Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Ken Gedaka, Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs. Welcome to FMC Tower. Before I bring Zack Zaki up, our Director of Investor Relations, safety is a very core value of our company. We start every meeting with a safety share. So safety share for today, you all know where the elevators are. If there was ever an incident, we need to go down, if those elevators are not working, to your right is a stairwell, just to the right of those elevators. There's another stairwell to my left, to your right, right through these doors here, and you go down here, turn right, there's another stairwell. So two stairwells to get out of the building if that was necessary. And with that, let me turn this over to Zack Zaki, Director of Investor Relations.
All right. You can hear me all right in the back over there? Very good. All right. Thank you, Ken, and welcome everyone to FMC's Investor Day. I'm glad to see so many members of the investment and sell side communities here in person at Philadelphia at our FMC headquarters, so thank you for taking the time to come out here. This is the global headquarters for FMC, and I hope you've had a chance to look at the different collaboration spaces during the showcase portion in the morning. I also want to take the opportunity to welcome folks who are joining us on the webcast. There will be summaries of the showcases put up later for consumption on our IR website. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Zack Zaki, Head of Investor Relations here.
Been with the company for over 10 years in different strategy and general management roles prior to this one. With that, let's jump right in. Today, we are going to discuss our strategy in detail and what that means in terms of financial implications, both for the midterm as well as long-term aspirations. We will be using forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures during the discussion today. Let me remind you that today's presentation and forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning specific factors, including, but not limited to, those factors identified in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Information presented represents our best judgment based on today's understanding. Actual results may vary based upon these risks and uncertainties. We encourage you to read the safe harbor slide that's up right now, as well as the disclaimers posted on our IR website.
Today's discussion and the supporting materials will include references to adjusted EPS, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted cash from operations, free cash flow, organic revenue growth, and return on invested capital, all of which are non-GAAP financial measures. Please note that as used in today's discussion, earnings means adjusted earnings, and EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation and definition of these terms, as well as other non-GAAP financial terms, to which we may refer during today's presentation, are provided on our website. In terms of the agenda for this presentation, we are certainly going to talk about the recent industry trend and the destocking that's taking place right now. We believe that the industry will start to normalize in 2024, and that assumption informs our view into 2025 and beyond. The focus today is really on the medium to long term and not necessarily on 2023.
Since there's been some recent misinformation and speculation regarding our diamide franchise, we did provide updated information on that franchise at our last earnings call. In addition, we will be providing further detail on our diamide outlook later today. Finally, we are meeting you on the heels of our third quarter earnings call, which provided more detail on the expectations for the rest of 2023. The focus again today is really on 2024 and beyond. Now, I would like to get the program underway and call on stage our Chief Executive Officer, Mark Douglas.
Thank you, Zack. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our home, FMC Tower, on our Investor Day 2023. For those of you here at FMC Tower today, I hope you enjoyed our showcase, the event that we held upstairs. We want to provide an opportunity to engage with several leaders across the regions and in R&D, Plant Health and sustainability. Many of the showcase topics listed on the slide, new innovations and product launches, newly patented diamide formulations, and the expansion of our Plant Health business, will be discussed in detail this afternoon as we outline our mid and long-term growth plans.
Let me start by saying that some of you may find this a strange time to conduct an Investor Day that outlines the future growth plans of our company when the markets we operate in have taken such a dramatic and unexpected turn this year. However, we believe this is a perfect time to showcase the underlying strengths of FMC and how, despite the current market, we continue to innovate and bring value to growers all over the world. I also want to say, from a personal standpoint, how disappointed, frustrated, and more importantly, annoyed that I am in FMC's stock price performance this year. I know many of you listening today as investors feel the same way. I do not in any way believe that the current stock price and compressed multiples are appropriate for our company.
They do not reflect the underlying strength of the company today, and they certainly do not reflect the growth prospects and financial performance we have in front of us. We have seen opinions that have been written about FMC over the last six months that certainly have not helped our stock price. The conclusions drawn by certain reports are, we believe, simply wrong. From the misguided and misleading commentary about the demise of our world-class diamides franchise to the financial strength of our company. Today, we will show you why these reports are wrong and why FMC is a great investment opportunity. The crop protection market is going through one of its largest channel resets ever. It is an incredibly complex set of events that has impacted the entire industry.... The current market backdrop should not cloud the fundamental strengths and growth potential of our company.
Our job today is not only to provide details on the immediate steps we're taking to address the market and the environment and our performance. Equally important is looking beyond these transitory challenges and to show you what we know FMC can deliver in the next three years and beyond. I'll begin with a review of today's crop protection market and the actions FMC is taking to address industry challenges. I will then shift to our new strategic plan, which builds on the core strengths of our company. We'll provide both midterm financial goals through 2026 and long-term financial aspirations that extend to 2033. This afternoon, our leadership team will discuss projects and initiatives designed to support and deliver profitable growth.
You will hear how we are accelerating innovation, enhancing our relationship as a trusted advisor to growers, optimizing our current portfolio, and further building resilience, agility, and efficiencies across our operations. Today's presenters will address many of our strategic imperatives, each focused on driving growth and delivering results. As I said at the top of my remarks, and during our quarterly earnings call two weeks ago, we are operating in an industry environment that is, frankly, unprecedented. The crop protection market is working through the most severe channel destock ever on record. A combination of inflationary prices and concerns about supply security during 2021 and 2022 resulted in channel participants and growers overstocking in the last couple of growing seasons.
In 2023, prices and supply stabilized for several product categories, while interest rates continued to trend up, resulting in the same channel participants drawing down their existing inventories, while at the same time, meeting steady demand on the farm. Meanwhile, channel participants are under pressure to operate with lower than historical inventory levels. This has reduced or delayed typical order patterns, leading to severe volume declines across the whole industry. FMC has responded on several fronts. We have prioritized sales from our existing inventory and reduced near-term manufacturing activity. We are maintaining or gaining market share at the grower level in all regions, while continuing to see good traction for our new products. We fully expect the destocking reset is transitory, and that the channel will begin to rebalance and ease back into somewhat more normal patterns as we enter mid-2024.
When that occurs, we want to be ready to take advantage of business opportunities. As such, we continue to focus on prioritizing debt paydown while making targeted investments in innovation, market access, and optimizing our core portfolio and operations. Although we've responded aggressively to the various market challenges, we must do more to align our business operations with the current market realities. As we previously announced, we are taking immediate steps to protect FMC's near-term profitability and ensure we're best structured for performance, efficiency, and business results today and in the coming years. Our recently announced restructuring initially targets $50 million-$75 million in savings delivered in 2024, with year-end 2023 expenses serving as the baseline.
We expect this company-wide cost savings and organizational restructure program will ultimately result in more than $150 million in run rate savings by the end of 2025. It is important to underscore, however, that despite the immediate challenges we are addressing and the destocking phenomena, the fundamentals of our business remain strong. FMC's differentiated portfolio has solid traction with pricing for value. Growth is being driven by a continuing introduction of new molecules and new formulations. We have a broad portfolio of herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, including our industry-leading diamides, that our R&D team continues to enhance with new patented formulations. Our Plant Health business has an expanding portfolio of differentiated products driven by our biologicals.
Based on grower point of sale data from third-party providers, we continue to gain overall share in key market segments, a result of our innovative portfolio, product launches, and deliberate pricing strategy we employed over the last couple of years. Also, keep in mind that on-the-ground application of crop protection products remains robust. We use various tools to gain visibility into on-the-ground applications and expect to increase the use of these tools in the future. Furthermore, planted acres continue to remain healthy and at higher levels, more recently, with good grower profitability. Turning to our strategic plan. In charting the next 10 years at FMC, we're building on the strengths that have driven our success. Strong innovation with a deep pipeline of new products and technologies, a resilient, efficient operations and supply chain model, strong market access, an expanding biologicals business, and a leader in sustainability and safety.
Over the last 12 months, we conducted a comprehensive review of our business and our company. Where have we excelled? What do we need to do to improve? Where do we want to be in the next several years as a leading innovative crop protection company? And just as importantly, what will it take to get us there? We engaged hundreds of employees across our company in these discussions, commercial teams, regions, functions, as well as our key customers around the world.... From this work emerged our new strategic plan, which is anchored in three core ambitions. First, to transform our relationship with growers. This is about strengthening the technical relationship we have with them.
We know our technology and products better than anybody, and we want to ensure growers get sound, accurate, timely advice, needed to make the right products and technology choices that best address their weed, insect, and disease pressures. This stronger relationship also gives us better insight into farmers' challenges, and more importantly, buying decisions. Second, to deliver superior growth and returns. In a moment, I will review the financial metrics and targets and discuss the mid- and long-term timeframes we've established for these. Thirdly, to maintain our industry leadership in safety, sustainability, and innovation. How we will achieve these core ambitions are reflected in a set of strategic initiatives. Within each are specific actions designed to drive the imperative forward, to guide how we think about and pursue FMC's growth strategy, to inform our investment decisions, and ultimately, to deliver performance and results.
Collectively, our strategic imperatives drive both midterm performance and our longer-term growth objectives. The first is a rolling three-year outlook. We expect revenue of $5.5 billion-$6 billion by 2026, with EBITDA outlook of $1.3 billion-$1.5 billion. On a rolling three-year average basis, return on invested capital is expected to return to the mid-teens level, and free cash flow conversion is expected to be at least 70%. We expect revenue growth to be driven largely by volume gains, reflecting our differentiated products and the growth of our core portfolio, which includes diamides as well as other franchise active ingredients. Revenue growth will also be driven by strong contribution from new product introductions and our expanding portfolio of biologicals and pheromone products in the Plant Health business.
The second timeframe takes a longer view, with aspirational goals extending to 2033. For this 10-year horizon, we're targeting revenue to outpace the broad market by 1.5-2 times or more. Our long-term EBITDA margin is expected to be in the mid-20s. Over this time, we expect to maintain return on invested capital in the mid-teens and free cash flow conversion of at least 70%. Many of these metrics are industry-leading. Let me also comment briefly on our early look at 2024. While the industry expected to still experience the destocking impacts as we move through the first half of the year, we expect 2024 revenue of $4.65-$4.85 billion, an improvement of 3% compared to our latest 2023 guidance.
2024 EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $1.025 billion-$1.125 billion, an 8% increase compared to 2023. We would expect EPS to grow faster than EBITDA over this horizon. Return on invested capital is expected to be greater than 10%, with free cash flow conversion greater than 100%. Our company has all the right elements to deliver on targets we've set. A robust portfolio, a successful track record of launching new formulations that meet the evolving demands of farmers, a deep pipeline of new technologies with new modes of action, a growing Plant Health business, which includes a new pheromone platform, a successful precision ag platform and services, and a lean cost structure, which we are optimizing even further.
As part of our strategic plan's focus to drive profitable growth, we are examining non-core assets that do not have a clear strategic role in our mid or longer-term goals. One asset we have decided to begin exploring strategic options for is FMC Global Specialty Solutions. This business leverages many of our technologies that serve a diverse mix of non-crop markets, including golf courses, professional sports stadiums, structural pest control, and vector control, just to name a few. It's a strong business with attractive margins and a history of growth. However, our company's focus is on products and services for the global crop protection market. As such, we believe Global Specialty Solutions will better thrive and grow outside of FMC. We are starting a process now to assess strategic options, which includes a potential sale of this business. As I mentioned, our new plan is built upon eight strategic imperatives.
During the next two hours, our management team will take you through specific initiatives and actions that are driving many of these imperatives. Our presenters are listed on this slide. Diane Allemang, our Chief Marketing Officer, will get things started with a look at the global crop protection market and how FMC's portfolio is delivering growth over the long term. Dr. Seva Rostovtsev, our CTO, will review our R&D pipeline, our newest technologies, and how we're accelerating the discovery process. You will then hear from Ronaldo Pereira, President of FMC Americas, about how we continue to strengthen our relationship as a trusted advisor to growers that will help support new product introductions in the coming years. Dr. Bénédicte Flambard, Vice President and Global Business Director for Plant Health, will discuss our growing Plant Health business with a focus on biologicals, including new pheromone technologies.
Thaisa Hugenneyer , Vice President of Procurement, Logistics, and Global Facilities, will join us to discuss how FMC is strengthening its resilient, cost-efficient supply chain and preparing to support the launch of many new products in the coming years. Andrew Sandifer, our CFO, will conclude today's presentations with a review of the key mid- and longer-term financial goals and aspirations, as well as actions we're taking that significantly improve cost efficiencies across the enterprise and drive profitable growth. Following my closing remarks, we'll bring all the speakers onto the stage to address any questions you may have. With that background, I'm pleased to introduce Diane Allemang.
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll be talking about some of the key trends in the historical crop protection market, and I will share FMC's view on the market today and the future outlook. I will speak about our competitive portfolio, including the diamides, and finally, I will discuss the innovation FMC plans to bring to the market and highlight the factors that fuel our ability to outpace market growth. Before we can look ahead and consider today's market in anticipation of the future, we first need to look back. Over the last 40+ years, the crop protection market has grown at a rate of about 3%.
The common drivers of growth were these—over these four decades—were: commodity prices, which supported grower investments, agronomic practices, including the adoption of new, targeted, and highly effective crop protection tools, and the continual enhancements in crop genetics. The increased value of seed increases the importance of protecting that seed and, and the resulting crop to ensure yield. Looking specifically at the market since 2010, we saw growth of 3%-4%, even with the downturn that occurred in 2015. Certainly, commodity prices helped fuel the growth as prices for key crops were generally strong. In 2022, wheat saw its highest price ever, and corn and soy reached their highest points since 2012. In addition, the introduction of new products and regulatory restrictions on older chemistries continued in many markets.
