Good morning, thank you for joining us today for our 2026 virtual Investor Day. My name is Varun Gokarn, and I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Integration here at Element Solutions. We're looking forward to sharing today's presentation with you. You will hear from several of our leaders providing a fulsome update on our business, the ways in which our portfolio has evolved, and the exciting opportunities that we are working on, all driven by a deep focus on solving our customers' most critical challenges. Before we begin, I would like to bring your attention to slide 2 of this presentation, which notes that we will be discussing certain forward-looking statements. These statements represent management's assumptions and expectations with respect to future events, but numerous risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ from those predicted. Additionally, we will present certain non-GAAP financial measures.
The definitions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP can be found in the footnotes and appendix of this presentation, which will be posted on our website. We have a full agenda today, including introductory comments from our CEO, Ben Gliklich, presentations from several leaders within our Electronics and Specialties business segments, and then some time with our CFO, Carey Dorman. We'll conclude with Ben and Carey framing our growth algorithm, and then an interactive virtual Q&A session. To kick things off, I am pleased to introduce our founder and former Chairman, Sir Martin Franklin, for opening remarks.
Good morning, thank you for joining us today. It is bittersweet to be speaking at my last ESI shareholder-facing event. Bitter because I've truly enjoyed founding and helping build this company over the past 13 years. Sweet because I'm so proud of what it has become. Notably, it is far more sweet than bitter because as Ben and the team here know, I will continue to be a resource to the company and intend to remain a large shareholder. I'm committed. Simply, I'm currently chairman of too many companies in the eyes of certain non-principal advisory services, and this is the company where I'm most comfortable moving off the board. My successor, Ian, has been my partner and confidant for more than 35 years, and on this board since its founding. From a board leadership and governance perspective, we will not miss a beat.
In all of the companies where I've been active, regardless of their size or end markets, there have been shared attributes for success. Capable people across the ranks, thoughtful, opportunistic capital allocation choices, and cultures that put a premium on high standards of behavior and performance without bureaucracy or taking themselves too seriously. Element has those characteristics through and through. It has been a long journey to today, and a very rewarding one. Our team has matured and built new capabilities. As you will hear today, our business has enhanced its position as a leading supplier to attractive niche markets. The ESI team has built a pipeline of innovative technologies that is deeper and higher value than at any time in the company's history, without losing its customer focus and commitment to best-in-class technical service. Its evolution has been remarkable, and even more fun to watch from the inside.
I have very strong conviction that the best is yet to come. Rest assured, I will be alongside this team and its investors for the long term. I'd like to take this final opportunity to thank our entire management organization and 6,000 members of the Element Solutions family for all of their contributions. I'm also grateful for the incredibly supportive and thoughtful board members, many of whom have served throughout our journey. Finally, to our shareholders who have placed their confidence in our efforts. With that, let me introduce you to our new chairman, my friend, Ian G. H. Ashken.
Thank you, Martin. I'm honored and excited to be the new chairman of Element Solutions. ESI is a uniquely positioned business that I've been proudly affiliated with for over a decade. The team here is top-notch. The business is focused on delivering exceptional service and products to our customers, and the culture is terrific. As chairman, I follow my long-term partner, Martin, and intend to focus on similar things to those that he did: people, capital allocation, and governance. Fortunately, ESI has a well-established, high-performing leadership team and a strong track record of prudent value-enhancing capital allocation. The company's future strategy, as you will hear shortly, is unchanged. You will also hear about the work our team is doing to continue repositioning our portfolio for higher growth and the exciting trends we are participating in and enabling through our technology and service. This is a business with long feedback loops.
Hard work and investments done today often drive growth multiple years down the road. We are reaping the benefits of the work Ben and his team did years ago. As an insider, I can comfortably say that there are more opportunities available to us looking forward than we have executed on in the last five years. Hopefully, the content covered today will provide you an insight into why the board and the management team continue to prioritize our technology pipeline, customer partnership, and portfolio evolution. To echo Martin, we believe the best times for Element Solutions are still to come. I'm pleased to now introduce our CEO, Ben Gliklich, to begin to take you through the presentation.
Good morning and welcome. Thank you for joining and for your support on our journey thus far. That journey is where we're gonna start today's presentation.
Element Solutions remains a young company. We're only 7 years old. The work we did upfront as we were launching the company in 2019, the work to lay a strong foundation continues to be rewarded. We thought deeply about our vision, the culture, strategy, and people we would need to deliver on it, communicating and reinforcing those attributes, then beginning to build the muscle to execute. That has been the basis for our success to date. In our 7 years, we've had no shortage of tests to that foundation, from COVID to supply chain disruptions to tariffs and difficult geopolitical circumstances. The agility of our decentralized local model and our culture that encourages people to challenge themselves, to make commitments, to actively make choices, and to focus on the customer has allowed for us not just to survive but to thrive through these conditions.
Our end markets struggled from the COVID-related demand bullwhip in 2022 and 2023. I think of 2023 as having been another opportunity to revisit our roadmap for the company and as another critical foundational year for us. It was in 2023 that we seized the disruption in our supply chain to reacquire or to buy back the distribution rights to ViaForm, which is our marquee front-end semiconductor technology, and also back then to acquire Kuprion, one of the most promising technologies in our current pipeline. You'll hear today about how both of those are driving deeper engagement with our supply chain and better access to leading-edge customers than we've had in the past. Since then, we've continued to pivot the business with help from the trends in our markets towards faster-growing, higher-value customers and end uses.
We've done that by deploying our strategy process by a divestiture in our 2 recent acquisitions. Our end markets over the past 2 years have surged from demand from high-performance computing and the AI data center build-out. We positioned ourselves to disproportionately benefit from that. We also sold our graphics business and added high-value electronics capabilities through our Micromax acquisition and new exciting offerings in specialty gases serving the highest growing sectors of the economy with EFC. Overall, the company has shifted to become more than 70% electronics. Within that electronics segment, now approximately 75% serving B2B markets from about 50% a few years ago. Those B2B customers have more predictable, higher-value demand. Overall, today, more than 20% of our sales are serving the fast-growing, high-value data center market. The business has been repositioned.
It's accelerating from a growth standpoint, and it's improving from a quality perspective. All of this activity has taken place in the context of a very challenged landscape for the chemicals and materials sector broadly. On slide 8, you can see adjusted EBITDA since 2022 for several relevant cohorts of companies. The aggregate earnings of these indices of chemicals businesses from 2022 to 2025 are down more than 20%. While expectations are for improvement in 2026, they're still operating well below their 2022 levels. Our proxy peer group from back in 2022 is forecast for an aggregate EBITDA decline of more than 10% off that 2022 baseline in 2026. This high-level perspective should give a sense for the backdrop we've been operating in.
Over that period, based on our latest guidance, we're expecting our adjusted EBITDA to have grown nearly 30%. This is part of the reason why we're changing our proxy peer group, it's not simply a matter of comparators. We have a differentiated business model within the broader material space. We may bill customers for barrels and drums of products, what they're paying us for is an outcome. It's a solution to their problems, a performance level in their factories, and of their final products. We sit between chemicals manufacturers and components manufacturers, both of whom have much more asset and direct labor-intensive businesses. We have a people-intensive business where the value add comes from innovation and technical service.
While our products represent a small fraction of the final product end cost or even our direct customers' costs, more than 80% of what we sell is specified or qualified by our customers or by our customers' customers, meaning that while it's not a large portion of the cost, the way it performs is very important. This combination of a people and know-how based model, high performance requirements, creates a very high switching cost relative to rather low switching benefits. Together, this is the recipe for a very sticky business model and robust cash flows. Additionally, nearly everything we sell is consumable, so we're not linked to the vicissitudes of capital cycles. If our customers are operating, we are selling to them, and this insulates our business from investment cycle volatility.
These attributes are intrinsic to the types of businesses we operate, and we've been thoughtful about making sure our ongoing investment and growth continues in businesses that match that profile. We've also built an operating model that we believe allows for us to make the best with these types of businesses. It relies on a simple framework balancing operational excellence, which is simply making our businesses better every day, and prudent capital allocation, deploying the strong cash flows these businesses generate wisely to compound long-term value. The basics for operational excellence are breaking down our businesses to their smallest logical cell, putting good leaders in place to run those units with the right incentives and the right tools, then making sure everyone at the company is focused all of the time on their customers. That's effectively what we do with our strategy process, ESDI.
The foundation for all of this is our culture, our five Cs, which are designed for a people-oriented solutions-forward company like ours. We've invested a great deal in tools and frameworks and in trainings to provide the skills required for our shared definition of success, and we continue to do that. The fun thing about continuous improvement is that it never ends. We still believe we are, in fact, early in our journey. The way we think about prudent capital allocation is unchanged from the early days of Element Solutions. We're opportunistic and flexible, yet very disciplined, meaning we don't have a fixed model for or an allocation to annual buybacks or to M&A. We seek to find the best use of our capital in any given window. We have a rigid returns criteria, and we do not compromise.
Our capital allocation over the past several years testifies to that approach. The outcomes since 2022 show how the combination of our business model and our operating model yield outperformance. We're outgrowing our peers, we're outgrowing our markets, and we're delivering for our shareholders. There are two areas we've been more focused on the past few years. The first of them is customer centricity. Everyone has a customer. We aspire to be a company where our people spend all of their time looking outward at their customer. Why is that? Because the customer is the source of our insights. Deep understanding of customer requirements and roadmaps leads to higher-returning innovation and better customer outcomes. We're fortunate to be customer intimate. We're in a market, especially today, where the customers need innovation and technical partners more than ever.
Through our customers, we can improve our capabilities, and they want us to. They communicate their needs very clearly and often well in advance. Of course, not everyone has a third-party external customer. My customers are the business unit leaders, and my job is to make sure they have what they need to be successful. What we call Enterprise Operations, which is the functional core of the business that Carey oversees, is tasked with making sure our businesses have the best tools to make decisions and execute their strategies in the world. We seek to minimize the time people are spending looking internally by cutting administrivia and deploying tools to simplify and accelerate internal reporting. That gives us more time to focus on customers, which is where value is created. The second area we'd highlight is capital allocation.
