractually guaranteed. The equipment in semiconductor fabs is tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't need our capital and our balance sheet for that. But we have used our balance sheet to support growth, to win market share, and support our customers. It's just another tool in our toolkit as we think about having the best value proposition in our markets.
Can you elaborate a little bit on the ViaForm transaction and kind of what that gave you that you weren't getting before, why it was worth $200 million to sort of buy yourself out of that? What changed as a result?
So in 2003, a predecessor company to Element Solutions sold the distribution rights to ViaForm to a predecessor company to Entegris for $20 million. It was an evergreen contract with a 35% distribution margin. So there was no way out of it. That product became a market leader in Damascene copper, copper deposition for front-end of line or front-of-line applications. When I took over as CEO of Element, we started having an exchange with Entegris because it wasn't a great structure for either of us or our customers. We were still doing the innovation. We were still doing the manufacturing. They were selling. They were getting a margin that was below average for them. And the customers couldn't see through to one counterparty. And so how could we untangle it, if you will? And eventually, Entegris was raising proceeds subsequent to their acquisition to delever.
We found a mutual win, if you will, where they could raise proceeds at an attractive multiple of the trailing earnings of that business. We could solve this customer issue and do so at what we believed was the trough demand environment for the semiconductor market in the second quarter of last year. So we paid a healthy multiple on trough earnings. That business has inflected positively. We now have a seat at the table with these front-end customers, with these semi fabs that we didn't have to the same extent previously. So there's an intangible benefit from this, just our access to market, the roadmap exchanges we're doing with very important market participants. The financial benefit is clear. That business has ramped really nicely. We didn't have control of setting pricing. Entegris set pricing.
That had a whole other host of issues that were opportunities associated with it. We've seen that business take off this year, right? Fab utilization is increasing. We're winning more business than we were before because of our, let's call it, focus on that product. When we think about the multiple we paid on 2024 earnings, it's a single-digit multiple for a very sticky high-value product. It was also less risky because we were making the stuff already and doing the innovation than standard sort of acquisitions would be. It was a real win for us. I think it was a win for Entegris and our customers.
The only thing I had is it was very difficult in that relationship structure to introduce new technologies because we didn't really have the attention of the Entegris sales force, right? So as we kind of innovated or we felt the customers were kind of meeting us for new products, we weren't getting the traction that we could get. Now that we have the whole structure and we're talking about the product, we're transacting with the product, new product introduction has gone much faster and a lot of real interest from some of the key customers in that space.
I have a high-level question that I'm confident you don't have to answer, but you talked about how R&D threads the business. People are in the middle of talking about the past, but in the middle of every subject, I'm curious: how has your philosophy changed over the last several years as CEO of the business?
People are what matters. That's not just an R&D comment. This is a professional services company. Our people are in front of our customers all of the time. Our products are not sold based on a chemical formula. They're sold based on an outcome. Our ability to innovate that outcome and then represent that outcome and ensure that that outcome is delivered, that's our value proposition. The markets we participate in, particularly in electronics, are growing and attracting a lot of attention, and that creates a lot of competition for our people. We have no choice but to be the choice employer in our markets. I think we understood that when we launched Element Solutions and we made it one of the three prongs of our vision, right?
Our vision was to be the best company in our markets in terms of the value we provide our customers, the opportunities we create for our people, and the value we create for our shareholders. But we've had to really back that up with actions. And I believe we have. And that strategic vision, by the way, is not words. It's measured empirically. And so the surveys we've done of our people, we do them every two years, have been markedly positive. So 2020 over 2018, in the depth of COVID, more than 90% favorable answers versus 2018 in terms of the quality of experience people had at this company, the opportunities they had at this company, the culture that they perceived at the company. We did that survey again in 2022. Again, longitudinal, same questions were asked. Again, more than 90% favorable versus 2020.
The next survey is this fall. So that'll be an important metric. But this is a people-based company with the great fortune of having great people who've been here for a long time, great brands and reputation in the market, and more recently, a level of investment that these companies independently historically did not have. And so the tools that, and we're sitting in one today, right? This is a new site with more modern capabilities than anyone at this company had experienced previously. And that is, again, talent retention, customer value proposition, all sort of captured physically in the space, right? I believe we're investing in people and technology more than we had in the past. And it's made manifest empirically in customer interaction, pipeline, P&L, both revenue and margin.