Furthermore, demand for food increased as the world's population grew over 15% since 2010. This is against a backdrop of essentially no overall change in the amount of cropland, thereby requiring a greater investment in inputs to achieve a greater output. In addition, increased demand for biofuels and animal protein supported market growth, driven by positive government policy, evolving consumer preferences, and increased per capita income. While it has grown at a rate of approximately 3% over the last 40 years, the crop protection market, like most markets, experiences periods of faster growth, punctuated by short periods of contraction. When looking at this slide, you can see notable downturns in the market, marked in orange, in 2009, 2015, and now what we are seeing in 2023.
The 2009 decline was primarily driven by the general economic downturn around the world. The market quickly recovered and returned to growth. In 2015, the downturn was preceded by a buildup of channel inventory over several years, particularly in Brazil. In Brazil, the market saw weak currency and the introduction of new genetically modified crops, which significantly decreased purchases of insect control products in 2015 and 2016. Demand for insect control products in Brazil has since rebounded, as resistance to GM traits developed and planted hectares increased. We've already spoken extensively about the inventory destocking phenomenon that is impacting the entire crop protection market, as well as the broader agricultural industry.
There are similarities between the downturn in the market in 2015 and what we are seeing today, in that there has been an inventory build, but the recent inventory build occurred over a shorter period, and it occurred all around the world. The key difference from 2015, and the key driver of the market downturn today, was the global pandemic. The crop protection market, like other industries, experienced COVID-related supply challenges, price increases, and inventory build everywhere. Now, even though we are in mid-November, it is nevertheless challenging to forecast the size of the crop protection market for the calendar year, especially given current market conditions. Q4 is the beginning of the selling season in North America, and the Latin America market is only a bit further along. Both markets historically have seen significant sales in Q4.
At this time, our rough estimate is the 2023 market will be down high teens%. But growers around the world continue to plant, protect, and harvest their crops. We note that the U.S. third-party data provider, Kynetec, shows the volume of FMC products purchased by U.S. farmers grew slightly in the 2023 season as compared to 2022. We have seen planted area expansion in some key geographies, such as Brazil. Crop prices have come off their peaks, but remain in line with their strong pre-pandemic levels. The market fundamentals are positive and well positioned for growth. Looking ahead, once the industry is past destocking. We anticipate the global crop protection market will see low- to mid-single-digit growth over the next 10 years, which we estimate may range from 1%-4%.
There are a number of factors which will influence the ultimate growth rate. The magnitude of each factor and how the factors interact will impact where in the range the rate lands. These factors include commodity prices, the speed of adoption of new technologies, interest rates, heightened concerns for food security, and extreme weather events. These last two factors are not new. Food security has always been a concern, but recent world events like COVID and the war in Ukraine have left countries feeling vulnerable, given the impacts on supply, trade, and transportation. For many countries, increasing their domestic food production will require changes in their agricultural practices. In agriculture, we always talk about the weather, but growers around the world increasingly face temperature and rainfall extremes, making reliable production an even greater challenge. Innovative, effective, sustainable crop protection products are needed to address these challenges.
Market growth will also vary depending on geography, crop, and product. FMC is focused on positioning our portfolio in market segments that are poised to grow much faster than the overall market, such as biologicals, which are forecasted to grow at a rate possibly 10 times the rate of the overall market. This growth in biologicals will be driven by continued advancement in their performance and agronomic fit, and the integration of biologicals with synthetic crop protection products enabled by precision applications, digital solutions, and data analytics. In addition, regulatory pressures and consumer preferences create a favorable scenario for biologicals growth. Now let me turn to FMC's growth and the growth of our portfolio. There are different ways to consider our portfolio, by indication or by region, for example.
For today's purpose, I will discuss it in terms of our current crop protection portfolio, which includes the diamides, as well as many other key products used by growers every day. Our Plant Health business, and Bénédicte will discuss this exciting growth area, and our new pipeline, active ingredients, or AIs, which you'll hear about from Seva. Today, FMC's new pipeline, AIs and Plant Health products, make up less than 10% of our total revenue. Combined, these will grow to account for more than 35% of our total revenue by 2033. While Plant Health and the active ingredient pipeline will be the main drivers of long-term growth, we anticipate our current crop protection portfolio will grow at roughly a 5% CAGR over the next three years.
This next slide will look familiar for those of you who were on the recent earnings call. The insecticides market has grown at roughly 5% per year from 2016 to 2022, driven heavily by the growth of the diamides. Today, the diamides have approximately 15% share of the insect control market. Products containing FMC's Rynaxypyr and Cyazypyr make up more than 80% of the entire diamide class, which includes a few other actives. We believe FMC's diamides grew to about 12% of the total insecticide market by the end of 2022. During this period, diamides outperformed every other leading chemistry class in the insecticide market by growing at an 11% CAGR, gaining 5% market share as a result.
We expect our diamide portfolio to grow in the mid-single digit range over the next 10 years, slightly higher than the overall insecticide market outlook of approximately 3%. What will drive this growth? From the moment we closed on the acquisition of the diamide products, FMC has been intently focused on developing and executing a growth and lifecycle management strategy. As Mark outlined 2 weeks ago, we have been incredibly successful in growing the diamide franchise, delivering these valuable products to more and more growers around the world. While it is inevitable and anticipated that generics would enter with their own versions of our diamide molecules, we are confident in the continued growth of FMC's diamide products. In the Q3 earnings call, Mark shared the key pillars of our diamide growth strategy: IP defense, market expansion, innovation, commercial excellence, partnerships, and manufacturing efficiencies.
But let's start by taking a quick look at post-patent trends in the crop protection market. We were asked on the earnings call about the growth trajectory of other chemistries when they came off patent. This is an area that the FMC team has been deeply analyzing for several years. Our analysis looked at the period from 3 years prior to composition of matter expiry to 5 years after expiry for 8 compounds across all 3 indications. We examined what unfolded in terms of the value of each compound and the molecular share of the inventor, also known as the brand owner. As you can see on this slide, in all cases, the value of the compound in the market grew. The value growth varied from less than 2x up to nearly 6x the value sold prior to patent expiry.
The share of the value the inventor maintained five years following composition matter patent expiry differed across the compounds, ranging from approximately 45% to more than 90%. It is important to note that these figures are likely understated, as we are not able to attribute to the inventor company any sales to partners, as such arrangements are confidential. The brand owner share varied depending on the IP estate and the company's defense of that, that IP, the innovation and differentiation the company brought to the market, and the market expansion opportunities for the compound. These analyses have informed our diamide strategy. Now let me talk about the growth pillar of market expansion. When we say market expansion, we mean increasing our reach by launching diamide products in countries or crops where they have a limited presence.
Despite the diamide's significant size in the overall market, there are still notable markets where these compounds are not utilized. As I noted, the diamides have approximately 15% share of the insect control market, yet the leading diamide, Rynaxypyr, is applied on less than 5% of the hectares, and Cyazypyr on less than 1%. This slide shows a breakout of crop area treated with different classes of insecticide chemistries for several key crops where the diamides can have an important fit. The diamide products appear in orange, and as you can see, they are not the primary crop protection tools for any of the crops. Regulatory pressures on older chemistries such as the OPs, neonics, and some of the pyrethroids, will see more and more growers turn to diamides to protect their crops.
These three chemistries are frequently used together in mixtures, and these mixture products are noted in the gray area on the chart marked Other. There are also a few other small chemistries in the Other category. Rynaxypyr and Cyazypyr will be the compounds of choice due to their efficacy and safety profiles. In addition, we know our diamides have significant growth potential for crops even where older chemistries remain. For example, Rynaxypyr has a strong fit in row crops such as soybeans and corn, and Cyazypyr in fruit and vegetables. Insect pressure can vary year to year, but the emergence of new pest species adds even more complexity to growers' ability to protect their crops. For example, the fall armyworm has become a significant threat in key global markets. Corn farmers in Brazil are now being challenged by increasing populations of the corn leafhopper.
Rynaxypyr and Cyazypyr, with their excellent activity on a broad range of insect pests and their compatibility with IPM programs, offer growers powerful new options for control of emerging pests. New formulations, which we are launching, will provide novel tools in crops where diamides have not been used before, as well as provide growers in all of these crops with critical, sustainable solutions. Our innovation with diamide offerings will support FMC's continued leadership in this class of chemistry. Innovation is key to addressing growers' needs and to fueling our overall growth, including the growth of our diamides. It is helpful to note when we speak about sales of our branded diamides, we are talking about sales of FMC diamide products, excluding our sales to partners.
Before I turn to our branded products, I do want to note that our partners and our partner sales will continue to be important to growing and supporting the diamides. Our current agreements continue through the decade, and we are in active discussions to extend and expand our diamide partners. We estimate that 17% of revenue from our branded diamides currently comes from sales of new diamide formulations and expansion of our products into new countries. In 2026, we anticipate 30% of revenue from branded diamides coming from such products, and in 2033, new diamide formulations are expected to make up more than 50% of branded diamide revenue.
To drill down further on our new diamide products, we will launch approximately 20 new diamide formulations across nearly 50 countries through 2033, and these innovative offerings will be differentiated from the products sold by generics. Today, we see a revenue split between our branded sales of Rynaxypyr and Cyazypyr of 80/20. By 2033, we expect that split to be about 65/35, as Cyazypyr grows rapidly from a comparatively smaller base. These are the innovations that will propel our future sales growth. We have already launched the patent-pending new offerings of Vantacor, Elevest, and Coragen Max, which growers in key markets are currently adopting in lieu of the older diamide formulations that generics will mimic....
A great example of one of our newest Rynaxypyr innovations is the large effervescent granules, LEG, something you may have seen if you visited the APAC showcase earlier this morning. This patent-pending, breakthrough application technology in rice farming will drive significant convenience and cost savings for the rice grower and improve sustainability. About 25% of the rice paddies in Asia that are treated for insect control involve applications done by manually spreading sand-based granules. These applications are challenging, as uniform distribution of the product throughout the paddy is difficult. In addition, sand granules are heavy and thus physically demanding to carry and apply. The introduction of the innovative LEG technology will allow for easy application, and the effervescent nature of the formulation allows the product to disperse upon contact with water.
The concentrated formulation can now be easily handled, weighing less than one-tenth of the sand granule-based formulation, and has the flexibility of being applied through a handheld dispenser. The formulation is also uniquely fit for drone application methods, which are becoming more prevalent in Asia. Furthermore, this technology requires less logistics, improves grower convenience, and provides excellent and long-lasting control against rice pests. As I noted, our innovations will bring important solution to farmers, including those in markets where the diamides have not been used. An important example is FMC's new Exirel bait, containing Cyazypyr for fruit fly control in the olive and citrus market in Southern Europe. This new product will be easy for growers to apply and provides excellent protection against many types of fruit flies.
As another example, our versatile Premium Star mixture product for control of chewing and sucking insects opens up a new market segment for the diamides. This patent-pending, easy-to-use combination of Rynaxypyr and bifenthrin is the first product to control both types of pests in Brazil and Argentina, and it received priority approval from Brazilian authorities. Premium Star has a dual mode of action, and it is broad spectrum with both immediate and extended control that can manage ever-evolving pest dynamics. Our pipeline of diamide innovation will drive growth of these compounds well into the next decade, and the patents for these new products will extend to nearly the middle of the century, providing critical, unique tools to growers around the world. Turning to one more pillar of our strategy, commercial excellence. The power of the Rynaxypyr and Cyazypyr product brands should not be underestimated.
Multiple market research agencies have spotlighted their unparalleled brand awareness and brand loyalty. While there's always a segment of growers inclined toward generics, there's a larger segment of growers who associate our brands with outstanding, reliable performance and crop safety. Leveraging the strength of that brand equity gives FMC the edge to build upon and introduce new innovations, enter new markets, and continue to be the trusted provider of insect control solutions for growers. Lastly, FMC's diamide products are based on high quality and environmentally sound manufacturing, including proper waste handling and water management and energy use that fits with FMC's Net Zero goal and the UN sustainability goals. Any company focused on its Scope 3 obligations and environmental footprint will be challenged if it considers purchasing one of the diamides from a source other than FMC or a source supplied by FMC.
Ultimately, while generics will enter the market with basic diamide products, FMC's proven formulations will continue to stand out in terms of performance and value, which will drive further farmer adoption. FMC will continue to innovate using the market understanding of our commercial teams, the strength of our R&D organization, and the vision of the entire organization to develop and bring new diamide products to growers everywhere. This same collective innovation mindset permeates the rest of FMC's portfolio. FMC has a history of developing innovative products to address the needs of growers. For example, FMC transformed the control of soil pests in corn in the U.S. with Capture LFR, the first insect control product ever available that is compatible with liquid fertilizer and thus can be incorporated into growers' standard planting program.
This same innovation was the foundation for our recently introduced patented Xyway fungicide, which is applied at planting and provides season-long control of key diseases in corn and other row crops, thereby reducing the need for subsequent fungicide treatments. This revolutionary fungicide increases yield with fewer inputs. Another such example is the LQM liquid formulation technology we developed for the SU herbicides, which have been important tools for wheat growers in Europe for many years, historically used as dry formulations.... This patented technology combines SUs and active ingredients with different modes of action to create unique liquid products with improved performance. The benefits include optimized droplet formation, improved spray retention and coverage of leaf surfaces, and enhanced uptake of the product, resulting in improved weed control and superior performance.