Our capital allocation over the past several years has improved our business quality. It's expanded our portfolio, it's created new compelling growth vectors for our company. We have at the same time returned approximately $500 million to our shareholders and maintained leverage below our ceiling of 3.5 times. We're very excited by the opportunities we've been able to action, we think seeds planted by this capital deployment are just only beginning to grow. They're saplings that we can at once continue to nurture while also planting more seeds. We see no reason that we can't continue to find ongoing opportunities that meet our criteria going forward. For the past several years, we've talked about the evolution in our portfolio towards a heavier weighting in electronics and a heavier weighting in B2B supply chains. This change has been both intentional and market-driven.
We've invested to build capabilities to support the faster-growing, higher-value niches available to us, which have been in high-performance computing and data center markets. That has worked, and our portfolio is shifting. Today, our business is nearly 80% enterprise-driven, and the electronics business has migrated from 50% enterprise to 75%. Importantly, we've not had to compromise on profits to gain share of this attractive market. On the contrary, we've seen our ex metals margins improve substantially since 2022. We've offset the inflation in our supply chains and improved our customer value propositions. Nor have we had to compromise on the quality of our business model. Our highly variable cost structure remains very much the same, with the ability to flex cost based on prevailing market conditions.
Taken another way, as you can see on slide 14, our margin resilience and the strength of our cash flow generation in all market environments remain very much the hallmarks of our business. We do not, however, define success simply with financial metrics. When we set up ESI back in 2019, we set a vision for our company. We aspire to be the best company in our industry in 3 specific categories, the value we provide to our customers, the opportunities we create for our people, and the value we create for our shareholders. I ask the board to measure me against that vision, to measure me against those categories. How much more are our customers willing to pay us than we spent? That's a good metric to measure our customer value propositions.
How many people are we promoting internally to fill open positions in our mid to senior management versus hiring from the outside? That's a good way to measure the opportunities we're creating for our people. How much do they enjoy working here? How well are we compounding per share value? That's the north star for shareholder value creation. Fundamentally, by the way, we believe if you have happy customers and happy people, you'll have happy shareholders. The inputs are the customers and the team, and we believe in measuring the inputs as success there is the key to sustainable progress. On slide 15, you can see how we're doing, and we're making great progress on each of those vectors. Margins are up substantially. Our people are growing and happier at ESI than before. Our earnings are growing, and our shareholders are being rewarded. I'm very proud of this data.
Of course, there's still plenty of room for improvement, plenty more we can do in each of these domains to improve, and you'll hear about that over the course of today. We have the industry at our back as we chart our course forward. Historically, there was a perception that the printed circuit board market was slower growing and less attractive than the semiconductor market. Over the past few years, we've seen two major shifts that are changing that. First, Moore's Law is breaking down, and packaging is becoming more important to advances in computing. Second, the AI market has developed, and circuit board architectures and requirements have become radically more challenging and valuable. Taken together, we've seen a surge in demand for high-value circuit boards and the chemistries that support them. The high-end circuit board market is growing faster in volume terms than MSI.
Initially, before 2023, there were already expectations for strong growth. That was because we were coming off a trough driven by the post-COVID bullwhip effect of demand. Today, forecasts remain for very strong growth despite 2025 being the best year on record. This is driven by the AI data center build-out. This growth is concentrated in the highest value boards, the segment of the market where we are most traded. In sum, Element Solutions has become a higher quality, faster growing company. On slide 17, we see the CROCI of Element Solutions against its new proxy peers, which include a broader range of electronics and electronics materials companies, as well as a selection of higher value specialty materials businesses. You can see our business is the best in the market in terms of our returns. CROCI calculates cash flow relative to tangible invested capital.
How many dollars you get out for every dollar you put in. You can see that ESI remains the highest quality company on that metric amongst our peers, all while we've increased our concentration in the faster-growing, higher value subsegments of our market and moved away from the more cyclical ones. It's an exciting time for our company. Next, you'll hear from a range of our business leaders who will discuss their businesses, emerging trends and technologies, how ESI is poised to participate and benefit from them. First, let me introduce Rick Fricke, who oversees our electronics business. Rick?
Hello, my name is Rick Frick, President of MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions, a business of Element Solutions Inc. Our electronics business spans the full spectrum, from circuitry to packaging to final assembly. We focus deliberately on the inflection point shaping next generation electronics, where heterogeneous integration is driving new substrate materials and advanced packaging architectures, and high-density data centers are driving an increasing demand for advanced packaging, thermal management, and higher component density. Our integrated approach across customer needs is reflected in the scale and diversity of the business, making the strength of our platform clear. We have built a robust portfolio of solutions to reach customers earlier in their design cycles to better serve their fast-growing and high-value applications. Our global business generates over $2 billion in revenue, with over 3,300 dedicated employees primarily focused on formulation, research and development, technical service, and commercial execution.
75% of our end market mix serves what we consider B2B or enterprise use cases. These are areas like data center infrastructure and power electronics, which typically have higher content value, higher margins, and less cyclicality. Our approach and positions allow us to engage earlier, solve harder problems, and create durable value, delivering a higher value for our customers. What makes this particularly valuable is how it positions ESI across the electronics value chain. We solve distinct high-value customer problems. This breadth enables early engagement in customer design cycles, cross-selling across adjacent process steps to provide system-level solutions, not single material sales. In Circuitry, we support PCB fabricators where innovation requires designs with higher layer counts and tighter geometries. In wafer-level packaging, we're providing interconnect solutions for transistors and chips down to the smallest nodes and advanced metalization that enables new packaging architectures.
In semiconductor and circuit board assembly, we deliver a range of die attach and package attach solutions. Recently, with the Micromax acquisition, we extended our portfolio into precision passive components and high reliability and high-frequency applications. That breadth becomes even more tangible when you map it to real manufacturing workflows. Our customer base spans the entire electronic supply chain, including foundries and IDMs, OSATs, PCB fabricators, assemblers, and EMS providers. At the package and device assembly levels, we have an unparalleled portfolio of advanced packaging material solutions in addition to thermal and protective materials. With printed circuit board fabricators, we provide solutions for every step of circuit board fabrication. We uniquely provide system-level solutions that are important when we look at how the industry is shifting. Our recent acquisitions extend our adjacencies and increase our relevance.
Micromax expands our range of offers with electronic inks, paste, and ceramic substrates to make passive components for the most demanding mission-critical applications. At the foundry and IDM level, we have leading presence in the chemical deposition of copper interconnects. With the recent acquisition of EFC Gases, Element Solutions now provides cleaning and etching gases to semiconductor fabs. This reinforces our role as an embedded systems partner, not a point solution vendor. For decades, computing performance was driven primarily by shrinking node size, dictated by Moore's Law. Today, however, the frontier is on improving how multiple purpose-built dies connect, communicate, and function together through heterogeneous integration. That shift is accelerating growth to where we have leading positions, including advanced PCB and substrate technologies, back-end-of-line metallization, and assembly solutions. You see this in the disconnect between PCB square meter growth and semiconductor silicon area growth forecasts.
Medium-term PCB industry forecasts are now stronger than semiconductor forecasts, reflecting the rising complexity and more value created outside the front end of the wafer. That shift directly informs how we build and focus our portfolio. Our materials solve challenges in five critical functions, interconnect, attach, reinforcement, protection, and thermal management. Our electronics business is well-positioned as a mission-critical problem solver. Solving these challenges also requires us to rethink how we organize and operate. Over the past five years, we have repositioned the electronics business to intensify customer intimacy and focus around customer pain points by integrating R&D, marketing, and applications development nearer to the customer. We have also focused our supply chain on continuous improvement, resulting in faster response times, improved quality and yields. Structure alone isn't enough. We are also investing ahead of industry inflection points. Recent investments made include ViaForm.
We bought our marquee front-end product and strategic semiconductor franchise fully in-house. Kuprion. We acquired breakthrough nano-copper technology precisely as AI, data centers, and advanced substrates began pushing the limits of thermal and electrical performance. Argomax. We moved into silver sintering with Argomax, well ahead of EV and power electronics adoption, investing ahead of scale while customers were still designing next-generation platforms. We look for common threads, including rising materials intensity, early technical engagement, and durable specification-driven growth. Those investments follow our customers, not just by technology, but geographically. We execute through disciplined deployment, placing resources where customer growth and innovation are accelerating. Examples include investments in additional Southeast Asia application labs, expansion of our Singapore manufacturing facilities, a newly opened India R&D center, and physical presence where customer design decisions are made, specifications are designed, and long-term relationships are formed.
All of this supports a broader shift in what's driving growth across the electronics industry. Growth is being driven by a structural shift from consumer to enterprise-scale electronics. Enterprise applications, including AI, EV, and space systems, have material performance and utilization requirements that are rising faster than unit volume growth. This drives greater material intensity and value per system. These dynamics favor Element Solutions' systems-level solutions approach. That leads to an important structural point about content per system. Let's compare a high-end smartphone and a higher, high-value server card. A premium smartphone contains low single-digit dollar content, while a server card carries content that is several multiples higher. This is driven by greater board complexity, advanced packaging metallization, and thermal interface requirements. Enterprise printed circuit boards demand higher layer counts, larger plating areas, and greater thermal and power management, driving higher materials intensity per unit.
While smartphones ship in hundreds of millions with modest growth, server cards are shipping at much lower volumes but are expected to scale rapidly. Even at lower volumes, enterprise applications create disproportionately larger and faster-growing value pools, positioning data center materials as a major growth driver across our portfolio. Data centers are the clearest and most immediate example of this dynamic. In AI data center, Element Solutions delivers material content from wafer to system level. At the wafer and package level, we enable advanced interconnect structures supporting high-performance GPUs, CPUs, and memory. In power delivery, our die attach and high reliable solders are embedded across critical systems. At the printed circuit board level, our metallization technologies enable dense, high layer count designs required for server platforms. At board assembly, we provide materials that enhance mechanical integrity and support large, high-density packages.
As electronic systems grow more complex, materials become increasingly critical to performance and reliability. Value is shifting from individual components to integrated performance-enabling system-level solutions. MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions is uniquely positioned for success at the center of these shifts, where complexity, specification, and value converge. Thank you.
I'm Jim Watkowski, Senior Vice President of Advanced Interconnect Solutions for ESI's electronic business. Here at ESI, we are entering one of the most innovative periods for electronic manufacturing I have seen in my nearly 40 years in this business. As innovation shifts towards the substrates onto which chips connect and communicate with one another, our material science and chemical process knowledge becomes critical. Our customers rely on us to navigate new non-standard chip and board architectures. They need a variety of full-stack metallization solutions such as via and through-hole filling chemistries, copper pillars, redistribution layers, and micro bumps. Our team sits at the convergence of chips and boards anchored by a world-class Circuitry Solutions business, providing leading-edge technical service and innovation to fabricators.
In Circuitry Solutions, the key customer need is rising board complexity driven by AI servers, IC substrates, and advanced networking. This means more layers and higher aspect ratios that require more plating steps, tighter process control, and higher advanced chemical formulations. Our circuit formation technology directly address those requirements by improving yield and signal integrity at high complexity. Our growth opportunity comes from higher content per board and higher qualification durability because these chemistries become deeply embedded in our customers' critical manufacturing steps. Let's focus on 1 example of how ESI is supporting customers that are building out AI infrastructure. As computing workloads shift from AI training and high-performance computing, server boards are becoming dramatically more complex. 10 years ago, a typical server board might have had 10, 12, 14 layers.
Today, leading hyperscale platforms are increasingly moving towards 20, 30, or even 40-plus layer boards to support higher bandwidth, faster signaling, and more sophisticated power delivery. When fabricators stack this many layers, they must plate copper uniformly through these extremely deep and narrow holes that connect the entire structure. These high aspect ratio through holes are difficult to plate reliably using traditional chemistries. Our PPR, or Periodic Pulse Reverse copper plating technology, allows fabricators to deposit copper much more evenly through these challenging structures. The proprietary specialty additives in our chemical baths and the unique electrical waveforms applied to the bath allows for a very granular control of metal deposition. That dynamic control enables copper to deposit uniformly along the entire hole wall. The result is a more reliable connection, electrical performance, and higher manufacturing yields for our customers as they build more complex architectures to support hyperscale computing needs.
Our technical service teams operate on-site with our customers as they start up their manufacturing lines, helping them with the deep technical work of scale-up at every step of the way. Just last year, we helped a single customer stand up an unprecedented 20 new plating lines for these complex boards. Today, we are a critical partner to many of the world's leading PCB fabricators, helping them scale production of these next-generation boards as AI server deployments accelerate over the coming years. Let's turn to wafer-level packaging, where we participate in one of the most important structural shifts occurring in semiconductor packaging today. As features shrink and interconnect density rises, manufacturing sensitivity increases sharply, and customers require void-free copper fill, tighter bump height control, and highly uniform metal deposition. Our solutions directly address these needs to improve interface reliability at very small geometries.
In this business, we grow by winning share in advanced nodes, winning premium packaging content, and ultimately enabling entirely new non-standard chip designs. Customers want material solutions that solve input-output connectivity at higher density and smaller sizes. One of the most important packaging architectures today is CoWoS, or Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate. CoWoS integrates multiple high-performance logic processors and memory stacks on a silicon interposer. This architecture dramatically increases memory bandwidth and compute performance for high-performance GPUs. Building these structures, whether 2.5D interposers, 3D stacked bandwidth memory, or embedded silicon bridges, introduces new material challenges. Each additional layer, interconnect structure, or wafer-level feature introduces opportunities for our specialized materials and plating chemistries. Today, we work closely with leading semiconductor manufacturers and OSAT providers around the world, helping enable the advanced packaging architecture that power modern AI compute platforms.
One specific example of where Element Solutions' suite of products can help packaging customers solve a unique pain point is a reduction of intermetallic contamination, or IMC, in joints with barrier layer plating technology. As packaging features shrink, controlling how metals interact in conductive joints becomes a big challenge. When copper interacts scaled to very fine pitch, the formation of too much intermetallic compound creates overly brittle, unreliable joints that will crack. Our advanced barrier layer solutions address those mechanical features by inserting advanced materials that stabilize the interfaces within these connecting structures. Leveraging the combined expertise in our portfolio, we've developed several alternative barrier chemistries that improve reliability, operate at lower temperature, and meet tightening regulatory standards. The result is a more durable interconnect stack that supports finer packaging connections. We are continually advancing this barrier layer technology to help customers control interfaces at shrinking pitch.
Importantly, this allows customers to keep their existing manufacturing flows without needing major tool changes. We help them extend the value of their existing CapEx by solving a real technical and financial constraint. As a result, we enable today's manufacturing transitions and are also well-positioned to provide future critical technologies like hybrid bonding. We've shown how we're pushing today's packaging platforms further, but there are greater leaps that can be made with an entirely new materials. That's where Kuprion comes in. To introduce the breakthrough copper technology and the opportunities behind it, I'm pleased to hand it over to Alfred Zinn, co-founder of Kuprion and the inventor of ActiveCopper.
Hi, I'm Alfred Zinn, R&D development fellow at Kuprion, a company I founded to commercialize the unique nano-copper technology, trademarked ActiveCopper, which Element Solutions is now bringing to market as a commercial product. As its inventor, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what makes this product so special. Copper has been used in the electronics industry for decades and is well known for its superior electrical and thermal properties. Copper is significantly cheaper and more abundant than other sinterable metals such as silver or gold. However, commercialization of copper sintered materials has historically faced a number of challenges. First, it is very difficult to synthesize nano-copper and control its particle size, and second, it is susceptible to oxidation in air before sintering.
At Kuprion, we developed a patented family of sintering pastes, adhesives, inks, and gaskets that overcome both the challenges of nano copper synthesis and prevent oxidation so that it can be handled safely in air. ActiveCopper has all the benefits of bulk copper without the drawbacks, fusing to form solid copper interconnects and strong bonds with a pressureless low temperature sintering process. ActiveCopper materials can be stored at room temperature and safely handled in air and still fuse readily under a nitrogen atmosphere using standard manufacturing reflow equipment and reflow profiles. Because ActiveCopper converts to bulk copper after an initial fusion step, it can be subsequently processed in unlimited reflow cycles, making it a good alternative to high temperature solder for reliable high volume manufacturing.
ActiveCopper has the unique capability of being adjusted to a coefficient of thermal expansion values ranging from 3-17 PPM. This unique CTE tuning capability enables CTE matching to many different substrates, including ceramics, silicon carbide, gallium nitride, and many more. These characteristics allow engineers to optimize heat dissipation in electronic systems while minimizing the mechanical stresses caused by CTE mismatches. These material characteristics are incredibly exciting, solving problems across a wide range of demand applications in semiconductor manufacturing and packaging, automotive ADAS and EV power electronics, telecommunications, satellite and aircraft systems, data centers, and medical and consumer devices. From the beginning, customers have been very eager to test this material in their electronic systems and design it into their applications as well as find new application spaces.
Element Solutions has been a terrific partner, driving production scale-up, accessing new application spaces, and generally support the commercialization of this materials technology platform. It has been a tremendous partnership where we are working on solving many hard problems and on our way to seeing the payoff. Now I'd like to turn it over to Nick to discuss a few of the applications that have resonated with customers the most.
Thanks, Alfred. I'm Nick Antonopoulos, VP of Emerging Technology for our electronics business. Now that you've heard about the technology behind ActiveCopper, I want to share how we're using it to address our customers' most critical pain points. The 3 main pain points focus on power density, thermal reliability, and manufacturability. ActiveCopper addresses all of these needs, providing extreme thermal conductivity and a tunable CTE to match the expansion profile of the substrate while being virtually immune to thermal cycling, fatigue that we see in solders. Importantly, ActiveCopper is versatile and compatible with current manufacturing windows, allowing customers to qualify next gen performance without disrupting established processes. These emerging needs and Kuprion's ability to solve them provides a tremendous opportunity to become a key long-term partner for tier 1 fabs and IDMs where speed, performance, and reliability matter most.
Let me talk more about each of these use cases. printed circuit boards generate a significant amount of heat, and to address this, manufacturers use copper coins to dissipate heat from an active component. However, traditional copper coins are rigid, prefabricated metal slugs that restrict the design of the PCB. Copper coin paste, like ActiveCopper, allows designers to fill virtually any size, shape in the PCB and sinter it with their standard processes. The paste ActiveCopper makes is CTE tunable, which can accommodate the stresses caused by expansion mismatch in the PCB itself. It sinters into a solid copper structure, having the melting point of copper of over 1,000 degrees Celsius, allowing it to go through multiple reflow cycles. It's a leaner and faster way to manage the extreme heat loads of the next generation of power hardware without sacrificing reliability for the most mission critical applications.
Next up, let's talk about power delivery. Modern GPUs and CPUs needed for AI servers and data centers require massive amounts of current, and traditional thin film PCB traces simply can't carry that load efficiently. ActiveCopper changes that architecture of the board by allowing us to move from thin traces to deep, high capacity power trenches. By using our proprietary copper paste and sintering process, we can fill trenches ranging from a half millimeter to five millimeters wide and up to two millimeters deep. These fills become solid copper structures with a superior conductivity value, allowing for efficient power delivery and more freedom to design houses that can handle the extreme power demands of AI hardware. You've heard about the opportunity in packaging and substrates. As substrates move toward glass for high performance packaging, ActiveCopper is a cutting-edge solution for the thermal challenges that glass exhibits.