Powerful innovation also comes in the form of mixtures, such as Authority Edge, an important new tool for soybean farmers in the U.S. Authority Edge was designed to be the next generation to Authority Supreme to meet the demands of growers in the U.S. Midwest. This unique blend of two powerful AIs delivers unmatched weed control and longer residual in a low and flexible use rate product. Looking ahead, innovative formulations, product concepts, and application technologies will be important contributors to FMC's growth beyond just the diamides. Through our focus on grower needs and their evolving challenges, FMC will continue to bring to the market innovative solutions based on proven technology. But even more transformative are new active ingredients with new modes of action. This Monday, November thirteenth, FMC achieved a significant milestone, submitting the first registration application for Dodhylex.
By 2026, we anticipate our first launch of Dodhylex, a new mode of action herbicide effective on the most challenging grass weeds in rice. Further dossier submissions of Dodhylex are planned in key markets across the globe over the next several years. There are four major new compounds that will be launched from our development pipeline over the next 10 years. Fluindapyr, a fungicide that we've recently launched in the U.S., Paraguay, and Argentina, and for which we'll have a major launch in Brazil soybeans next year. Isoflex, the herbicide we launched in Australia and will be launching in Argentina this season, with significant launches in Europe expected in the next few years. Dodhylex, the rice herbicide I just mentioned, and rimisoxafen, an exciting herbicide effective against resistant weeds in corn and soybeans, which we anticipate launching later this decade.
Collectively, these new active ingredients will drive approximately $2 billion in sales by 2033. Our pipeline of new active ingredients is expected to be a powerful driver of FMC growth over the near term and long term. We intend to bring innovative and transformative technologies in all indications and all regions, addressing grower challenges for years to come. Agriculture is evolving, and the size, scope, and diversity of our portfolio enables us to meet growers' needs today and in the future. The future of agriculture prioritizes sustainable yield on the acre. We will see acceleration of the use of more modern inputs, everything from precision ag to biologicals and more modern chemistries like the diamides.
Using these tools in combination, growers will achieve more production out of the land they cultivate, which is vital to feed the ever-growing world population, and they will have to do so without creating more farmland, while using less water, less energy, and less labor, all with a reduced environmental impact. For companies supporting growers in this enormous task, it will be critical to tailor solutions to address growers' evolving needs. It's not about the volume you sell, it's about the value you create. New modes of action are going to be more and more essential for growers as they face increasing pest resistance, more extreme weather, and increased demand for output. There is tremendous value in both our current portfolio and our pipeline, and to accelerate the discovery and advancement of our pipeline, we have to continue to push the envelope when it comes to innovation.
You'll hear more from Dr. Seva Rostovtsev next, as he talks through our R&D initiatives and reviews our pipeline.
Thank you, Diane, and hello, and thank you for joining us today. As Diane mentioned, our R&D organization is focused on solving growers' future challenges with novel modes of action, new modalities, and new formulations. FMC has a culture of innovation. We believe that great ideas can come from any level in the organization, and as a team, we are in constant pursuit of new and differentiated technologies that help protect and improve productivity of farms across the globe. For centuries, agricultural lands expanded to meet food demands, but there is a finite amount of land, and as the population increases, growers need to achieve the greatest yield from the land that they farm. Innovation is essential.
Our role as an innovation company is to help them do that sustainably by providing a portfolio of solutions that enable farmers to address pest pressure while also improving soil efficiency, soil quality, using water and inputs more efficiently, and protecting pollinators and other beneficial insects. To help achieve this, we use the FMC Sustainability Assessment Tool, an example of which is pictured on the slide. In R&D, we worked on projects which are 5-15 years away from commercialization. We need to be aware of the challenges growers face today, but most importantly, we must anticipate the issues that might become important in the future. We consider the emergence of new pests, the development of resistance, climate change, and evolving regulatory requirements. We have traditionally relied on synthetic chemistry to develop new solutions that offer growers unique modes of action to control pests.
Synthetic chemistry will continue to play a significant role in crop protection, but we now have a new group of modalities and approaches to work with in R&D. We are looking at different types of modalities such as biologicals, proteins, and nucleic acids, to help manage crops and control harmful pests. Over the next 15 minutes, I look forward to sharing with you how FMC is accelerating the speed of crop protection innovation and advancing the discovery and commercialization of our new active ingredient pipeline. FMC's global R&D team of more than 800 employees, biologists, chemists, weed scientists, entomologists, plant pathologists, and microbiologists, is guiding one of the most robust discovery and development pipelines in our industry. Our pipeline is well-balanced between the three indication areas: weed, insect, and disease control, and covers the entire range of target markets.
It is highly valuable because it is biased towards new modes of action. We have currently over 25 leads, and half of them are new modes of action. We're passionate about discovering new solutions that will become technical and commercial winners. The R&D pipeline is managed through a stage-gate process that has two parts: discovery and development. The two sides are very different, but they both follow a very rigorous process to ensure, to ensure we're advancing the best candidates from discovery to development. Our discovery organization is identifying and creating new molecules the world has never seen to control pests that challenge growers. In the discovery process, we find and optimize new areas of chemistry with promising biological activity.
We use many different approaches to generate starting points of research and drive programs forward by focusing on meeting and anticipating future registration requirements, as well as other criteria for successful, competitive commercial products. We use both phenotypic and target-based approaches to optimize leads, and progressing a program for discovery can take up to five years. We advance an area from discovery to development only when it meets an objective set of promotion criteria. The focus areas are indicated on the right side of the slide. Most importantly, there must be evidence that it can become a successful commercial product. The collective effort to bring promising solutions into development pipeline is a tremendous achievement. We aim to move one new area from discovery into development every year.
We have been expanding our discovery approach to include new tools and technologies to help us solve growers' problems quicker and at lower costs. Data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are becoming more important for decision making, both in the lab and in the field. We believe that artificial intelligence will change the way we do work on R&D by saving time and reducing costs. Here are a couple of examples. In collaboration with Optibrium, a company that builds software for small molecule design and optimization, we have started using machine learning and AI to help us sample the chemical space to improve our heat generation. Having the right type of data and the right amount of it is crucial for success. Early results indicate that we should be able to take several months out of the discovery optimization process.
We look forward to applying these lessons in many other areas of R&D. For our biological pipeline, we're partnering with the bioengineering department of the Technical University of Denmark to discover and screen microbe-based biological crop protection solutions. We're using machine learning methods and AI to map high volumes of phenotypic and molecular data to crop protection performance. From virtual screening and predictive modeling to field performance, machine learning methods open up new approaches for the discovery and development of new generations of crop protection products. This holds a great potential for the future of R&D. DNA-encoded libraries, or DEL technology, is a cutting-edge approach for identifying molecules with biological activity on the target of interest. DEL allows for the screening of billions of molecules against one or multiple targets within a single experiment.
We have been testing this technology in our discovery programs and have been able to perform, in a matter of days, experiments that would have taken us months to complete in the past. We have already generated hits that were added to our pipeline using this approach. These discovery processes add new technologies to our toolbox, advance our discovery pipeline, and further commercialization of the new active ingredients. But before we get to commercialization, we go through the development phase. When a molecule is in the development phase, we test and develop all attributes needed for a commercial product. We run the required studies to support registrations to register the molecule and sell the molecule. We test the molecule in the field to develop a label for the use of the product. We develop formulations for specific crops and regions, and we put together a manufacturing process.
In total, given the need to test in actual growing seasonal conditions, as well as the extensive studies we need to do, which are required by regulators, it takes 7-12 years to develop and launch a synthetic commercial product. Biologicals generally take less time, and obviously, we want to be at the shorter end of this range, so we kicked off an effort to identify additional ways to optimize our development pipeline. In late 2022, Fungicide-One advanced into development pipeline, getting us closer to providing growers with the next generation fungicide. Fungicide-One is exciting because it demonstrates excellent efficacy on Asian soybean rust, a very aggressive disease that has developed resistance to most fungicides in the market. Because of this, there is a high demand for new tools to control the disease.
Fungicide-One is expected to strengthen FMC as a key player in Brazil's significant foliar fungicide market, and further expand our fungicide portfolio into other countries and regions. Fungicide-One reflects FMC's commitment to bringing new tools to growers, even with the known modes of action. This new technology, together with our ability to monitor resistance in major agricultural areas of Brazil, will bring significant gains to South American soybean producers and position FMC among the leading companies in the foliar soybean disease control market. In addition to fungicide, we have development molecules for insect and weed control. In the weed control category, I want to highlight the new herbicide, Dodhylex. We're excited to launch the first new mode of action herbicide in 30 years. Dodhylex, the global brand name for tetflupyrolimet, is a new mode of action herbicide, effective on the most challenging grass weeds and rice.
This is particularly remarkable because rice is a grass, and controlling a grass weed in a grass crop can be challenging. The molecule is a significant advancement for the agriculture industry, as it will help combat resistant weeds. Studies show that Dodhylex provides season-long control of important grass weeds in the rice market, as well as control of broad-leaf weeds and sedges. We know there are opportunities for Dodhylex outside of the rice market, and we are testing this active ingredient in other crops, including sugarcane, wheat, soybean, and corn. This new mode of action herbicide was discovered at the Stine Research Center, and is a testament to our commitment to innovation and a disciplined approach to advancing the most promising new molecules. We utilize high volume screening, chemical genomics, directional design, and target-based methods to get to the final compound.
That gets us the activity and selectivity we want and need in a commercial product. We bring the combination of principle and sciences to bear on all the other projects in our pipeline. In addition to Dodhylex, we have several other promising herbicides in our robust development pipeline. Many of the herbicides are new modes of action for use across regions in multiple crop settings. Next, I will briefly highlight an insect control molecule in our development pipeline. indazapyroxamet insecticide is a novel technology targeting aphids on high value and row crops. It protects the plant from damage caused by destructive aphids feeding on leaves, while also protecting the plant from viruses that can be transmitted by the aphids in certain vegetables and ornamentals. We're excited about this technology because this gives us a selective piercing succulent insect control product, filling a gap in our current portfolio.
Our development pipeline is robust with synthetic chemistry, biologicals and pheromones. Diane presented the financial benefit expected from these molecules. You will hear more from Bénédicte Flambard on our biological products and pheromones later this afternoon. In R&D, we are broadening our focus to utilize cutting-edge technology through focused partnerships and collaborations. Deeper and stronger associations across the crop protection industry are key to accelerating the development and commercialization of new technologies. At FMC, we know we can't go it alone, and we're actively developing a highly networked ecosystem. The innovation ecosystem has three key objectives: identify opportunities to strengthen the core portfolio, expand our business, and reimagine the future of FMC. Recent examples of our collaborations include Micropep Technologies and AgroSpheres. In December 2022, FMC and Micropep launched a strategic collaboration to develop biological solutions to control destructive herbicide-resistant weeds that reduce crop yields.
The collaboration is centered on accelerating the development of short herbicidal protein molecules naturally produced by plant cells. By combining FMC's R&D capabilities with companies like Micropep, we strive to expedite and improve the success rate for new innovative technologies. Earlier this year, FMC invested in AgroSpheres, a startup developing biodegradable microencapsulation technology to improve the delivery, stability, and efficacy of biological crop protection products based on RNA interference. External collaborations, partnerships, and investments can enhance the diversity of our research efforts. We will continue to partner with and invest in companies that are complementary to our own actions. Our R&D ecosystem approach is bringing new solutions to the discovery and development of crop protection products through partnerships and research collaborations. To recap, our R&D organization is driven by a set of priorities that guide how we approach our mission every day.
Foremost is anticipating grower needs, translating their needs into potential market opportunities, and directing our research to create new, sustainable products that address those opportunities. Synthetic chemistry will continue to play a key role in crop protection, but we have an entirely new group of approaches to work with in R&D. We're looking at different types of modalities, such as biologicals, proteins, and nucleic acids, to help manage and control harmful pests. We're utilizing data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to accelerate decision-making and advance our pipeline. Through the work at our global innovation centers and field stations, we seek to understand unique local needs in key markets, and position our innovations in the growers' programs. Later, you will hear more about pheromone trials that we are conducting at our research stations in all four regions.
This deep knowledge leads to solutions that make a difference for growers and enables us to accelerate the adoption of new technology. Our future is based on technology. There is a tremendous value in our R&D pipeline. With over 40 new active ingredients and over 30 areas with new modes of action, our pipeline is robust. As Diane noted, Isoflex, fluindapyr, Dodhylex, and rimisoxafen are expected to collectively drive $2 billion in sales by 2033. The other product, products in the development pipeline are expected to launch or significantly scale beyond 2033, representing over $1 billion in additional peak sales potential. Our R&D pipeline is so strong because it is based on product concepts. We are truly focusing on addressing the growers' problems. Ronaldo Pereira will now share how FMC is getting closer to growers to increase and expedite grower adoption of our newest innovations.
Thank you, Seva, and good afternoon, everyone. You just heard from Seva about the powerful new technologies we're bringing to the market in the coming years. You also heard from Diane about how these technologies are expected to materially enhance our portfolio. As you can imagine, the commercial organization is very excited about our pipeline and how we do change our footprint. This will, however, require our commercial approach to evolve so we can help growers maximize their results and, at the same time, help us realize the full potential of our pipeline. FMC's commercial organization today is set up to serve over 20,000 customers and millions of farmers over 100 countries. We have over 10,000 SKUs, which are used on farms ranging in size from a few acres for smallholder growers to thousands of acres for some of our largest growers.
FMC employs both staff, commercial reps, as well as seasonal contractors to serve these different markets. The go-to-market approach varies by country, but largely follows a pattern of selling to the channel, which consists of distributors, co-ops, and retailers, before the product ultimately reaches the grower. Commercial teams are typically comprised of roles such as account managers that focus on establishing alliances with channel partners. We also have technical reps that focus on assisting the partner's sales force on promoting our products to growers. Going forward, as we launch new products with new modes of action, we'll have to expand our presence and influence, ensuring growers become familiar with these new products and can correctly understand the value they can bring to a farming operation.