With ActiveCopper, we've created a proprietary paste and process specifically engineered to fill glass vias with diameters as small as 25 microns and substrates as thick as 800 microns. A wide CTE range allows ActiveCopper to expand and contrast at the same rate as the glass, reducing mechanical stress and improving the reliability. These are just a few of the initial applications we're excited to develop and commercialize. I want to leave you with why Element is the ideal partner to commercialize this product and capture the potential it brings to customers. Prior to the acquisition, Kuprion was a lab-scale technology. Element provides Kuprion a head start with its existing tier 1 customer base and provides the scale and manufacturing resources to meet the ActiveCopper demands for those customers. Building out our manufacturing capability is a top priority.
We opened a mid-scale site this month to serve the near term pipeline and have plans for a larger scale plant underway. Bringing a completely new material into the electronics supply chain is incredibly difficult, 'cause customers are change adverse and require rigorous validation. Element can leverage the deep track record it already has with OEMs, foundries, and OSATs to navigate these complex multi-layered qualification cycles and establish ActiveCopper as the industry standard. ActiveCopper is highly complementary within Element's portfolio of system level solutions. From wafer plating to die attach, Element can work with customers to ensure that ActiveCopper will be fully compatible with the surrounding circuit pathways in a way that a standalone company could not achieve. We are very excited about this technology and the potential it has to support the most pressing needs of our major customers globally.
Hi, I'm Tom Hunsinger, Senior Vice President of Packaging and Board Assembly. Our business helps customers build more complex and reliable electronics assemblies with critical materials and technical support that improves heat dissipation, interconnect precision, production yield, and reliability from the semiconductor package all the way to the finished circuit board. Let's start with our semiconductor assembly solutions. Our customers include EV OEMs, tier 1 power semiconductor suppliers, and semiconductor package and testing companies, or OSATs. For these customers, artificial intelligence and the electrification of mobility are creating new challenges around thermal management, attachment complexity, and manufacturing yield. EV manufacturers require advanced materials capable of supporting higher operating temperatures, greater power density, and long-term system reliability. Our proprietary sintering materials, power solder preforms, and thermal interface technologies play a critical role in connecting and managing heat within next generation power modules.
With our existing technology and applications expertise, we have a unique opportunity to build product leadership in a variety of power electronics use cases. For high performance computing, as devices require more complex 2.5D and 3D architectures, our high precision die attach materials matter more than ever for the millions of AI processors being ordered by hyperscalers. As components shrink and performance soars, customers want proven technology with better thermal paths, tighter bond line control that efficiently scales from development to high volume manufacturing. In our Argomax product line, we have a core technology focused on solving the problems of power and thermal efficiency. Argomax gives customers a silver sintering platform for die and package attach that improves thermal performance, electrical conductivity, and long-term reliability while supporting scalable manufacturing approaches like low pressure sintering.
It does this by creating a high conductivity bond line that lowers the heat transfer resistance between the die and its cooling structure, enabling better heat dissipation and more reliable operation of the inverters that connect a battery to the motors of an EV. We are helping the EV supply chain climb the quality and performance ladder and extend range. This has helped us win a significant new business with tier 1 suppliers and vertically integrated OEMs globally. Today, our materials support millions of EVs worldwide, helping deliver reliable performance across billions of kilometers of operation. Our demonstrated capabilities in electric vehicles provide an entree into other areas where high thermal loads and long service life are critical, such as charging infrastructure and electrical infrastructure for industrial and data center applications.
Building on the success of Argomax, we are extending our leadership in power electronics through innovative applications development that converts existing materials into new form factors that enable different package designs. We do that through precision engineering that addresses the full stack of attachment solutions required for electric vehicle assembly. These products allow for more attach points per power module and the ability to attach onto a wider variety of substrates. I'd like to walk you through three examples that deliver this full stack offering. In BondPad, we have leveraged our metals expertise to create an innovative assembly-ready top side interconnect. This type of copper-based interface delivers up to 20 times higher reliability compared to traditional aluminum interconnects and provides better compatibility with copper wire or ribbon bonding. With Acculam, we have created precision die attach for EV modules.
Here, we're able to pre-cut a sinterable film to provide exact bond layers to enable fast, clean manufacturing that reduces manpower and material waste by up to 85%. This improves reliability and lowers the cost of ownership in high volume power modules, creating a highly attractive, scalable die attach solution for automotive inverter production. Finally, with Accutac, we can expand sintering into more complex module geometries by allowing material placement in cavities, lead frames, and other difficult to reach locations. By providing precise bond line control with volume pick and place manufacturing processes, we enable designers to extend sintering technology throughout the module stack and to unlock new designs and smaller footprints. What you see with these power electronics product offerings are examples of how Element Solutions meet customers where they are to solve manufacturing bottlenecks. We can create value through superior applications innovation.
Let's now move to circuit board assembly, where we solve problems related to component attach onto printed circuit boards. At the board level, our customers are currently dealing with a very specific set of challenges driven by larger packages and tighter tolerances, particularly in AI accelerators, cloud networking hardware, and advanced automotive electronics. As semiconductor packages get bigger and run hotter, issues like thermal warpage, coplanarity, and solder joint reliability become gating factors for yield and long-term performance. Our solutions are designed to solve these problems directly in the assembly process. Our spacer blocks and engineered preforms control standoff height and reduce tilt on large ball grid arrays, while our advanced solder paste, edge bonds, underfills, and coatings improve first pass yield and protect assemblies in harsh operating environments.
As customers push into higher performance, higher cost of failure systems, assembly materials move from being a commodity to a critical enabler. That creates a clear opportunity for higher value content, broader material sets per design, and durable, specification-driven business for Element Solutions. Let's focus on one timely example of how our experience and thermal management is meeting an urgent need for AI accelerator assemblies used in high-performance computing. AI accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs use flip chip ball grid array packages to connect chip packages to larger board substrates. These package architectures are far less tolerant of dimensional variation, and even small inconsistencies can affect manufacturability and integration with control boards. These large area, high-dense arrays can have several thousand small solder balls that need to be precisely bonded over a wider surface area than ever before.
Unfortunately, during the heating process to liquefy and connect these small solder balls, large format packages can warp during heating, causing short circuits and poor connections in unchecked assemblies that ultimately hurt manufacturing yields. Our TrueHeight spacer blocks solve these solder bridge failures in a simple but elegant way by inserting a spacer block that only melts to a precise height during the heating reflow process, thus preventing warpage on the package, protecting the integrity of the joint, and significantly improving yield. As investment in AI data centers continues to ramp, we are seeing a sharp uptick in demand for engineered preforms like TruHeight that reduce end-of-line defects. In recent quarters, sales from these products have grown 50% year-on-year. We see a robust pipeline of opportunities for these products over the next several years.
Hi, I'm Bruce Moloznik, Senior Vice President for Micromax, a business which I am thrilled to be leading after several years growing our circuit board assembly business. Micromax is a recent addition to our electronics portfolio. The business has a long history as a pioneer in advancing circuitry technology, having developed the first commercial resistor paste back in the 1960s. Today, Micromax is a leader in highly specialized inks and pastes, specifically engineered for mission-critical electronic applications where performance and reliability are non-negotiable. Our portfolio of services cover four key end markets. First, radar and communications, where our low temperature co-fired ceramics or LTCC materials enable high frequency, high reliability communication systems. Second, our passive circuit board components, where we are a leading supplier of specialized resistors, capacitors, and inductors for demanding and complex applications.
Third, automotive, where our thick film paste and glass ceramic tapes integrate automotive electronic circuitry on a variety of substrate surfaces to enable critical subsystems. Finally, health and safety technologies, where our conductive inks are used in various biomedical sensor and other printed electronic solutions. Given the highly specialized nature of our products, our criticality to customers' supply chains, this is a high-quality business with strong margins. The rationale for Micromax is consistent with Element's portfolio-wide effort to enhance customer intimacy and offer systems-level solutions that solve our customers' most critical needs. I'll highlight two focused areas. First, we are seeing a trend toward power-dense miniaturized designs and a need for advanced resistors that can deliver tight tolerances over a large temperature range. Our precision resistor pastes allow customers to maintain stringent and stable electrical control even as chips and boards become more complex.
This has uses in a variety of applications, including increasingly advanced driving assistance and data center. Second, as high-frequency wireless communications expand, there's an urgent need for low signal loss systems that perform reliably in harsh environments. Our solution here is low temperature co-fired ceramics or LTCC. By combining ceramic tape with conductive metal pastes, our LTCCs provide exceptional mechanical, electrical, and thermal stability that ensures signal integrity for advanced antennas. Micromax technologies are poised to capture a growing share of demanding end uses in automotive, medical, and aerospace defense, and are at the forefront of RF communications for the next generation of wireless infrastructure, satellite communications, and defense applications. Growing power density can present challenges when it comes to the passive components within electronics assemblies.
All electronics rely on passive components like resistors. It's the fast-growing markets with demanding applications like advanced mobility and data connectivity that drive opportunities for Micromax. Our materials ensure that resistors maintain their precise values over long periods of time and across a wide temperature range. This is critical in key markets such as data centers, aerospace systems, automotive electronics, and renewable energy. We differentiate our manufacturing consistency to support our high customer yields. Our customers might print millions of features in a given period. Even a tiny deviation in paste quality can lead to part failure. In modern electric vehicles with level two or higher autonomy, for example, there might be tens of thousands of passive components supporting the vehicle's electronic systems. All these components need to be able to perform with the same level of precision over a wide range of temperatures.
Another exciting growth vector is advanced antenna applications. Driven by network densifications and accelerating data demands, specialty materials used in advanced antenna systems are experiencing strong growth. This expansion spans both terrestrial applications, such as 5G, radar, and automotive, and non-terrestrial technologies, including satellite systems. The world needs more high-reliability antennas, and Micromax has a diverse portfolio of LTCC materials to support antenna performance for various frequencies, sizes, and thermal environments. We pair proprietary ceramic and metallic materials with deep application experience to optimize product performance and manufacturing consistency. This ultimately reduces our customers' total cost of ownership. We've owned Micromax for only a few months, and already a few things are clear. The team brings exceptional technical depth with strong applications expertise and decades of development experience built through close collaboration with customers. Customer feedback to date has been very positive.
Over the next several years, we believe we can accelerate growth from Micromax to outperformance end markets by refocusing on commercial execution. We see opportunities for higher penetration of Micromax's most advanced passive components in communications and high-power applications, including automotive and data center. We will expand our access to our wider network of OEMs and key specifiers with whom we enjoy established commercial and technical relationships already. Furthermore, we will leverage Element Solutions' global customer network to broaden reach, accelerate adoption, and unlock growth opportunities worldwide. At Element Solutions, we have a track record of investing ahead of inflection points. Micromax is well-positioned to solve emerging customer pain points in mission-critical applications of growing relevance. We are committed to build on this legacy of innovation.
Hello, I'm Matt Liebowitz, President of Element Solutions Specialties segment. Our Specialties segment is a collection of high quality, niche specialty materials businesses that together represent more than $800 million of sales and over 1,900 employees around the world. Our businesses serve a broad range of end markets, headlined by our decades long relationships in the automotive sector and its industrial finishing suppliers. Notably, roughly 15% of our revenue now comes from electronics related areas such as semiconductor manufacturing, electrical grid infrastructure, and consumer electronics. We're also geographically diversified with technical teams, production sites, and customer relationships across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. At first glance, these businesses may look quite different. Our Industrial Solutions business modifies the surface of metals and plastic components. Our Energy Solutions business supplies critical fluids that enable offshore drilling and production equipment to operate safely in harsh sub-sea environments.
Our latest addition, EFC, supplies high purity specialty gases and advanced materials into some of the most demanding technology markets in the world. Underneath that diversity, all three businesses share a common operating model and ethos. First, they are all high specification, high qualification businesses. Our products are not easily swapped in or out. They are engineered into our customers' processes, validated over very long periods of time, and often tied to strict performance, reliability, environmental, or purity requirements. Second, they are technical service intensive businesses. The value we provide is not just the chemistry or the gas molecule itself, it is our formulation expertise, our application know-how, troubleshooting capability, and local technical support that help customers run their critical processes reliably and efficiently. Third, our businesses generate predictable recurring revenue streams. These are consumable materials used repeatedly in ongoing production, finishing, drilling, infrastructure, or high technology applications.
Once qualified, our materials tend to remain in customer production processes for many years because the cost of failure is high and the cost of switching is meaningful. This model produces strong financial characteristics, including high and stable margins, relatively asset light operations, healthy cashflow, and attractive returns on capital. Our diverse businesses are connected by the same value creation formula: highly specified materials, deep technical service, recurring use, and durable profitability. Today, you'll have the opportunity to hear from some of the leaders that are both accelerating growth in our newest businesses and those bringing new approaches to build on an established legacy of long-standing industry leadership. Our profit improvement strategies are tailored to each business. As you'll hear from its founder, Pavel Perlov, with EFC Gases, our strategy is growth acceleration.
EFC brings exposure to attractive secular growth markets like semiconductor manufacturing, space and satellite systems, and electrical infrastructure. We're building a strong qualification pipeline and enhancing capabilities in purification, metrology, recovery, and recycling to support our customers. In Industrial Solutions, the opportunity is to build on our existing leadership position. We've streamlined costs, are increasing automation, and growing content and margin through higher value applications. In Energy Solutions, we focus on production oriented recurring applications, support customers with qualified environmentally advantaged fluids, and expand selectively where deep water activity, equipment complexity, and reliability needs create durable value. Specialties is our home for niche, high margin, service intensive businesses. We serve many end markets, but have 1 consistent value creation story, differentiated materials and applications, embedded customer positions, recurring revenue, strong margins, and durable cash flow.
Hello, I'm Pavel Perlov, founder of EFC Gases and Advanced Materials, now proudly part of the Element Solutions Specialty segment. EFC is a leading provider of ultra-high purity electronic gases, rare gases, and advanced materials that are essential for high value, high cost of failure applications in the fast-growing niches like semiconductor manufacturing, satellite propulsion, and electrical infrastructure. These key end markets make up more than 90% of our sales and provide a tremendous opportunity for continued growth, both within EFC as well as across the Element portfolio. Before we dive into our three growth areas, I want to share the pillars of our value proposition and how we are positioned to win in these very specific segments of the gas market. First, we specialize in purification, synthesis, and metrologies of gases like xenon, krypton, and neon, materials that are mission critical for our customers.
This differentiates us from industrial gas majors that serve more commoditized markets. In fact, many cases, these gas majors are our customers and distribution partners. Second, because of these specializations, our competitive advantage is rooted in our technical precision and application know-how. Our solutions and approach are highly customer-centric in that we purify and package these materials specifically for our customers' most complex use cases, which allows us to develop intimate, long-term relationships in attractive, high-growth verticals. Finally, we offer a differentiated closed-loop operating system that recovers, repurifies, and recycles rare gases directly at the customer site. This circular model ensures security of supply for our customers while helping them win on cost and sustainability. As the semiconductor and satellite demand scales, EFC is uniquely positioned as an indispensable, sustainable materials partner for the next generation of global physical infrastructure.
Matt will now provide you with more detail on the exciting growth opportunities in our focus end markets.
Hello, my name is Matt Adams, Executive Vice President at EFC, responsible for our commercial organization. We're incredibly excited about the growing breadth of solutions we can provide to customers, so let's dig into how we add value in our largest end markets. One of the most high-value and fastest-growing use cases for our specialty gases is semiconductor fabrication in the United States. We offer a variety of dielectric etch gases, plasma cleaning gases, and unique rare gas recovery and recycling solutions that can improve sustainability and cost effectiveness at the fab. EFC captures the opportunity by managing the molecule qualification process, allowing us to capture a greater wallet share and form deeper relationships with tier 1 fabs. Molecule qualification drives future volume and earnings growth. EFC has a track record of achieving successful molecule qualifications with new customers.
Once an EFC high purity etching or deposition gas, for example, is qualified into a specialty tool or process flow at a tier 1 fab, it becomes a predictable multi-year revenue stream and positions EFC as a trusted partner for many future qualifications. In 2025 alone, we achieved double-digit material qualifications. On average, each of these qualifications can translate to a multi-year revenue opportunity of over $1 million. We are winning these qualifications through our customer centricity and responsiveness. We are nimble, focused on quality and service, and our customers trust us to get it right. We see ample white space with both existing and new customers through additional qualifications, many of which are already in process. Over the last few years, a modern-day space race has intensified for satellite manufacturers and other blue-chip aerospace companies.
To meet the growing space economy demand, the industry is shifting to smaller, lower-cost satellites that can be launched more efficiently and therefore more frequently. To put this in perspective, satellite launches have increased at a CAGR of more than 35% since 2018 and are expected to nearly double over the next five years. As a primary provider of the high purity xenon and krypton necessary for satellite propulsion, this dynamic has created a significant secular tailwind for EFC to support these mission-critical projects with customized solutions that meet ultra-high purity and performance standards. Our competitive advantage in this area is anchored in two places. First, the rare gas distillation column at our Hatfield facility is one of the few sites globally capable of the extreme purification and metrology required for aerospace-grade noble gases.
This column has the capacity to meet industry demand while creating shorter lead times with our customers. Second, the closed-loop operating system that I mentioned provides meaningful value to aerospace customers. We are the only provider with the capabilities to offer xenon and krypton recycling and reloading at the customer site, which allow manufacturers to recover and reuse these expensive gases during ground testing. The combination of our technical capabilities, proprietary operating systems, and application expertise creates a deeply embedded service model that lowers the total cost of ownership for our customers while securing our position as their one-stop-shop partner. As the global push for electrification and grid modernization accelerates, the demand for reliable, high-performance electrical transmission infrastructure is at an all-time high.
EFC serves as a critical partner to major utilities and OEMs, providing the high-purity dielectric and insulating gases that allow high-voltage switchgear and circuit breakers to operate safely and efficiently. Another value add we bring to this space concerns regulation around sustainability. Traditionally, transmission infrastructure relies on sulfur hexafluoride, or SF6 gas, as an effective, reliable insulator. It is also considered one of the world's most potent greenhouse gases. EFC solves this issue by supplying recycled SF6 and providing comprehensive gas management services that significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our customers. Our integrated field services covering SF6 delivery, on-site recovery, and reprocessing position the company as a long-term operational partner for utilities, ensuring efficient lifecycle management as grid infrastructure expands. To sum it up, we are excited about these three high growth opportunities to continue expanding our business as part of Element Solutions.
Now, I will turn it back to Pavel to explain why EFC is such a great fit within the Element Specialties portfolio.
EFC is well positioned for growth within the Element platform, the advantages of being able to tap into Element's scale, customer relationships, and technical expertise are already crystallizing since the sale closed in January. Element is already deeply embedded into the supply chain of OEMs across the semiconductor and aerospace. There's a real opportunity for EFC to leverage these relationships and gain greater mind share in these industries. Finally, with our deep roots in finding the niche value-added, service intense pockets of the specialty gas market, we share a lot of the same DNA as Element Solutions' other businesses. We have the same solution mindset, high-touch service model, and customer intimacy that defines this company, we are thrilled to add new growth vectors in semiconductors, electrical, and space infrastructure on which ESI can continue to build.
In ESI, we have a true partner for growth and expansion. We see a very bright future ahead.