As you can see here, our product mix, as well as our crop mix, will look different in the future compared to how it looks today. As we advance our pipeline into commercialization and continue to launch premium formulations of existing active ingredients, we are expected to increase our presence significantly in herbicides, fungicides, and Plant Health products to supplement our traditional strength in insecticides. Our crop exposure is expected to increase in cereals, while we maintain important positions in soybeans and fruits and vegetables. FMC may have historically been underrepresented in some of these market segments, yet we have the potential for significant market share gains in the future. FMC's portfolio is expected not to only become more innovative, but also more complete, as it will cover several crop protection needs.... will also become an essential partner in enhancing crop yields.
This breadth in portfolio will require a deeper and more influential relationship with growers, especially when it comes to their decision-making process. Let's take a look at the key criteria that farmers use while making a product decision. Growers broadly consider two sets of drivers. For existing technologies, most of the focus is on programs, availability, brand reputation, and other commercial considerations. For new products, on the other hand, growers take a different approach. They will not use an innovative, yet unknown technology just because there is an attractive commercial program supporting it. They will first want to make sure that that is the right technology for their needs, and that it will not put their yields at risk. Technical considerations become the driver for product choice.
The average farmer only has 40 or so growing seasons in their lifetime, and this results in a careful approach to new products. Farmers want to see consistent research results over time to develop trust in a new technology. Products have to incorporate several attributes, including easier use, agronomic efficiency, consistency, and sustainability. These attributes need to demonstrate, need to be demonstrated under local conditions and against local pests. Growers rely on universities and other research institutions, channel reps, neighbors, and independent crop protection advisors to gain important insights, but they ultimately want to develop some experience with the new products, either by testing it or by using it on a small scale before they move to adopt the product on the entire farm.
In this scenario, our role is to be closer to growers during the entire crop cycle, helping them to get familiar with the products and focusing on agronomic attributes rather than on the commercial offer, until growers feel confident to advance to larger-scale adoption. In fact, we have already started down this path of collaboration with growers in some key segments and geographies. Over the last few years, we have talked about the market access investments we were making to extend FMC's influence in select segments. These actions resulted in some early wins using parts of the trusted advisor approach. A few of the target segments for this initiative included corn in the U.S., diamides in Canada, and a variety of crops in Colombia and southern Brazil.
In each of these cases, we either had new technology that we were bringing to the market, or we were driving adoption of existing technology in an underserved segment of the market. Let's take a closer look at one example related to the U.S., the U.S. market. You already heard from Diane on how we rapidly increased the sales of a new fungicide, Xyway, which provides season-long systemic disease protection in corn with a unique at-plant application. FMC had a minimal presence in fungicide within the U.S., especially for corn in the Midwest, prior to Xyway's launch. We increased our technical presence in the market, especially with disease management capabilities leading up to the launch of Xyway.
FMC also invested 2 years in extensive demonstrations and plot tours, both in person and virtual, to share results as well as address the how and the why behind Xyway's efficacy, and we continue to drive growers to adopt this technology on every acre. Since at-plant application happens at the time of seeding, we're embracing the opportunity to be among the first products applied on the farm. FMC's fungicide sales at the grower level grew 3 times from crop years 2020 to 2023 in the U.S., led by Xyway, which accounted for almost 40% of our fungicide sales in the country in 2023. Another example of prioritizing agronomics and leading with technical expertise comes from Australia, in our successful launch and growth of Overwatch, a new herbicide for ryegrass and other weeds impacting crops such as wheat, barley, and canola.
FMC introduced Overwatch based on Isoflex into the pre-emergent market when growers were struggling with resistance developing to older products. We invested in hundreds of demo plots and dozens of local field trials in partnership with our retail partners over a two-year time frame. Thousands of growers and agronomists were engaged in various technical aspects of the product, such as crop safety, residual control, mixed partners, and the ultimate yield benefits. This agronomic approach was completed by a strong brand awareness campaign. But behind all this, there was an investment on expanding our field presence and becoming part of the target grower communities, making ourselves known and available to key influencers. The product launch handily exceeded our commercial goals and helped to drive growth of the overall Australian business by increasing FMC's share of wallet among the cereal farmers.
Just within 3 years of the launch, we achieved a 10% market share in the pre-emergent herbicide market for cereals. As we look to the future, we have selected 12 markets to target with our trusted advisor strategy. These 12 countries accounted for almost 70% of FMC sales in 2022, and the respective crop protection markets make up over 60% of the global crop protection market today. The specific segments we are targeting within these countries align with the technology coming from FMC's pipeline, as well as crops and indications where we see unmet needs and opportunities to gain market share. For example, the rice herbicide based on Dodhylex is expected to provide significant opportunities for growth in India and Southeast Asia. Our investments will vary by target segment, but they will share some common themes and metrics to gauge performance.
First, we'll focus on the people aspect by continuing to increase our presence at the grower level with technical and commercial resources that can influence growers' decisions and raise FMC's brand visibility. The additional resources will be a combination of new hires, as well as developing new capabilities in the existing sales force. Second, technology investments will focus on existing local innovation hubs, such as the ones we already have in places like Brazil, U.S., and India. These hubs will help drive regular engagement with growers on existing as well as new products. They will also help us engaging with researchers, crop consultants, and channel partners. Moreover, we'll leverage digital and precision agriculture tools to connect with growers at different points. For example, drone spraying services in India will help gain traction with the smallholder farmers.
Another example would be the use of social media in fragmented markets, such as Southeast Asia, to reach multiple growers without adding significant sales personnel on the ground. The progress we make will be tracked using specific key performance indicators or KPIs. Market share gains, market share of wallet, share within a crop segment, and ramping new product introduction are some examples of KPIs that we are using to track progress on this strategy. The ultimate goal of these investments is to accelerate adoption of the new technologies and to capture the full value of our R&D pipeline. In order to advise growers on holistic and sustainable yield improvement, we need to deliver the best solutions, whether that's a biological product or a synthetic active ingredient, or a digital application. To talk more about our biologicals and broader Plant Health business, Bénédicte Flambard is up next. Thank you.
So thank you, Ronaldo, Diane. Good afternoon to everybody. So 10 years ago, FMC saw increasing demand for sustainable solutions in agriculture, and we identified three key market drivers, including increased pest resistance, regulatory hurdles, and consumer preferences that led us to explore opportunities in Plant Health. Since then, we have built a foundation to be a leader in biological crop protection, and I will talk more about this and how FMC's leading Plant Health business will help achieve our strategic plan. Our current Plant Health business represents 4% of our overall revenue as of 2022 and includes crop nutrition and biologicals platform, which is expected to be a significant source of forward growth. Our crop nutrition portfolio includes differentiated formulation that enable us to enhance the value of our product compared to the broad market offering.
When applied to seeds and plants, this formulation enhance nutrient uptake and nutrient use efficiency, which increase crop quality and yield. We are creating an umbrella brand for this product to strengthen our positioning and stand out in the growing market. Our biologicals portfolio represents the largest area of growth. This is due to new modes of action and additional sustainability profile that we're able to provide to growers. Biologicals are derived from naturally occurring materials and can be used to improve nutrient uptake, control insects, or protect against diseases while improving yield and increasing crop resilience for more sustainable farming practices. Our Plant Health business, like our commercial business, is science-backed and innovation-driven, which has allowed us to launch approximately 40 products in biologicals alone in 24 countries globally over the past 5 years, and we are one of the few companies with a full global presence.
Our geographic footprint, coupled with our core portfolio, market access, and precision ag technologies, position us as a top-tier global provider of integrated solutions to help grow sustainability reward. One of the strategic imperatives of our long-range plan is to grow FMC's leading Plant Health business with a focus on biosolutions, with a goal to achieve $2 billion in sales by 2033. Our strategy will build on three pillars that emphasize biologicals as a key investment area, integrated solutions that pair biologicals with synthetic, and a dual approach that leverages both organic and inorganic lever for growth. The global biological market is expected to grow rapidly at double-digit in all four regions, reaching an estimated of $26 billion by 2033, with a CAGR over 10%, greatly outpacing the overall crop protection market.
This growth is enabled by factors including regulatory requirement, consumer awareness, new technologies, and the need for more sustainable solutions. Integrated solutions that include synthetics and biological products will drive growth for the biologicals market as technologies become more advanced and growers demand more sustainable solutions. Integrated solutions can slow down the development of resistance and extend the life of actives due to their different mode of actions, allowing us to optimize performance while preserving resources, enhancing soil health, and protecting biodiversity in the field. The third pillar is a dual approach to growth, which include inorganic growth from licensing, partnership, and M&A, in addition to organic growth from our in-house research and development. Inorganic growth will enable us to access new technology or new markets quickly.
As we look ahead to our goal of $2 billion in sales by 2033, we will be concentrating our efforts on five areas: making investments to enhance our capabilities, growing our commercial portfolio, successfully launching new products, evaluating opportunities for inorganic growth, and finally, scaling our pheromone platform. First, to strengthen our foundation for growth, we are investing in enhanced capabilities with the expansion of our biological facilities at the European Innovation Center and establishing dedicated resources for Plant Health. This includes an independent biological commercial organization in select countries, which will increase our presence with the growers and provide the technical and commercial resources that influence grower decision, as Ronaldo mentioned. Next, we are growing our commercial portfolio by increasing penetration in existing markets and focusing on scaling up in markets where our presence has been limited today.
This includes both introduction of existing products into new markets and extending the use of existing products to additional crop and pests. For example, Provilar biofungicide, a foliar bacillus combination to address key diseases like leaf spot and white mold in soybean, cotton, and beans, will soon be available under different brand names in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru in Latin America, and Korea, Japan, China, and Australia in APAC. Third, we are launching new products from our robust development pipeline, which includes both second generation and new active ingredients. We will continue to accelerate the launch of new products through our internal R&D efforts to continue helping growers solve their most pressing crop protection challenges. For example, we recently launched Entasia biofungicide in India and RhizoMagic biostimulants in Mexico. In the U.S., we launched two biofungicides, bionematicide, Zironar, for in-soil applications and Avodigen for seed treatment.
Fourth, we are leveraging complementary partnerships to gain access to third-party products that fill gaps in our portfolio, like our collaboration with C6 Energy. In addition, we are continuously evaluating external opportunities to quickly access the right biological capabilities, whether on the ground or in production. And finally, we are launching and scaling our pheromone platform, which we expect to make up a significant part of our $2 billion goal. I will talk more about this in a minute, but before, let me highlight the key attributes of pheromones. Pheromone solutions help growers manage insects through mating disruption, reducing overall egg-laying adults, and decreasing the next generation of the target insect population. By preventing insects from reproducing, pheromones can add an extra layer to insect control, helping growers manage pests and resistance with an excellent safety profile. Pheromones do not have a negative impact on the environment.
They precisely target specific pests and do not harm beneficial insects, such as pollinators. As we expect pheromone to make a significant part of our $2 billion in revenue, I will spend the remainder of my time speaking about our progress within pheromones and our plans for product launch. Since purchasing BioPhero in 2022, we have already made significant investments to scale and accelerate the launch of our pheromone products. The expansion of our biological facilities in greenhouses at the European Innovation Center will support our R&D efforts and increase our capacity for discovering new AI and new technologies. We have also strengthened our discovery and development pipelines with new innovations, and have secured our first commercial contract. With BioPhero, we acquired 12 patent family, including more than 40 patents and 60 patent applications, providing production and yeast engineering protection for specific pheromones.
Already since closing, we have filed six additional patent families covering pheromone formulations, uses, and application with other actives. FMC will, of course, continue to protect current and new product offerings within the pheromone space by securing intellectual property and ensuring freedom to operate. Our acquisition of BioPhero provided us with game-changing technology that can produce pheromones through fermentation of an engineered biological yeast. The overall biomanufacturing process uses fewer steps and is expected to reduce production costs by a factor up to five, compared to the actual industry standards of chemical manufacturing process for those pheromones. We are developing a portfolio of unique sprayable pheromone products that have never been used for row crop before, together with synthetics and precision ag technologies in an integrated pest management system.
We are in the process of building our production capabilities at our Rønland facility in Denmark to scale up production to commercialization and leverage our existing resources and know-how. These innovations will be key to unlock competitive cost and ease for the grower, and will mark a new era of biologicals with no compromise on performance or sustainability. Because of the reduced cost and ability to scale, we expect to be the first company to offer quality mating disruption products to row crop growers at lower price points, expanding pheromones application much beyond high-value, smaller acreage specialty crops, such as fruits and vegetables. After successful field development trials, we expect to launch our first pheromone product, SoPhero FALL, targeting the fall armyworm for corn, starting in Brazil in 2025. This product will be the first sprayable row crop application of pheromones.
SoPhero FALL is also the first product of many coming from the FMC pheromone platform. It targets lepidopteran pests that are inherently difficult to control using the mating disruption mode of action. Brazil is the largest market for biologicals in Latin America, with a market of more than $900 million. Biological products are gaining in Brazil due to regulatory pressures against synthetics and favorable regulation for biologicals. Additionally, row crops such as sugarcane, corn, soybean, and cotton are the predominant market for biologicals. So selecting Brazil as our initial launch provides us with strong market access and opportunities for significant growth. We expect to sequence product launches in select countries in Latin America, APAC, and Africa in 2026, and with rapid expansion to additional countries in 2027. So the concept of pheromone for insect control is not new.