Hi, my name's Graeme Dickinson. I'm the Senior Vice President of MacDermid Enthone Industrial Solutions, or IS for short. Industrial Solutions is a global surface treatment solutions platform built from targeted acquisitions. We have a broad-based technology capability and serve a diverse set of end use markets and applications. We serve mission-critical and highly specified applications in a recurring consumables model, and combine deep technical support with high customer switching costs into a durable business model with long-term customer relationships. The IS portfolio spans anti-corrosion, decorative, and wear-resistant surface solutions. These core solutions are complemented by adjacent offerings in lubricants, water treatment, and recycling chemical offerings. We think of our place in the value chain as a process technology provider, not, on the other hand, as an individual product sale business.
Some customer processes, for example, are made up of 25 to up to 40 tightly controlled processes in automotive decorative applications. At ESI, we win by providing local agility versus our global peers. Conversely, we win from the breadth and value chain coverage and innovation versus our local competitors. We're invested in differentiated capabilities that support customer shifts from hexavalent to trichrome solutions that maintain performance and regulatory compliance. We reduce customer cost of ownership with our three S process, for example, that increases customer process efficiency and increases their bath lives. We operate an OEM-aligned global quality system that standardizes specifications, verification, and audit processes. The program ensures consistent performance across a customer's footprint aligned to OEM expectations. This is something our customers rely on when scaling or moving an operation, which is pertinent as our customers balance their manufacturing footprint globally.
Underlying the Industrial & Specialty operating model is a deliberately decentralized structure, placing decision rights close to the customer. The implication is that the qualifications can oftentimes be completed in weeks rather than months. In parallel, central product and strategy coordinates innovation priorities, portfolio expansion, and entry into high growth applications. At the same time, the supply chain is flexible. Production is fungible, can be optimized across a region that allows for supply continuity for our customers in enabling cost optimization internally. The result is an operating model that combines local speed, coordinated strategy, and a flexible supply chain to drive share gain. Despite a challenging industrial macro, we're focused on improving the quality of the business. We have a simplified portfolio where we've exited underperforming areas and consolidated the portfolio from legacy acquisitions.
We've been focused on both procurement and pricing discipline, and we've invested in site productivity and automation. Importantly, we're actively addressing legacy footprint fragmentation from the acquisitions, improving cost structure and asset utilization. Coming out of this period, we're a more efficient business that will have higher operating leverages as volumes recover. Stepping back, with the platform built, the operating model aligned, and the footprint improving, we'll be increasingly focused on growth. The growth levers are from market and key applications, from share driven by fast regional execution, and from portfolio and SAM expansion driven by innovation. That growth will be enabled by fast qualifications and focused strategy, high operating leverage, and capital efficiency from an integrated footprint. Thank you very much.
Thanks for the time today. I'm Carey Dorman, President of Enterprise Operations and CFO of Element. I'm excited to share our vision for enterprise ops, and then to join Ben as we talk about our growth algorithm. At ESI, central support functions exist to enable sustainable business growth. We've been intentional about consolidating our G&A functions under one team with a clear and focused mission. This team is responsible for the business of being a business. We provide table stakes for a nicely listed public company, plus compliance, risk management, and tools to drive efficiency. Our goal is to keep customer-facing decisions as close to the customer as possible. We're following a proven playbook of process standardization, technology-first solutions, and a continuous improvement culture. With this playbook, we can enhance service while also reducing cost. We started this transformation in finance five or six years ago.
We emphasized technology, process standardization, and automation. These efforts drove significant efficiency and scalability. It also allowed us to successfully integrate multiple acquisitions and capture cost synergies quickly and without added risk. We drove finance costs down more than 25%, while at the same time driving internal customer satisfaction up by more than 30%. This is better quality and lower cost. Over the last few years, we've been expanding this playbook beyond finance, and I believe we have a large runway ahead. Importantly, all of this progress was achieved before the proliferation of AI, which opens a new set of value creation opportunities. Let's look at AI. We have a dedicated team of AI data scientists, engineers, and business analysts, all pursuing use cases across our organization today. In Enterprise Operations, we're looking for speed and efficiency opportunities.
In supply chain, we're looking at enhancing flexibility and speed from demand planning through regulatory compliance. Commercially, we're exploring automating more of the customer experience from order management to troubleshooting to onboarding. We're taking the AI opportunity seriously. When we think about sizing the prize, the addressable spend pool is over $100 million on this slide alone. AI is an exciting thing for our business. Our Enterprise Operations structure will make it easier to attack. Now let's pivot to growth in the future. As you heard from Ben earlier, our portfolio has changed and our end markets have improved. This translates to an acceleration in our growth algorithm. Here we present our growth algorithm in two ways. First, by end market exposure. What is our portfolio mix? What are those end markets expected to grow?
How much can we conservatively expect to outgrow them? Then by business unit mix, what do we expect our segments to grow? These views and the analysis supporting them suggest ESI can grow at approximately 7% organically on the top line and through the cycle. The biggest changes in our end market mix should not be terribly surprising. Our portfolio has evolved from being consumer electronic centric to data center and B2B driven. Data centers are now more than 20% of sales, while mobile devices are now roughly 5% of sales. While automotive remains a meaningful percentage of our revenue, less than 15% of our business is truly industrial automotive, while the rest, representing more than half of our automotive exposure, is driven by automotive electronics, a far faster growing market.
The weighted average through the cycle end-market growth works out to be 5% to 6%. We have a consistent track record of outgrowing our end-markets through focused innovation and market share expansion. We expect this 1% to 2% outperformance to continue. Our ability to outgrow will come from different tactics and different businesses, some through technology, some through commercial excellence, and some through pricing. Overall, the key that underpins it all is customer intimacy. Coming at the same growth question from a business mix perspective, we get to a similar roughly 7% expectation. We expect high single-digit growth from our Electronics segment, driven by Semiconductor and Circuitry Solutions. We expect roughly 5% growth from our Industrial & Specialty segment via industrial market-share gains and strong demand from EFC Gases.
The upside to this whole outlook is from Kuprion, where we are only including conservative base case, and from other early stage technologies or opportunities that may contribute more meaningfully in the medium term. This math also assumes that data center growth slows. This investment trend has driven growth in our recent quarters above what we are considering our long-term expectation. ESI has consistently translated strong revenue growth into even stronger adjusted EBITDA growth, both organically and through thoughtful strategic activity. From 2018 to 2025, we grew sales ex metals by $370 million and adjusted EBITDA by $127 million, a 34% incremental margin. We achieved this through periods of outsized inflation and despite meaningful investment in facilities, R&D and OpEx, which have supported our trend towards higher growth. High incremental margins are structural.
We generate gross profit dollar growth with minimal incremental costs to acquire or to support it. We continue to expect 30% to 40% incremental EBITDA margins over the medium term. These incrementals are supported by electronics mix shift, our innovation pipeline, AI efficiency and continuous improvement in supply chain and across our functions. There will be, of course, intra-period swings, but the trend line should hold, if not improve. It's a really compelling paradigm. Our strong earnings growth is expected to generate significant cash flow and reduce leverage organically. This creates opportunities to drive additional shareholder value. Our balance sheet's in a healthy place, and we have consistently maintained the strength and flexibility over the last five years. Capital deployment has been opportunistic and has been strategic.
M&A in some periods, buybacks or dividends in others, and cash build in others, while always remaining committed to our targeted leverage ceiling of 3.5 times. The takeaway here is that strong earnings growth provides upside to an already strong and flexible balance sheet. Ben, over to you.
You heard me earlier talking about our framework for deploying capital, and what you heard and what you see on this slide are no different from what we've said since the outset of Element Solutions. We're opportunistic and flexible, but disciplined. Our priority is to fund internal growth capital that is customer-led, tied to high-value growth. These projects together are not substantial enough to come anywhere near absorbing our total cash flow in any given year. With excess capital, we evaluate the alternatives available against our returns criteria. Our hurdle rate is variable based on our free cash flow yield. In other words, we view our free cash flow yield or buying back our shares as our cost of capital. If we can't generate a premium to our free cash flow yield, we'll either buy back stock, retire debt, or build cash.
Historically, we've sought a high single-digit free cash flow yield on a one year forward basis for buybacks or a cash-on-cash return of 10% or more for acquisitions. Given these variables, our free cash flow yield, cost of debt, and our M&A pipeline are always changing. Our approach needs to be flexible and is inherently opportunistic. Capital allocation is ESI leadership's principal responsibility. That's both internal capital deployment, excess capital allocation, and that of human capital. How do our people spend their time? We encourage all of our leaders and everyone at the company to be very thoughtful about them. Are we spending our time on the things that matter, on the things that will move the needle? Human capital is our primary and most important asset. We spend multiples of our CapEx in OpEx, and that OpEx is effectively hours of our people's time.
That time is an investment decision. We think our approach to capital allocation, discipline, flexibility and creativity are differentiators for our company. Our culture and growing reputation as a great long-term home for entrepreneurs is as well. The diversity of our recent transactions showcases those dynamics. Putting together the components of the growth algorithm Carey walked you through and our expectation of high returning capital deployment over time, our target is to compound adjusted earnings per share in the mid-teens through the cycle. With a top line of approximately 7% and our expected incremental margins, we believe we should grow adjusted EBITDA in the high single to low double digits. Capital allocation should add a few points to that. I'd note that since the founding of ESI, we've compounded EPS at roughly 12%. However, we sold a business recently and reduced debt through the end of 2025.
The benefit of our 2025 capital allocation is not captured in that 12% as those transactions only closed in 2026. In other words, that 12% understates the benefit of our cash flow and capital allocation over the past few years. We believe our long-term growth algorithm is both compelling and achievable given our portfolio has improved and our markets are accelerating. Before turning to your questions, let me try to summarize what you've heard today. First, our portfolio is better. It is faster-growing and higher quality in terms of end markets, margins, and cash flow generation than it was before. We've achieved this. We've enhanced our company deliberately by executing our strategy frameworks, investing thoughtfully, and building a team that has translated to leadership in the best subsegments of our addressable markets. The fruits from these investments are only just beginning to be harvested.
Our pipeline of new technology is more robust than ever. We've established ourselves as technology leaders, and in a long cycle business like ours, this is only just beginning to accrue to our benefit. You've heard from our leaders. They're experienced, deeply technical, and customer-oriented. They have strong benches behind them as well. We have a great team and culture. We've established a strong track record of capital deployment and a pragmatic approach to balance sheet management, which together with our business transformation, should translate to an acceleration in earnings growth and a compelling opportunity for value creation. Thank you, and let's now take some questions.
We will now move to our question and answer session. For attendees who have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen asking to be promoted to a panelist. Please accept, wait a moment, and once you've been promoted, you will hear your name called, and you may unmute your video and audio and ask your question. Your Zoom application may disappear momentarily. This is expected, and your window will reappear. Please limit to one question and a related follow-up. If you have additional questions, please raise your hand again to re-enter the queue. For attendees in the webcast, please use the ask a question tab at the upper right corner of the webcast player to submit a question.
We will now pause a moment to assemble the queue. Your first question comes from the line of Josh Spector with UBS. Josh, please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for all the details. I wanted to ask first just on Kuprion. I appreciate all the details on the technical side of it. That is certainly helpful to get a better understanding. I think, you know, we thought you might be at a point where you might talk a little bit more about some of the financial impacts of that with the new commercial facility coming online, and just your thoughts around market sizing and TAM, and how we should be thinking about how that rolls through given the forecast you just provided. Thanks.
Yeah, sure thing, Josh. Thanks for the question. Thanks for joining in what looks like a on the road moment. Kuprion is contributing less than 1 point to our growth algorithm that we communicated today, and that's simply for conservatism. The bottleneck is capacity. We're investing heavily to expand capacity. The demand is truly off the charts for this capability, and I believe that that 1% could, you know, be more than double that, or we could deliver more than double that 1% to the growth algorithm, which would be upside to our plan as capacity comes online. I expect we'll spend $150 million over the next three years building that capacity. We've talked about an earn-out target of $100 million of revenue by 2030. That's the cap.
Based on what we see, we think that we'll be hitting that on a run rate basis at some point in 2028, and it's really driven by capacity. The addressable market is multiples of that $100 million. To date, we've only gone again to a handful of customers with this technology because we don't want demand to outstrip supply any more than it already has. As these sites ramp, we'll be going out to more customers, and we'll have a better sense for addressable market size. The conservatism here is really tied to supply chain. It's not tied to demand or technical capability of the product. We're on track from a demand perspective.
We're probably ahead of plan from a demand perspective, and we're ramping up our investment to meet what we think could be, you know, significant demand in excess of that earn-out level here, you know, over the next four or five years.
That's a really helpful detail. A really quick follow-up, kind of somewhat related, I guess, is that I looked at your prior investor deck. You didn't give a free cash flow conversion number, or at least I didn't see it. I guess having plenty of things to invest in is obviously a good problem to have but, you know, a few years ago you said 60% EBITDA conversion. Would you expect a terribly different number than that in your forecast over the next few years?
Kuprion is the primary large investment area outside of ongoing growth investment and maintenance CapEx. We will invest more in CapEx in 2026 and 2027 than we have on a percentage of sales basis in the past. We think that's a good thing. It's tied to customer-led innovation and demand. There are some opportunities on the gases side of the business as well to invest very high returning projects tied to specific customer growth vectors. You know, we've said it's about a 50% conversion from EBITDA to free cash flow in the past. I think that's a good sort of recurring level. Could it be modestly lower for the next two years? Yes. That would be tied to an acceleration in growth over and above what we've communicated here today as the long-term growth algorithm.
Understood. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Bhavesh Lodaya with BMO Capital Markets. Bhavesh, please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi. Good morning, Ben, thanks for all the color and the details from the business leaders as well today. You spoke to the growth in applications around glass substrates for the next-gen packaging solutions. It looks like the industry is increasingly moving towards co-packaged optics or silicon photonics for growth. How is ESI positioned over the long term to capture this shift? Are there any negative offsets to perhaps a copper portfolio? If I look at the presentation, looks like Kuprion and maybe a bit of Micromax are exposed to this. Yeah, any color around this opportunity and who you're working with, what your market share potential is as well?
Great question. Thanks, Bhavesh. I wanna separate optics and interconnect, right? We're moving from copper cable wiring to optical wiring and our copper is not really used very much in copper cable wiring, maybe at some edges around the connectors. Not in the coax itself, if you will. Moving that from copper to glass to fiber optics doesn't erode our market. On the other side, as we move from plastic substrates to glass substrates, you can get much finer feature sizes and finer and deeper aspect ratios. Our portfolio is very well-positioned to deliver value in that market.
It's a market that's just emerging, and current production technologies are really not delivering the yields that our customers want, and Kuprion solves that in a meaningful way, as an example. We see this as a technology transition as an opportunity for substantial share, and it's very high value because we've got an offering that is differentiated from a performance perspective, dramatically improves our customers' yields, which translates into value for them, and we'll share in that value.
Maybe if you look at the various platforms, you gave your mid-term growth outlook, certainly seems like the near-term trends are pushing for a stronger growth than that in Electronics and perhaps an inverse in the Specialties group. Could you maybe have, like, a second half 2026 or a 2027 outlook in terms of how you think about organic growth for the two platforms?
Yeah. Yeah, the Specialties business, you know, has several strong growth vectors in it. The offshore business grew 15% in the first quarter, and between pricing and an increase in drilling activities, we expect that business to grow healthily in the you know, mid-single digits this year. EFC has a tremendous tailwind behind it and very strong team and strong commercial execution. That business should also be able to grow nicely. The industrial surface treatments business, you know, we've thought that it's been at trough for an extended period of time, and there are some geopolitical headwinds, particularly in Europe right now, but we haven't seen them actually manifest in the P&L year-to-date. It's been a tough environment for the IS business.
We've outperformed, and we expect to continue to outperform and we haven't seen the recent trends impact the business as yet. On the electronic side, it's been really strong, right? We've gone from strength to strength coming off a peak year, yet delivering 15% organic growth in the first quarter and our expectations of continuing strong levels of growth into 2026. You know, it's not our order book, but the supply chain backlog, if you will, or the supply chain order book associated with data center build-out seems durable well into 2027. You know, if you're asking sort of upsides, downsides to our long-term plan, we have conservatism built in simply because the current operating rates, the current growth rates are well in excess of our long-term growth algorithm.
We're assuming that trees don't grow to the clouds, and that there'll be a deceleration, but we have no obvious indication that that deceleration is imminent. We've also put quite a bit of conservatism into the Kuprion opportunity, given, you know, our visibility on getting that supply chain up and running.
Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of John Tanwanteng with CJS Securities. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions, and thank you for the great and detailed presentation. That's actually a good segue into the question that I had, which was the slowing in data center, you conservatively assume that that's gonna happen in your long-term growth outlook. I was wondering if you could walk through what your assumption is for when that actually starts to happen, if that's a fuzzy number, and what your growth looks like before and after that transition becomes apparent.
You know, we don't have a crystal ball around that, John Roberts. We built our growth algorithm off of industry forecast data, right? The industry forecast from Prismark says that the PCB market, from a volume perspective, is gonna grow 7% through 2029. That clearly has a deceleration at some point in the next four years, but we don't have a pin in that number. We're just baselining our forecasts or our growth algorithm off of industry forecasts. As I said just now, there's nothing indicating a slowdown is imminent. If anything, we're seeing an acceleration in certain pockets of the market, and we see opportunities to outperform given our concentration in the higher growth, higher value segments and new innovation we're bringing to market.
Got it. Thank you. Carey, I had a question for you. You mentioned, you know, the $100 million savings target. I was wondering if you could talk about what the cash costs of those savings are, as well as the pace, number one, and then kind of how that impacts the margin progression as you go through those.
Yep. Thanks, John. Just to clarify, I think we called it an opportunity, which I would say is a little bit different than a savings target. Think about it as the pool of spend that we're playing in as we look at where we can deploy AI most effectively. I would expect meaningful contributions over the next handful of years as we're seeing this technology evolve and we're learning how to use it well in our business. We are not setting aggressive internal targets, and I would expect the one-time costs associated that with those, achievement of those savings will be relatively modest. More to come on that in the coming quarters as we are ready to disclose.
Yeah, look, I think that We've done a good job, Carey's done a great job of implementing technology to add efficiency to our processes with the goal of having more efficient processes, not simply cost savings. The cost savings fall out on the back of that. There are more tools available to us today than there were five years ago, and there are more domains that we can pursue with those tools. You know, Carey's talking about $100 million of G&A that we can go fishing in for opportunities, and we're already in the process of that. I wouldn't consider those cost savings factored into our incremental margin evaluation, right?
We didn't have this size opportunity to hunt in when we started four or five years ago, yet we've delivered, you know, good incrementals in line with our long-term targets while ramping up investment in OpEx for growth. You know, I view the AI opportunity, or I'll call it process efficiency through technology opportunity, as all additive to incremental margins.
I would just add also that none of that 100 addresses the procurement opportunity and some of the, you know, potential, say, revenue opportunities associated with it. It's still early, as Ben says.
Got it. Thank you for the clarification, and keep up the good work. Thank you.
Thanks, John.
Reminder, for attendees who have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found at the black bar at the bottom of your screen. For attendees in the webcast, please use the Ask a Question tab at the upper right corner of the webcast player to submit a written question. Our next question will come from the line of Peter Osterland with Truist Securities. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hey, guys. Thanks for all the information this morning. Just first wanted to start by asking another one on the growth algorithm. You know, you gave us a lot on how your targeted performance relates to the underlying market growth across your end markets and your businesses. I was wondering if you could expand on that and maybe talk through where you see the highest risk of variability, I guess, if you were to outperform or alternatively miss these targets over the next few years, particularly in terms of where you expect to outperform underlying markets. Where within your portfolio of businesses do you see more risk of this happening, and what are the most relevant drivers you're focused on, that would impact meeting your outlook?