However, many growers around the world, especially in the row crop market, could not access it due to high costs and lack of sprayable application technology. That is why we're working directly with growers to prepare the launch of our first pheromone product, acting as a trusted advisor, as Ronaldo discussed. For growers to adapt this technology, they need to be well-informed and educated on the technical aspects of pheromone, including their mode of action, target tests, and appropriate application timing, and the technology needs to be tailored to meet their specific needs. Our first step in working with the growers directly was to understand the specific pest problems to their field. We also conducted in-depth market research to understand their perception and knowledge of the pheromone, to determine areas where we could provide support.
Our market research showed us that while the general concept of pheromone was understood, there were gaps regarding the technology, integration with synthetics, and use over large area. We launched trials in the field with growers to evaluate and show them benefits of pheromones, and we will start trialing an integrated solution using Arc farm intelligence, and diamide to position FMC as a preferred partner for for insect control. Since closing the BioPhero acquisition, we have conducted nearly 60 field trials in 15 countries across four regions. While trials are ongoing, we have seen positive yield improvement of up to 15% in Brazil. As you can see in these pictures, without pheromone application, there is significant damage to both the ear and the leaf of corn, something we do not see with pheromone application. Growers are also very much responding positively to the benefit of using pheromones.
As you can see, biologicals are an important part of FMC's business strategy and will be an important factor in achieving our goal of $2 billion in sales in the next decade. FMC has built a world-class business with more than 50 biological products across 50 countries, offering crop protection for both high-value crops and row crops. We have a robust pipeline of differentiated and patented technology developed through our biological R&D organizations, as well as third-party collaboration. We have significant opportunity for scalability of pheromones as we make that technology available for row crop. Together with our synthetics and our novel precision ag technologies, FMC is well positioned to continue providing growers with integrated solutions that benefit their crop management. After the break, you will hear more from Thaisa Hugennayer , our Vice President of Procurement, Logistics, and Global Facilities. Thank you.
All right. For our folks in the room, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna reassemble here at 2:25 P.M. For folks on the webcast as well, 2:25 P.M., we'll have Thaisa come up, and then Andrew, as well as Mark, and then do the Q&A. There are refreshments outside on my left, and there are, the restrooms are right out there as well. So again, 2:25, we're gonna restart.
All right, folks, let's settle down. Folks wanna please grab their seats. We're almost at 2:25 P.M., and we'll go live at 2:25 P.M. for the webcast again. Thank you. All right, hopefully, everyone's come back. All right, welcome back, everyone. Now let me introduce Thaisa Hogeweijer. Please, Thaisa.
Thank you, Zack, and good afternoon, everyone. Our procurement, operations, and logistics teams work together seamlessly to ensure we reliably procure raw materials, efficiently manufacture products, and deliver those products to customers on time. Our investment in these functions during the last several years has helped FMC successfully navigate significant global and regional disruptions. Today, I will discuss what we are doing to further strengthen these functions at FMC, applying what we have learned over the last five years to evolve our supply chain, increase resilience, accelerate decision-making, and further improve our efficiency and cost structure. These initiatives will support the company's mid- and long-term goals and prepare us for potential future challenges. To begin, let me provide some details about our procurement, operations, and logistics organization.
... These teams work together closely and partner with our commercial teams to carefully plan for the right products to be manufactured at the right time, in the right quantity, and shipped to the right location anywhere in the world. The scope and scale of this collaboration is broad, from internal teams, physical assets, to our relationships with suppliers of raw materials, intermediates, and other products and services. All of this must work seamlessly, must work seamlessly to serve over 20,000 customers across more than 100 countries around the world. We purchase about 20,000 different items annually from over 15,000 vendors. We operate 21 FMC manufacturing sites worldwide, with our largest facilities in Denmark, India, and the U.S. Our teams are structured around a centrally led strategy with very strong local execution.
Our approach to supply chain resilience, it starts with a structured, cross-functional process to quickly anticipate, assess, and respond to events throughout the world. FMC leaders and decision makers in the procurement, logistics, manufacturing, supply chain, and finance, meet at least weekly to review and report on local events that could potentially trigger a supply issue. They discuss potential impacts to the business and mitigating actions. Our teams are positioned across the globe in critical locations, giving us an early line of sight on what is happening on the ground. This provides insights and intelligence, where just one day can make the difference between delivering products on time or missing the window completely. Over the last several years, we have strengthened our relationship with strategic suppliers and focused on exploring options that bring supply flexibility.
This could include alternative materials, adjusting specifications, or in some cases, moving manufacturing capacity to different countries. Procurement and operations work closely with R&D and marketing to support the transition from products in the development pipeline to launch. We develop efficient and reliable supply networks that support the scale-up of production to meet customer demand as per the launch plans. And as you heard from Bénédicte, we have more than 50 biological products in our Plant Health portfolio, with many more expected to launch in the coming years. Biologicals have a very different profile compared to synthetics, different raw materials, unique manufacturing capabilities, and even specific logistics requirements. Our supply chain strategy needs to account for this and be agile enough to handle the unique needs and future growth of our Plant Health business.
We have a strong track record of success in managing procurement, operations, and logistics at FMC, especially when we were put to task over the last several years. Impacts to global supply chains were dramatic during and after the pandemic, but FMC prevailed with minimal disruption. We learned much during this time that will serve us well in supporting the company's future growth. But we cannot get comfortable. There's more than we needed to do to prepare for significant increases in product introductions, the launch of new biologicals, and frankly, to be ready for potential new global or regional events that could impact supply chains around the world. Turning to our strategic plan, our supply chains are focused on further building a de-risk and cost competitive network, one that is prepared to best support the company's growth and to manage future challenges or disruptions.
We intend to continue to lead the industry with the strongest, most resilient, and cost-efficient supply network possible. Our goal is to operate a transformed, digitized supply chain network through the improved real-time data, advanced analytical capabilities, de-risk key supply nodes, and optimize formulation flows. We have targeted a couple of critical initiatives to meet this goal: strengthen the resilience of our supply chain while further optimizing our cost position, and this work began in 2021, and implement a differentiated end-to-end supply chain models. This is often referred to as fit-for-purpose model. I will discuss examples of each.
Strengthening the resilience of our supply chain while optimizing our cost position covers four work streams: refreshing our diamide supply strategy, de-risking our global supply chain, developing a supply strategy that addresses the unique needs of our Plant Health business, and finally, enhancing our formulation capabilities that are closer to key customer markets. Each of these streams has dedicated teams that are contributing to the overall resilience and cost competitiveness of our supply chain. Let me comment on one of them, refreshing our diamide supply strategy. Given the importance of our diamide portfolio and the evolving market dynamics, we have been adjusting our supply strategy to better support a post-patent environment, which you will recall Diane discussed earlier. This diamide supply efforts will continue well into next year. Our plans also include developing an integrated model in India, increased ability to flex capacity, and an end-to-end physically optimized flow.
Collectively, these initiatives are delivering increased network resilience. Equally important, they are also continuing to reset costs to new levels of competitiveness. We have several projects well underway with new partners. As I said earlier, FMC's resilience, procurement, operations, and logistics network has weathered unprecedented challenges in global supply chains over the last several years. Our model and processes have served us well, but we must evolve and progress our organization to support FMC's growing business needs. Traditionally, in crop protection and similar industries, supply networks were built from the bottoms up, starting with the available manufacturing assets and existing sources of raw materials, and focused on driving the best unit cost based on internal benchmarks. The network design was primarily focused on what we had to solve for from a manufacturing, purchasing, and logistics perspective.
The structures were rigid, difficult to change, and often somewhat disconnected from the pressures and priorities of our commercial teams. While we have made good progress in the last few years on our model, there is more we are doing to continue our transition to a fit-for-purpose supply chain, featuring segments based on needs, preferences, and profitability. This model, illustrated at the bottom half of this slide, leads to a more intentional design of the network, driven by business needs and focused on supporting growth and efficiency, while successfully managing complexities. To expand on this, we continue to strengthen the connection between our supply chain organization and the commercial teams by refining the segmentation of brands, which you see on this graphic.
This is about defining what is cost sensitive, what requires greater speed to respond to new demands, or what needs a higher level of service quality, perhaps for new products entering the market. Based on this input, we determine how the end-to-end supply chain should be adjusted to best meet those needs. Our investments match specific customer value propositions. For example, with cost-sensitive brands, we perform a cost deconstruction exercise to determine the right levers to pull that will drive down the total cost of supply. Another example is with our growing Plant Health portfolio. Here, we are studying the appropriate supply network model for a business with unique requirements. For example, the development to launch process for biologicals happens much more rapidly than the synthetics portfolio, so speed on establishing the supply network is key.
A fit-for-purpose, end-to-end supply chain network is about making informed, strategic, and intentional choices that best align our procurement, operations, and logistics models with the commercial priorities. The end game is greater efficiency, lower costs, and stronger reliability. Procurement, operations, and logistics have a significant role to play in supporting the company's growth goals today and in the mid and long term. The launch of new synthetic and biological products over the next several years will demand a supply chain and operations network that is resilient, reliable, and extremely cost effective. Strengthening the resilience of our supply chain while optimizing costs, as well as implementing fit-for-purpose, end-to-end supply chain models where necessary, will build the strong base we have today and supports the business' future growth aspirations. Thank you for your attention.
To discuss the details of how FMC's strategic plan translates into strong financial performance in the next three years, as well as over the longer-term horizon, I am pleased to introduce you to Andrew Sandifer, our CFO.
Thanks, Thaisa, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for investing a bit of your time with us today. Throughout the course of the day, you've heard our leaders elaborate on our pathways for growth. These include expanding our portfolio by introducing new and innovative products, including biologicals, as well as the new molecules in our synthetic active ingredient pipeline, strengthening our relationships with growers, and effectively managing our supply chain. With that in mind, let's walk through how all of these factors impact our financial outlook. In his opening comments today, Mark referred to our near-term goals and long-term aspirations. I'll dig into both in a moment, but first, let me share some thoughts on why we chose these specific metrics and timelines.
At our last Investor Day in 2018, we provided a five-year outlook for top and bottom line growth, as well as for cash generation and conversion. Clearly, the significant geopolitical and macroeconomic events that occurred over the last five years, not the least of which was the global pandemic, were not anticipated in that outlook. Going forward, we'll provide a rolling three-year outlook so that we can more regularly adjust our midterm expectations to reflect changing market conditions. We intend to update the three-year outlook each year during our Q4 earnings call, alongside initial guidance for the new year. We're also sharing today our longer-term aspirations, looking out over a 10-year horizon, which we hope will help investors better understand how we believe our portfolio and performance will evolve over a more expansive time frame. Revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow will continue to be key metrics.
We are adding return on invested capital, or ROIC, as a fourth key metric. ROIC is an important indicator of how efficiently we're utilizing the capital provided by both equity and debt, and it is an underrecognized element of FMC's economic profile. I'll speak to this metric in more detail later in my remarks. So with that said, let's look more closely at our key metrics for the near-, mid-, and long-term horizons. For 2024, we see a market in transition, moving past the global channel inventory reset and returning to more meaningful growth through the year. We expect revenue of $4.65 billion-$4.85 billion, representing an improvement of over 3% versus the midpoint of our current 2023 guidance, which we are confirming here today.
EBITDA is expected to improve more substantially, growing to a range of $1.025 billion-$1.125 billion, roughly 8% growth, midpoint to midpoint. We expect ROIC to improve modestly with the growth in earnings, resulting in a ROIC of 10% or more, still well above our weighted average cost of capital, despite historically depressed earnings. We anticipate very strong free cash conversion, driven by higher EBITDA and, more significantly, meaningful cash release from working capital. In 2026, we're targeting revenue of $5.5-$6 billion and EBITDA of $1.3-$1.5 billion, with EBITDA margins returning to the mid-20% range. We expect rolling three-year average free cash conversion of 70+% . We also expect ROIC to return to the mid-teens % range, consistent with FMC's historical performance on this metric.
Looking out to the 10-year horizon, we aspire for FMC's revenue growth to outpace the overall crop protection market by 1.5-2 times or more, while EBITDA margins are maintained in the mid-20% range. Over this period of strong growth, we also expect to maintain ROIC in the mid-teens and rolling three-year average free cash flow conversion of 70% or more. This is a powerful combination: strong top line and bottom line growth, coupled with healthy cash flow and robust return on capital. With these metrics as a foundation, I'd like to provide some additional color on why we're confident that we can achieve our midterm goals and long-term aspirations. But before I do that, let me dig in a bit more deeply into our preliminary outlook for 2024.
To understand our outlook for 2024, we first need to come to terms with what is happening in 2023. As Diane discussed earlier today, the crop protection industry is in the midst of a truly unprecedented global correction. Never before have we seen a year-to-year drop in market size of the magnitude forecasted for 2023, which is likely to dwarf the previous record 8% market drop recorded in 2015. Never before have we seen double-digit market declines in every region of the world at the same time. The 2015 drop was primarily a Brazil event. I won't belabor the point, but the outsized growth in 2022, in reaction to supply disruptions and rapid inflation, is being more than corrected by the abrupt market drop in 2023.
The channel is not just reducing excess inventory, but it is also adjusting to the materially higher cost to carry inventory and the improved availability of crop protection products. Both of these factors may, in fact, push down the amount of inventory the channel is willing to carry. This slide expands on our preliminary outlook for the coming year. 2024 will be a year in which FMC's performance will largely be driven by actions in our control, not market conditions. Our preliminary revenue outlook assumes it will move past the global channel inventory reset in the first part of the year and then shift to more meaningful growth. This suggests that the first quarter is still likely to be down year on year, with revenue progressively improving as we lap the global channel reset over the subsequent quarters.
New products will drive the majority of anticipated revenue growth in 2024, with particularly strong contribution from patent-pending new products in Latin America. This is an important point. We are not counting on market recovery alone to drive revenue growth for FMC in 2024. We expect EBITDA will grow more than twice as fast as revenue in 2024, driven largely by the benefits of our restructuring program. Volume growth, mainly from new products, combined with lower input costs, will be largely offset by the impacts of high-cost inventory, unabsorbed fixed costs, and modest price pressure in select markets. We expect ROIC to improve to above 10% in 2024, driven by improved earnings and lower debt, but still well below historical levels. Free cash flow should be a highlight.
EBITDA growth will help, but free cash flow will primarily be driven by release of cash from working capital. I'll dig into the drivers of this in a few minutes, but overall, we expect to bring the three elements of working capital back into a more normal equilibrium after the disruptions of 2023. Finally, we expect earnings per share to grow faster than EBITDA. Interest expense should decline year to year as we reduce debt, with additional benefits should rates ease. Tax rate is expected to remain in the 14%-16% range. While Mark gave an overview of our restructuring program in his opening remarks, let me share some additional details, given the importance of this program to our 2024 outlook. The restructuring program builds on a number of initiatives identified within our strategic plan, particularly with respect to two of our strategic imperatives.
1, driving a competitive and resilient supply network, and 2, increasing operating leverage and optimizing functional costs. We've chosen to accelerate these actions as part of the restructuring program in order to more quickly align FMC's cost structure to the current market realities, while ensuring we remain positioned for long-term success. Through this program, we'll reduce cost and complexity, as well as improve speed and efficiency. Simplification is a key theme, particularly for our back office operations. And while we're strongly focused on driving rapid P&L benefit through cost reduction, we're not limiting our efforts to just cost cutting. We're also reexamining how we approach forecasting, including improving on our market intelligence processes as a part of this effort. We want to learn from the missed signals in 2023. Certainly, the efforts underway to get closer to growers that Ronaldo described earlier, should provide additional market intelligence.
We're also looking to expand the use of digital platforms with the channel and growers, as well as broadening our use of proprietary and third-party surveys to further enrich our views of the market. In terms of outcomes, our commitments are clear. We'll deliver $150 million or more in run rate savings by the end of 2025. But critically, we'll deliver $50-$75 million in cost savings realized in the P&L in 2024. With these actions and continued disciplined management of the business, we'll return leverage to target levels well below business as usual covenants. We'll return working capital to more normal levels, and we'll enhance and sustain FMC's long-term growth and profitability. So let's now turn from the short term to the mid and long term, starting with revenue.
We expect revenue to grow from about $4.6 billion in 2023 to a midpoint of $5.75 billion in 2026, with more pronounced growth in 2025 and 2026. Through 2033, we expect revenue to grow 1.5-2 times or more, the growth of the overall crop protection market. On a dollar basis, the primary driver of FMC's growth through 2026 is our core portfolio, with approximately 5% compound average growth of both our diamide and other non-diamide core products, in both cases, supported by strong contribution from new products. While smaller in dollar contribution, both the new AI pipeline and Plant Health contribute to FMC's growth over the 2026 horizon, building momentum that accelerates in the latter part of the decade.
Earlier today, Diane discussed the range of expected growth for the global crop protection market. Our 2033 aspirations assume that the crop protection market grows at a rate of 3% or more over the coming decade, consistent with the market's long-term historical performance. We expect the successful execution of our strategic plan to deliver top line growth of 1.5-2 times or more the overall market through 2033. From 2026 to 2033, the core portfolio continues to grow at or above the overall market. The new A.I. pipeline and Plant Health become the largest driver of growth for the company as we commercialize FMC's synthetic and biological pipelines. As a result, FMC's sales mix in 2033 looks very different from today. Diamides remain an important foundation, but will be a significantly smaller portion of the total.
Importantly, the new AI pipeline and Plant Health become a material portion of the total, growing collectively from less than 10% of FMC's portfolio today to over 35% by 2033. With that overall framing, let me now dig a little deeper into some of the key drivers of growth. The diamides have been a strong source of growth for FMC since we acquired the products in late 2017. Earlier today, Diane shared with you our strategy for sustaining the high value of this core franchise. We expect solid mid-single % growth of the diamides over the next three years. We expect continued, though decelerating, growth from 2026 through 2033, despite the expirations of composition and matter patents and the eventual expiration of the process patents as well.
This growth will be driven by new product innovation, particularly patented new formulations, as well as increased market access. As you can see on this chart, we're pursuing a strategy of intentionally cannibalizing our older diamide products with differentiated, often patented, new products that will enable us to sustain strong value capture over a long horizon. There will certainly be more generic competition as we move forward, but those competitors will likely have to focus on older, less complex, and less valuable diamide formulations. Our strategy of continuing to introduce new differentiated diamide products will allow FMC to grow our branded diamide sales in the mid-single-digit % range over the ten-year horizon while delivering healthy margins. You heard Seva speak earlier today about our new active ingredient pipeline. There are four new synthetic active ingredients that will drive growth over the next decade, one fungicide and three herbicides.
Each provides growers with new tools to meet their crop protection challenges, with both Dodhylex and rimazoxifen providing growers powerful new modes of action not currently available in the market. Through 2026, fluindapyr fungicide and Isoflex herbicide are the key contributors to revenue growth. Isoflex, in particular, brings accelerating growth after 2026, with its anticipated introduction across European markets.... Dodhylex begins to ramp up in the late 2020s and becomes more material in the early 2030s, primarily driven by its anticipated introduction in Asian countries. We have high expectations for rimazoxifen, particularly in the early 2030s, with its anticipated introduction for use on corn and soybeans in North American markets. I remind you that the products and revenue projections you see here are from the introduction of new synthetic molecules only, and do not include any contribution from Plant Health.
This chart also excludes 4 additional synthetic active ingredients currently in our development pipeline that are expected to commercialize beyond 2033, with peak sales collectively expected to be above $1 billion. So speaking of Plant Health, I certainly hope you got a sense from Bénédicte's presentation earlier this afternoon of our genuine excitement over the growth prospects for biologicals, particularly pheromones, which represent the largest growth opportunity in crop protection today. As Bénédicte detailed, growth in Plant Health will come from three areas. First, continued growth of our existing Plant Health product portfolio. Second, and most importantly, from successfully launching new products, especially pheromones. And finally, we'll augment our organic growth with further inorganic investments and partnerships. Combined, these areas are expected to generate approximately $2 billion of revenue by 2033. Now that we've walked through the key drivers of revenue growth, let's shift to profitability.
Over the 3-year horizon, we expect strong EBITDA growth from $1 billion at the midpoint of our current guidance for 2023 to $1.3-$1.5 billion in 2026, a 9%-14% compound annual growth rate, with EBITDA margins increasing by approximately 260 basis points at the midpoint of the ranges to the mid-20s%. What's driving this EBITDA performance? Now, from a volume mix perspective, new products are the key driver, new synthetic formulations, new synthetic active ingredients, and new Plant Health products. Price is not a major driver, with modest price pressure expected in select markets in 2024, and with price assumed to offset any modest input cost inflation or FX headwinds in 2025 and 2026.
Benefits from our restructuring program are key to EBITDA growth in 2024 and support EBITDA growth in the following years. From a longer-term perspective, FMC's EBITDA growth is driven by all of the elements of our strategic plan. Building a closer relationship to growers will allow us to maximize the value of our products, particularly capturing value from new product launches. New formulations, broader product offerings tailored to local market needs, and an increasingly agile and cost-efficient supply chain will help sustain the profitability of our core portfolio, including the diamides and the rest of our portfolio. Our new active ingredient pipeline will add meaningful EBITDA growth over the 2033 horizon. Plant Health will become an increasing contributor to EBITDA, particularly through the rapid growth of biological products, including pheromones. And finally, operating leverage will further support margins.
FMC has historically had the lowest operating cost structure among our R&D-led peers, and we expect to sustain and expand that advantage. Moving away from the P&L, I mentioned earlier that we'll be using ROIC as one of our key metrics going forward. Why ROIC? Of the various return on investment metrics out there, ROIC is the most directly comparable to weighted average cost of capital, and as such, is a strong indicator of whether a business is generating true economic value, that is, producing returns in excess of its WACC. Increasing ROIC is associated with increasing share price, as is sustaining a strongly positive ROIC versus WACC spread while growing. As our working capital is largely funded by debt, ROIC also reinforces effective working capital management and supports free cash flow. FMC's asset base is different from a more typical chemicals and materials sector business.
We are fixed-asset light, despite recent investments in capacity to support new active ingredient introduction. Working capital is a much more significant driver of our invested capital. So while growth of our business requires growth in working capital, efficient working capital growth generates very healthy returns. Over the last four years, we delivered ROIC in the mid-teens % range. This level of return is well above our WACC and is on par with or exceeds many benchmark companies' returns. Further, FMC's ROIC substantially exceeds that of other U.S.-listed crop protection companies on a like-for-like basis. 2023 returns will be lower than prior years due to the global channel inventory reset.
However, even with 2023's historically depressed earnings, FMC's average ROIC versus WACC spread over 2019 to 2023 is more than 6 percentage points, with ROIC roughly 1.75 times the average WACC for this period. We expect ROIC to recover rapidly, returning to the mid-teens % by 2026, and being maintained in the mid-teens % through the 2033 horizon. As we deliver strong returns on invested capital, we expect to generate significant free cash flow. 2023 free cash flow and conversion are clear outliers versus FMC's historical performance. Profoundly negative free cash flow and conversion expected this year are driven by lower EBITDA and the impacts of the global channel inventory reset. Prior to the current disruption, we were well on track to delivering our rolling 3-year average free cash conversion aspiration of 70% or more....
following the normalization of working capital after integrating the acquired business in 2018 and 2019. Growing EBITDA, and most significantly, cash released from working capital, are the key drivers of free cash flow in 2024. Receivables will stabilize relative to new sales levels, with continued healthy collections. Inventory will adjust to be more in line with near-term sales expectations. Payables will rebuild as we gradually ramp production back up through the year and bring inventory and payables back to a more normal relationship. In 2025 and beyond, we expect working capital to resume a more normal level of cash consumption that tracks our projected growth. With solid cash generation over the next several years, we expect rolling three-year free cash conversion to return to 70% or more by 2026, and to be sustained at that level thereafter.
Now that I've covered the outlook and drivers for all of our key metrics for the 1-, 3-, and 10-year horizons, let me take a few minutes to address some important balance sheet and financial policy topics. First, it's important to understand where our balance sheet was entering the global channel inventory reset before we can address how we're going to resolve the current pressures. Prior to the global channel reset, we targeted net debt to trailing 12-month EBITDA between 2.3 and 2.4 times on a rolling four-quarter average basis. We'd stress-tested this target range against market history and believed we had adequate headroom to weather market disruptions without major interventions.
Recent events have unfortunately proven that our stress tests were, simply put, not stressful enough, as we clearly did not anticipate a sudden and abrupt drop in sales of this magnitude across all regions, particularly occurring at our seasonally highest leverage point at the end of Q1. That said, as you can see on the left-hand chart on this page, we were actually at the low end of our targeted rolling 4-quarter average net leverage range at March 31, 2023, and even slightly below it at December 31, 2022. Similarly, working capital was also at normal levels prior to the reset. Net trade working capital as a percentage of trailing 12-month sales varies widely through the year, given the seasonality of our business. Working capital levels are typically at their highest at March 31, and then come down through the rest of the year.
Our working capital grew in the first quarter this year, as is normal, and in proportion to our then outlook for 2023. As the global channel reset began in mid to late Q2, our working capital increased to unsustainable levels rather than showing the normal seasonal decline. We've spoken extensively about the causes of the global channel reset and the actions we're taking in response to it. We own the performance of our business and offer no excuses for the current situation. We have a clear plan in place to address the current stresses and expect to show a meaningful improvement in both leverage and working capital levels in 2024. So how do we fix our currently stressed balance sheet? First, by getting needed covenant relief, which we completed on November seventh.
We didn't take having to go back to our bank group for the second time in two quarters lightly, so we asked for and received significant relief. The new covenant amendment provides FMC with headroom and duration well beyond what we believe will be required to get our leverage levels back to more healthy levels. We are greatly appreciative of the unanimous support of our bank group. Looking ahead, we expect that we will hit peak leverage levels at the end of Q1 of 2024. Our focus this coming year will be on returning working capital to more normal levels. This means converting inventory to receivables by selling product on hand and then collecting those receivables. This further means cautiously ramping up production to keep inventory at lower targeted levels, rebuilding payables in the process.
We'll prioritize the use of any proceeds from the divestiture of non-strategic assets towards debt reduction. With these actions and improved P&L performance, we expect to end 2024 with a balance sheet that is approaching historically normal leverage metrics and returns to targeted rolling four-quarter average levels by the end of 2025. FMC is committed to solid investment-grade credit ratings. To be more precise, we seek to maintain BBB and Baa2 long-term credit ratings, along with A-2 and P-2 short-term ratings or better. We've long talked about our preference for utilizing commercial paper for working capital financing, given the liquidity and attractive pricing of U.S. commercial paper markets. We always have the option of utilizing our revolver in place of, or as a supplement to, commercial paper, though revolver borrowings do come with some cost and flexibility trade-offs.
But access to commercial paper is not the only reason to target BBB and Baa2 long-term credit ratings. These ratings require a balance sheet that can weather disruptions and uncertainty, especially in a cyclical and seasonal sector like agriculture. That is the strength of balance sheet to which FMC aspires. Our current credit metrics are out of line with our targeted ratings, and returning the metrics in line with our target ratings is a key priority. Moving forward, FMC will target net debt to trailing twelve-month EBITDA of approximately 2x on a rolling four-quarter average basis. This will provide a greater margin of safety at times of market distress. Stress testing has included a wider range of potential downsides, with the intent to be able to weather a disruption of the magnitude being experienced in 2023, with more limited interventions.... Let's now move to cash deployment.