Sure. Thanks for the question, Pete. You're just trying to understand sources of variability versus the market arrow. You know, execution, if you will. Where do we have the most execution risk, market share risk, and so forth? You know, it's a good question. As I see upside here, it's Kuprion, it's some of the other emerging technologies you heard about, TruHeight spacer, some of our TIMs. you know, we've done a really good job with circuit board metal, server board metallization technologies, and we've got a strong market position there. The short answer is we've developed incumbency in these markets, and these are markets where there is a very high bar to change, especially in the fastest growing ones, where our customers are just solving for capacity addition, right? It's not about driving out that incremental penny or nickel. It's meeting surging demand.
As I see it, that incumbency is very powerful and gives us more upside than downside, as we roll into, you know, the next several years, and based on our expectation that the current growth rates aren't abating anytime soon.
Okay, great. very helpful. Then just, as a follow-up on a related note to growth, on capital allocation, in the current valuation environment, do you expect to be doing more bolt-on M&A in the near to medium term? Where within your portfolio are you seeing the most opportunities in the pipeline for complementary businesses that could be a good fit?
We never know when something great is gonna come across our desk, and valuation for these types of businesses tends to be less driven by the market multiple. They're really high quality businesses, and they're scarce. For the most part, you know, they're private companies held by families. We don't see too much volatility around valuation. The pipeline is fine, I would say, right now. We're not actively working on anything, but, you know, we feel as though what we're regularly maintaining dialogues with the principals of the businesses that we're interested in. It's just a matter of when, and we can't catalyze those transactions. It's, it's sort of takes two and the other side of the table has a large bearing on that.
We're very happy to build cash should there not be attractive things to do with our capital. We're still in the process of de-levering a bit from our acquisitions last year, so there's no urgency. I would expect Element to continue to be on the offensive in terms of building its portfolio. We're building confidence from Micromax and EFC around integration and around steps into logical adjacencies to our portfolio based on the receptivity and the success we've had to date.
All right, great. Thanks a lot for all the info today.
Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of John Roberts with Mizuho. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Thank you. For MacDermid Enthone, have you been able to gain some share from one of your major competitors being for sale for the past six months? Maybe talk a little bit about win rates in that business.
You're asking about the Industrial Solutions business?
Yeah.
The Industrial Solution business has done well over the past several years. We have consolidated that market, first with the Enthone acquisition and with the acquisition. We, you know, have a very strong position, a very strong team, a globally capable technical services organization. You heard from Graeme earlier today talking about both, you know, sort of the vectors of growth and innovation, how we're spending our time, and our outperformance relative to peers. We do believe we're taking share in that broader industry, not simply improving the business through commercial excellence, but also through productivity, and you can see that in the margin expansion we've delivered through a period of inflation.
secondly, silver's become a bigger cost component, and maybe Micromax brings in being handled differently from the historical tin solder, fasten.
John, we missed a portion of that question. You said silver has become more important, Micromax brings in?
Yeah, and you've historically had a automatic pass-through on tin solder, but I think those other metals are handled differently.
No. Tin and silver in our assembly business are pass-through with a very similar mechanism. Micromax also has a metals pass-through mechanism, we view those as sort of pass-through sales. Where customers want fixed prices, we will commit to a fixed price, but hedge that exposure. That creates a little bit of noise in the P&L and in some periods, but over time we don't lose any value associated with that metal.
I just, I think to clarify that point, the profit dollar margin protection embedded in our pricing model for our legacy tin and silver business holds with Micromax. There shouldn't be risk to profit dollars as metals fluctuate.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Harris Fein with Wolfe Research. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just one from me. You took the effort to differentiate today between automotive electronics, which are growing a lot faster, versus automotive surface. Just maybe any sort of framework as to how we should be thinking about electronics intensity or content per unit opportunities on the automotive electronic side. Thanks.
Sure. If we go back several years, we thought that our auto business would be growing, you know, low to mid-single digits because auto units would be growing low single digits. Content per unit would grow 1 to 2 points faster than that. What we've found over the past several years is that our auto business on the surface treatment side hasn't seen that growth vector because units have been, you know, challenged, particularly in the West. Our automotive electronics business has vastly outpaced that as there's more sensor technology, more autonomous systems, more power electronics and so forth. You know, we're conservatively saying our automotive electronics business is gonna grow in the mid-single digits. Our industrial, you know, auto surfaces business will grow more with SAR.
Recent evidence would suggest the auto electronics business can grow much faster than that.
Thanks. Yeah, that's all from me.
Thanks, Harris. Great. Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of Joshua Spector with UBS. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Yes. Thanks for taking the follow-up. I just wanted to ask on the breakdown of the business where you're talking about the AI data center, telco, high-end compute, the 20% of sales. You guys laid out an industry CAGR, or at least your view of what you can grow there, about 11%. I think you've clearly been growing higher than that near term. I'm curious if you can kinda define what you think that growth might look like for that part of the business over the next one to two years versus what you're framing as the market, just given kind of where the industry's at today versus, you know, your longer term view. Thanks.
Absolutely. That was something we struggled with because there's a lot of dispersion in that, in that portion of the business. You've got, you know, the TruHeight spacers growing more than 50% a year. You've got, you know, the PPR technology growing at a similar CAGR. You've got your, you know, memory disk business, which is growing okay, but basically the supply chain's at full capacity right now, so you're not gonna get the same growth arrow there. We put it all together to get to what You know, it's a double-digit number. In the near term it's growing faster than that, right? Like, you know, our expectation is that this year and next year it's gonna be growing well ahead of that.
Again, we've taken this view based on industry research that there will be some deceleration at some point. That's how we landed at that 11%. Is that overall piece of business or that overall slice of the business growing at 20% right now? Something in the high teens to 20% is a good rough figure. I don't have it directly in front of me.
Okay. No, that's what I was going for. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Frank Mitsch with Fermium Research. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Good morning. Thank you for the color and the detail on the various segments. It sounds like, you know, the overarching commentaries on EFC and Micromax were positive. I'm curious, you know, here you are several months into owning both of those businesses, you know, how what may have surprised you positively or negatively on those two acquisitions?
Micromax came out of the gates incredibly strong and continues to be performing really, really well. They've got great capability. The customer overlap and the sort of collaboration between our organizations is going very, very well. You know, these capacitors are becoming increasingly important to the electronic supply chain and, you know, we expected that might be the case, but, you know, you read reports recently where, you know, you go from one generation of NVIDIA server board to the next, and the number of capacitors goes from 6,500 to 12,000 and, you know, on a smartphone it's 1,000 of them, right?
Just the intensity of the increasing unit intensity of what Micromax is selling into the leading edge has been a I don't wanna call it a positive surprise, but a helpful dynamic, right? Micromax is, it's just a good transaction, good value, good team, great fit. EFC is doing really, really well as well. We are thrilled to be owners of that business. The markets are moving in its direction when you look at the incremental investment in satellite capacity. We're winning big contracts with the OEMs and electrical transmission infrastructure, all of that on the comm to support data center build-out. It feels like a highly strategic asset, right?
We're in this period where the reliance on foreign gas is an important concern to the domestic semiconductor market, and we own a potential solution to that. Over time that's gonna accrue to our benefit. Great business, great fit, great team, very optimistic about what that business can become.
As you thought about the capital needs to grow both of those businesses, has that changed at all? Have you uncovered, you know, other growth opportunities that you're gonna, you know, be investing in maybe a little bit faster than you originally thought? How, how do you think about that?
Micromax, no. Micromax has ample capacity. They've got a great site in Puerto Rico. We're thinking about adding more there. Again, domestic supply, lower cost, you know, really strong jurisdiction. EFC has a great site in Pennsylvania. EFC does require a bit more capital per dollar of revenue growth, because you're adding columns, you're adding, you know, new capabilities for formulation. There are some bigger opportunities there where we could, you know, scale that business and add meaningful capacity in partnership with our customers and other supply chain participants. That is something that we, you know, expect to evaluate over the next couple of years. We'd only do it tied to very meaningful, high value growth opportunities.
Gotcha. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Next question will be a written submission. I'd like to turn it over to Varun Gokarn.
There's just 1 written submission here. Can you share sources of upside and downsides to the long-term growth algorithm that you've laid out today?
Yeah. Absolutely, and thank you for that question. Look, the downside, it's linked to units or weaker macro, whether that's data centers or otherwise. We don't see the data center markets slowing imminently. We see units as coming off of a, you know, when you think about smartphones, which is less important than historical, but consumer electronics or auto, you know, reasonably weak, baseline. Auto units have been high, but most of that growth has come from, you know, low value units in Asia, where we are not significant suppliers. The downside is really macro and unit driven. We don't see any of that imminently.
We see more upside than downside to the long-term growth algorithm simply driven by the fact that the current conditions are materially better in this market than the forecast shows, right? There's this implicit deceleration, which we're not saying we wouldn't dismiss, but we don't see it imminently at all, you know, on the near term horizon. The other sources of conservatism in the plan are Kuprion, where, you know, again, it's contributing less than 1% to the annual growth algorithm, and it could easily be double that in the near term, and at substantial incremental margins. Then, you know, just going back to the AI observation, we really haven't baked in the way process efficiency and technology can translate into better than historical incremental margins. I expect that over time it will.
The conservatism is to some extent on top line, you know, with a more conservative macro and a more conservative Kuprion, and to some extent on margins tied to, you know, what, you know, our organization can do to be more efficient, as we scale.
There are no more questions at this time. I'd now like to turn the call over to management for closing remarks.
Great. Thanks to everybody for joining. My deep gratitude to the team. You know, we showed a deeper bench of leaders than folks normally see, and they put real effort into putting a good foot forward and showcasing the incredible technology that we've been developing around the world. Thank you for joining. Thanks for your time, and we look forward to seeing many of you soon. Take care. Have a good day.