Going forward, our primary priorities are to, 1, maintain target leverage levels, and 2, to pay the dividend. We view debt as a source or use of cash for deployment, depending on leverage levels. At our current elevated leverage levels, debt reduction is a key priority for cash flow and the default use for deployable cash after dividends have been paid. For dividends, our policy continues to be to pay a market median dividend payout ratio, which we believe to be a payout ratio between 25% and 35%. The dividend payout ratio will be much above this targeted payout range for 2023. Because of this, we do not anticipate recommending a dividend increase to our Board of Directors this year, as would be typical for our board to consider at its December meeting.
That said, and to be absolutely clear, we have no intention whatsoever of recommending reducing the dividend from its current level. Rather, we'll recommend that the board leave the dividend unchanged until earnings grow sufficiently to return the payout ratio to the targeted range. At that point, we would expect to return to our policy of growing dividends in line with long-term earnings growth. Once leverage is returned to targeted levels, deployable cash beyond that needed to fund the dividend will be available for inorganic growth, which we expect to primarily be early stage or bolt-on opportunities in Plant Health and other emerging technology areas. In the absence of attractive inorganic growth options, any remaining deployable cash will be returned to shareholders through periodic share repurchases, again, only after leverage is returned to targeted levels.
Before I turn the floor back over to Mark, let me share a few summary comments. We believe we have a realistic outlook for 2024. Revenue growth is driven by new products and a return to market growth as we lap the global channel inventory reset in the second quarter. EBITDA growth largely stems from self-help delivered through the restructuring program. As we move into 2025 and 2026, we anticipate accelerating growth, with contribution from new products and more normalized market conditions. We further expect cash flow and ROIC metrics to return to their prior strong levels over the 2026 horizon. Looking out further to 2033, our aspirations are consistent with our vision of FMC as a high profit, high return, organic growth-driven business, fundamentally built on technology and closeness to the grower.
With that, I'll invite Mark back to the stage for some closing comments.
Thank you, Andrew. Before we bring our management team back to the stage to address your questions, let me conclude today's presentations with a final few comments. Our objective today was to show you the full breadth and depth of FMC, and our growth potential over the mid and long term. Our performance expectations over the next three years offer a compelling case for investment. Strong organic revenue growth with faster EBITDA growth, adjusted EPS that grows faster than EBITDA, and mid-teens, mid-teens ROIC, and strong free cash flow conversion. Over the last few hours, our management team outlined the mid and long-term elements of our strategic plan that will drive performance and sustained value creation.
From growth driven by new product introductions and our expanding Plant Health business to a strong innovation pipeline with new AIs, new modes of action, and new patentable, high-value formulations, all to be introduced in the coming years. We have among the strongest margins in the industry, supported by attractive operating leverage and a lean cost structure, which we are optimizing further with the restructure of our company. Our management team has absolutely no doubt that this company has all the right elements to deliver the premium performance that is expected of us, and that we know we can deliver. Thank you for your attention and participation today. I'll now turn it over to Zack, who will transition us to Q&A.
Right. Folks, we're gonna start Q&A in about five to seven minutes. You can stand up, stretch a little bit, but we're gonna start fairly quick. We're just gonna have the chairs come out here, and the speakers, please, if you'll make your way up. Got a question ready? You guys can stand there, and then, yeah. Okay. So if I want to have a second question in mind because your first question gets taken over by someone else. We've not started yet, Charles. Yeah, if you don't mind, could you just wait a few minutes? Yeah. We have Nicole Canning from Corporate Communications, as well as Curt Brooks from the Investor Relations team. Kevin, you wanna get us started?
Sure.
Thank you. Kevin McCarthy from Vertical Research Partners. Mark, you, you announced this morning or quantified restructuring savings of $150 million by the end of 2025. Obviously, a substantial number relative to the earnings base. Can you elaborate on the sources of those savings? You know, how much might be coming from SG&A, procurement, operations, other sources? And likewise, geographically, it sounds like Brazil might be kind of the center of focus area there, but, to, to what extent are you looking for savings outside of Brazil, would be helpful.
Sure. I'll make some overarching comments, and then, Andrew, if you wanna jump in with some more details. We've taken this opportunity to really take a step back and say, "You know, you should never waste a good crisis," and we've always believed that at FMC. One of the things we're doing is taking a look at how we actually operate. So you think about Ronaldo's comments earlier on about how we get closer to customers. What does that actually mean for us? What resources are we putting in the place of salespeople in terms of potential agronomists or people who develop the business? Coming back from that, we're looking at our structure. We're structured basically across regions. We have four major regions in the Plant Health business. How do we structure ourselves in the regions? Today, we operate pretty much all functionality across all regions.
Do we really need to do that? So thinking about it from a forward place, coming back, rather than just saying, "We're gonna take 5% out of SG&A, we're gonna relook at R&D, we're looking at our manufacturing footprint, all our indirect savings from procurement," we're taking a much more holistic view and saying: How do we actually operate? How do we get the most value out of the interaction with the customer and then everything that flows back from that? So that's the overarching principle. Don't think of it as a restructuring program that is based on a percentage of each function or each region. It's not like that at all. We're actually taking a real fundamental relook at the way the company operates. Andrew, do you wanna make any other comments to that?
Sure. Just to expand on that, I think certainly you should expect to see impacts on COGS and on operating expense in 2024 and beyond. As I mentioned in my comments, there are two of our strategic imperatives that are really relevant to the restructuring around the supply chain and around getting operating leverage, where we had plans and actions underway that we're accelerating to allow us to take advantage of more efficient ways of working, and to really take advantage of a fit for purpose supply chain. So a big piece of this, and part of the reason it builds into 2025, it really does take fundamental changes in the operating model and how we run some of our back-end processes that aren't quick hits. It'll take some time to move through.
It'll be a combination of spend reduction, combination of network efficiency, as well as SG&A and R&D efficiencies in the near term, and fundamental evolution of the operating model going forward. And I'll echo again, the comment I made in my prepared remarks. Going into the channel reset, FMC operated at an operating cost structure well below that of our peers. We'll restore that, and we'll continue to sustain that advantage. And I think that's a key hallmark from FMC is that degree of agility and our ability to really leverage the back office.
Yep, John, go ahead.
Thanks. You expect generic diamides to grow the overall market more than taking share from FMC. How big do you think generic diamides could be in 2026, so that we don't get surprised by the size of that?
Diane, do you wanna talk about that?
Sure. We actually believe the growth will come significantly from us in addition to generics. We have seen generics to a very small extent in India, and their entry is dependent on patent expiry, but also on their registrations. And by 2026, we expect to see some presence in markets around the world, but not significant. Plus, we will have a number of new products on the market by then, and that will be growing the market.
So not $hundreds of millions by 2026?
No. No.
Adam?
First, on the restructuring, what's the cash cost that you're thinking about to achieve those savings? And just to confirm, whatever those cash costs are, are included in the free cash flow conversion outlook that you provided. And then following up maybe on John's question, appreciate that there's more patent protection through 2026. Beyond that, FMC today is... or the two active ingredients are 85% of the diamide market, largely from FMC. How much of the total diamide market do you think FMC is providing either itself or through licensed partners in 2033 or 2030, longer-term outlook? How much do you think your share of that market truly is between your licensed partners and yourself?
Wanna go first, Andrew?
Yeah, I'll start on restructuring. Yeah, Adam, we haven't fully dimensioned all of the cost of all the actions we're taking. I mean, historically, it's been somewhat less than dollar for dollar versus run rate savings for those kinds of big restructuring activities. So we'll continue working through the full estimates of that. I think for our cash flow guidance for 2024, we do anticipate some modest cash spending in 2024 to help make that happen. It'll be spread out over 2024 and 2025, and it's built into our guidance.
You wanna go?
Sure. We expect to have the majority of the share directly, a combination directly and through our partners. The analysis that I talked about regarding the other chemistries, we've looked at that beyond patent expiry minus 5, patent expiry minus 10. And you, if you manage your compounds well with innovation, market expansion, you can easily maintain the majority of the share of the value.
I think just to build on what Diane said, you know, you look at that chart we showed where you look at the expiry and the total value of the growth of the molecules. There was 3 that we highlighted there, sulfentrazone, clomazone, and bifenthrin. We are the proprietary owner of those molecules, and we own the vast majority of those markets today. Some of those molecules have been off patent for 10, 15, 20 years. So what we're talking about is not unprecedented at all. In fact, many of the owners of molecules really protect them long term by doing exactly what we're doing. We've learned from others. We're bringing in a strong product life cycle management process. We're cannibalizing our old, older products. So when people come with a generic, yes, there's always a market there.
We've already moved, we've already gone, and you can see some of the examples that Diane put in place. We expect to be a very major player in the diamides for a long, long time.
Mike, you have the-
Yeah, Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners. You guys have talked a lot about getting closer to the grower, and I was hoping you could just elaborate a little bit more on, on what that entails, what kind of investments that's gonna require, how that looks, as you look at the different regions. Does it create some potential for channel conflict?
Yeah, listen, we've talked about it, and Ronaldo, please jump in here. We've talked about it over the last few quarters, and certainly the last, I would say, 18 months, about where we've invested in new resources to grow market share. Brazil is a good example. We've done it in the U.S., we're doing it in parts of Asia and parts of Europe. It's a very different type of selling. It's not a commercial salesperson. That's not the type of resource we're adding. We're adding people with very strong technical skills. But Ronaldo, you're much closer to that. Do you wanna give an example and talk a little bit about that?
Sure. You touched already on one aspect of that, which is adding resources and primarily technical resources, not necessarily commercial resources. We want to be closer to growers, but to take technology, it's not just to expand our commercial footprint. So that is the one part of the investment. The other one is, I mentioned in my presentation about the innovation hubs that we have. We want to expand the use of those innovation hubs, not only to continue to develop our products, but also to put growers in closer contact to our scientists. And that's very unique. Not many people do that. So we eliminate, you know, all the translations of the value proposition. They can actually... Growers, agronomists, channel partners can actually be trained in those innovation centers, and that is very powerful.
We've started doing that, and we've seen the amount of traction that we gain when we get closer as a company to growers. You mentioned also about potential conflicts with our channel partners. The way we see this is quite the opposite. We are working with them to take and communicate the value proposition of our products to growers. They'll continue to sell those products. We are partnering with our channel distributors, co-ops. As a matter of fact, last week, we were visiting a very large co-op and discussing exactly this point. And they are eager to have more presence of FMC to carry and to help them reach their customers. So we do not see any conflict. We're not changing the way we sell our products.
We are, though, taking more ownership on the way we communicate the value propositions of the new technologies that we take to the market.
Yes, Steve?
Thank you. Mark, you talked a little bit earlier about your view that channel inventory levels might be below normal now, at least in some regions. What gives you that visibility? Are you doing anything differently now than you have earlier in the year, and if so, what gives you that confidence?
Yeah, certainly when you think about where the industry is today, we're spending a lot more time talking to distribution, retailer, and where we have access to growers, talking to growers. That's happening in Asia, it's happening in Europe, certainly happening in the U.S. and Brazil. Ronaldo and I, we'd literally just come back from Brazil over the last few days, and we spent a lot of time with very large co-ops talking about, "Where are your inventory levels now versus where you expected them to be, and as you look forward?" I do think there are certain places, and Brazil will get to that point, where we see pockets of people drawing their inventories down below normal. That's, that's gonna happen.
There are some places where it won't be below normal, but I do think, in the U.S., we certainly know that at the grower level and at retail, the inventory levels are way below normal. But at the distribution level, as we enter the season, they're high. So that material will flow through the channel, is already starting to flow through the channel, so we expect that to normalize pretty quickly. Do you wanna comment on Brazil, Ronaldo?
Yeah, I will. Yeah. But I want to also capture the drivers behind that. What we are hearing from our channel partners is their reaction or their target. They want to take the inventories to a below normal level, I would call it that way, primarily because there's a perception of available supply, so there's no risk of supply, and also the cost of capital. While those two variables remain true, we may see channels trying to drive very hard the inventory to a lower level than they were used to. If there's anything happening with one of those two variables, they may rethink and build strategic-
... line per line on their inventory. In Brazil, it's not different. The companies, the partners are thinking more or less the same way. I think what we're seeing in Brazil is different than U.S., is basically a function of seasonality. In U.S., we have seen an entire crop cycle that basically finished now. So we have had the opportunity to see growers depleting their inventory. And pointed to your question, what makes us believe that that is true now? Because they returned a lot of inventory to the retailers, and that didn't happen in the past two seasons. So we saw those returns from growers to retailers. Our retailers told us that.
In Brazil, they're in the middle of the season right now, actually, the beginning of the season, so they'll probably need this cycle to get to the same point, that, that the channels are in U.S.
Arun?
Thanks. Arun Viswanathan, RBC. I guess I just had a question about some of the near-term dynamics. So I think you noted that you are reiterating or confirming your 2023 guidance. Is there anything you can comment on Q4 thus far? I know it was just recently when you reported. And then, similarly, I guess when you look at that 2024 guidance, how much of that is coming from price or maybe some of the known quantities that you have, and what gives you the confidence in that level of guidance? Thanks.
Andrew, you wanna take the price piece? I'll take the other piece.
All right.
We are, we are where we thought we would be at this point in the quarter. Here we are in mid-November. As usual, in the ag cycle, there's a lot of business to be done in the second half of November and going through December, but we were where we thought we would be in all the regions. So hence Andrew's comments and, and my comments about reaffirming where we are. Andrew, do you wanna talk a little bit about the price side of things?
Sure. Man, I also know it's been two weeks since our earnings call, so only so much can change in two weeks. At least so far this quarter, I can say that. Look, in terms of our outlook for 2024, I, I would say this, you know, we are expecting, you know, Q1 to be a down quarter. Well, you know, it was the last quarter before the channel inventory reset really started racing around the world. I think what we're gonna see following Q1 is progressively stronger quarters. We do expect some shift return to more normal market growth in the second half as you fully anniversary the channel reset. But again, the big driver of volume for FMC throughout the year, and particularly on a full year basis, is the strength of new product introduction.
You know, and that's building on momentum where, you know, look, through nine months this year, company's down 20% in revenue. Our new products are up 4%, right? So with that kind of backdrop, if you have any market support, you know, we believe we can have very, very strong volumes, particularly going into the second half next year. From a price perspective, we're still expecting to have some modest price pressures throughout the year in select markets. We don't see that as a global phenomenon, but certain highly competitive markets, Brazil, for example, we do expect to have some pricing. So you could see low single digit kind of price headwinds through the year. And at this point, you know, I wouldn't point to any specific FX headwinds.
You know, not to say the world can't change, but not something we've factored into the guidance explicitly at this point.
I just wanna build on... Sorry, before we go to the next question, guys. I just wanna build on what Andrew said, because I think it gets lost in the noise here. Our new product introductions, so products that were launched over the last five years, have grown 4% in a market that is down high teens%, perhaps even low twenties%. That's a significant achievement, and that should tell you why we've spent so much time highlighting the new product introductions that are coming, because it is an engine of growth for this company, not only in terms of top-line growth, but from a mix perspective as well. We've had so much inflation and volatility in the P&L over the last couple of years that I think the mix aspect of the value of those new products hasn't come to the fore yet.
Once we get stabilized and lap a couple of these big events, that mix is continuing to change and will improve, hence the discussion we had earlier about getting our margins back into the mid-20s% range from an EBITDA perspective. Yeah. Aleksey?
Aleksey Yefremov, KeyBanc Capital Markets. I was looking at your historical EBITDA just to understand the long-term forecasts, and I went back to 2020 as seemingly a normal year, before inventory accumulation happened, and you earned $1.25 billion EBITDA. So if I look at your 2026 guidance midpoint of about $1.4 billion, that implies about 2% annual growth rate. Is 2020 the wrong baseline to do that kind of math, or it could one point four prove way too pessimistic if you grow 4%-5% per year, you could be way over that number? I appreciate you making forecasts in a highly uncertain environment, but any thoughts about that math?
Andrew, do you wanna go first?
Sure. Look, I think 2020 as a comparable is a tough one because we did have COVID disruptions that year. You know, starting in April, pretty significantly, that dampened EBITDA growth in that year. And... Look, I think we have to approach multiyear forecasting with some degree of humility, given the experience we've recently gone through. I think we're looking at real- you know, a realistic 9%-14% EBITDA CAGR over three years to the nontrivial, you know, rebound from depressed earnings of 2023. Certainly, could things go better for us than what we have built into that forecast? Yes.
... but I don't think we have an appetite today to overstate or overreach in what we think the midterm deliverable might be. But if you look at it a different way, you know, 2026 at midpoint of top line and midpoint of bottom line basically mirror where we were at 2022, right? So takes a couple of years to rebound from a year, which in retrospect is, you know, was a probably a high mark of performance and a peak of a cycle. So that couple of years, we'll have a good time to both refresh the product mix, continued benefit of the new products, as well as get the benefit from operating leverage and the way we're gonna evolve the back office of the company in that time horizon.
Through 2026, are we being conservative? Possibly. Beyond 2026, can that accelerate? I think that's a definite possibility.
Yep. Josh? Go ahead, if you can.
Yeah, Josh Spector with UBS. Actually, kind of similar follow-on to that is just without looking at the exact year in 2020, you gave your three-year forecast of what you thought you'd be doing today. You know, on the sales side, obviously, it's a different starting point. I think that's probably impacting your guidance, but maybe what's a little bit surprising is on the margin side. You thought margins could be 29%. Now you're saying mid-20s, even out to 2033. So what's changed in the thinking there? Or is it timing? What are the factors there? Thanks.
Well, Andrew, you can comment, but I think taking the top, we didn't project 3 years out from 2020. We projected 5 years out from 2018. That's the problem with a 5-year plan. We said we would like to be in the 27% range. When we say the mid-20s going forward, that's gonna be 25, plus or minus. You know, as the mix changes, could it be higher than that? Yes, of course, but I think to Andrew's comment earlier on, you know, it's a long way out, even for us right now, when you consider how opaque things are. We have a broad range that we've put in place for 2026. When we get to the end of 2024, we'll be updating through 2027.
We might have a better view of that as we get closer, but I think this is the right way to do it. I don't think a five-year plan that says we're gonna be at 27% margin with all the changes that can occur, it just doesn't feel reasonable in today's environment. So I do think that mid-20s% range is the right place to go, but as Andrew said earlier, could it be better than that? Yes, it could be.
Okay. Jeff?
Thanks very much. Jeff Zekauskas at J.P. Morgan. If you look at your diamide margins back in 2018, 2019, and you compare them to where they were in 2022, are they very different? And, you know, are they three hundred basis points higher or three hundred basis points lower or the same? And what are the... What’s behind that? Second question for Andrew. Your working capital use in the first quarter of 2023 was a use of $850 million, and your use in 2022 in the first quarter was $600 million. You’ve used a lot of working capital this year. Order of magnitude in the first quarter, how much are you going to use?
And then a question of clarification, when you do all of this free cash flow percentage, are these calculations after all of the discontinued operations spending, or are they before?
Do you wanna go first? Do you want me to go first?
Why don't you go first.
I'll go first on the margins. Listen, we've never disclosed what the diamide margins are.
I didn't ask you-
I know, I know. Well, let me finish.
Yes.
So we're not, we're not disclosing what the margins are. They're in the same place as they were in 2018. We've had changes in mix, which doesn't always become apparent. We've had tremendous changes in terms of raw material costs with all the inflation we've gone through, and we've also raised prices on diamides over that period of time. So you net all those out, Jeff, it's roughly the same.
Roughly.
Yeah.
Yeah. So let's talk working capital dynamics in Q1. All right, so first thing, we've taken significant prepayments from North American customers in Q4. A lot of the sales we make in North American markets in Q1 are offset against prepayments. So the working capital we have is a bit of a shuffle between inventory and receivables in Q1. It draws down. We build inventory in Q1 typically, all right, in advance of the remainder of the season. We don't have the capacity to instantaneously produce all that we need for every season around the globe at this in season. So we do have to build material in advance of second half growing seasons.
So I think that dynamic that you're seeing from Q1 of 2023 versus Q1 of 2022 is literally just the continued growth trajectory of the business, including building inventory for a forecast at the time that was over $6 billion in revenue for 2023. All right? In retrospect, that's more inventory than we would like to have right now, but, you know, we had, you know, very firm outlook from customers and a strong look, you know, a position in the market that we thought that that was the case, so we ended up with too much inventory. So we've talked about how we're gonna work through and address that going forward. Now, I'm not prepared to do a quarterly guidance on cash flow today. I don't want to guide. I just want, like, order of magnitude.
Significantly less. Okay, you still have the consumption of prepaid as a portion of the dynamics in working capital in Q1, but inventory builds should obviously be a significantly lower factor this year since we have plenty of inventory on hand at the moment. But we also have substantially lower payables because we're not anticipating ramping up significantly manufacturing activity in Q1. So the reason I'm not trying to be evasive-
... It is a moving target in terms of how it works through the year. I think we're comfortable in how this ends up by the end of the year in rebalancing payables and inventory, but the actual sequence of ramping up our production and rebuilding payables, its timing during the year, can move quarterly cash flow. So I wanna be a little careful there and not be falsely precise at this point. To your third question, just to be very clear, our definition of free cash flow, cash from continuing operations, less cash used by discontinued operations, less capital investment and other investment activities. All right?
All legacy liabilities and all CapEx, as well as non-capital things that we do through investments and partnerships, et cetera, through our other investing activities, through partner manufacturers, for example, flows through our free cash flow calculation.
Thank you very much.
Sure.
All right, Frank?
Good evening, you're working. Frank Mitsch, Fermium Research. Talking about the portfolio, Mark, you indicated that you're going to look to monetize the Global Specialty Solutions business based on the end markets. I wish I knew that business better, but I actually don't know much about that business, and I'm just curious as to what the materiality might be. And then it does beg the question, you know, might we start thinking about over the next 18, 24 months, other sort of portfolio actions, including divestitures?
Yeah, you're probably thinking about the golf courses, right?
Exactly.
So these are products that are used by professionals rather than agriculture. So these can be products to control mosquitoes, fungicides for golf courses, herbicides for golf courses. We're not so far away from the NFL's best football team, which is the Philadelphia Eagles, and they use our products on their field. That's the type of business it is. It's predominantly the US, about 85%, I think, of the business is in the US. We have business in Australia, India, and Japan. It's about $150 million in revenue. We won't disclose the EBITDA at this point, given that we're working through what we're gonna do with that business. Suffice to say, it's a very profitable business, grows at a nice rate. It will fit somewhere very well.
It's a great business, great people, just we're going in a different direction, really focusing in on it. So they're not markets that we generally talk about. Business has been around for a long time. Competition is, generally speaking, other crop protection companies, because you utilize many of the same technologies in those markets. So that's the type of business it is. With regards to other assets that we have, that's the first one that we're really looking at because it's very obvious for us from a strategic perspective. There may be other things in the portfolio as Diane starts to look at the, the rationalization of the portfolio as we think about going forward. There may be product lines, that type of thing, but there's no other business structure or major business product lines that we would think about.
Yeah. Andrew Ketches...
Andrew, I appreciate the color on the leverage and tempering the leverage target. It does seem like you are switching to more of a focus on net debt instead of gross. Is the right read, and maybe you can confirm? I think it's that you plan to run with more cash and less CP in this rate environment. There's obviously a sort of a nice little arb there, given the rates. And then related to that, because it's a net debt target, it's a little opaque in terms of what the right capital structure for this business is longer term. So can you give us some perspective of what the right level of gross debt or cash you think is appropriate for the business?
Are we simply just talking about repaying commercial paper, or is there anything beyond there?
So, yeah, thanks for the question. I think, look, certainly we are emphasizing net debt over gross debt in terms of thinking about leverage for a couple of reasons. One, certainly the rate environment is fundamentally different from where we were five years ago. Commercial paper wasn't quite free, but it was quite inexpensive, and there were either zero or negative returns for cash deposits. You know, we're at a point now where, you know, the way we are structured in terms of where profit accrues and cash accrues in the company, we accrue a pretty substantial amount of cash outside the U.S. We can pretty frictionlessly return it to the U.S., but not instantaneously. There are some timing lags.
So this is an opportunity to do some self-financing of working capital through cash balances that build up over time in different foreign subsidiaries before we can dividend it back to the parent company. So I do think, you know, interest income will become a part of the story, which hasn't been really part of our capital structure management story for the past, you know, for prior years, just 'cause the world has changed in that regard. So I think, you know, the amount of cash is meaningfully higher than what we've had on balance sheet in prior years. It will return to the parent on a regular basis. It's just not in... You can't do it instantaneously every month. In terms of the long-term capital structure, look, I think we've got more work to do.
I think we will certainly, in terms of prioritization of debt paydown right now, we have $400 million in notes due in February. We'll retire those in December. If you remember, when we did the financing activity in May, we actually raised the cash for that. So that, you know, it's in the cash balance, as we speak today. So we'll retire that debt in December, and from that point forward, the immediate area to reduce is commercial paper. And certainly, our normal seasonal profile would have a big commercial paper build in Q1 and Q2, so our intent is to keep that build much more modest in 2024. And then we will reserve the right to keep looking at other elements of the capital structure.
You know, we certainly can, we can do things through to, to rebalance. We, you know, commercial paper is-
... a variable portion of our, both in terms of rate and outstandings, in our capital structure, it'll still be a piece of that. But the mix of other long-term debt that we have, something we'll continue to look at.
Richard?
Richard Garchitorena, Wells Fargo. I know for your 2024 revenue guide, 3% CAGR doesn't assume any volume growth. Can you walk us through how you get to the 6%-9% revenue growth in the 2026 goals? Does that include anything from Plant Health? And, also break down, does that have volume growth in addition to the NPIs?
Andrew, you.
Sure. So 2024, as we talked about a little bit earlier, certainly has volume growth in it. In terms of particularly in the second half, a bit of market recovery as we lap the channel reset. So we get into 2025 and 2026, you know, a lot of that growth is new product introduction. So it's new diamide formulations in particular, and second and third year of those introductions as they accelerate. It is some growth and accelerating growth from our new active ingredients, particularly fluindapyr and Isoflex. There's a more pronounced acceleration for both those molecules after 2026. But you should expect to see, and as we get those products introduced in additional countries, remember, we don't get registrations around the world all at once. It's really country by country.
So it'll take some time to build that, and that's the chart that both Diane and I showed today. You'll see that build up. And then certainly Plant Health, you know, an acceleration there. You know, by 2026, both Plant Health and the new AIs are still a relatively modest part of the overall portfolio, but meaningfully bigger than where they are in 2023. And really part of that accelerating trend to where we think it gets to be in 2033.
Bénédicte, you want to add anything there with regards to Plant Health?
No, no, I think Andrew has been really covering. I think the new product and projections 2024, 2025, 2026 are really, really strong. So it's just to support what you were saying, just exactly.
Just as a reminder that we do capture new products in volume. That is when we say that we're growing volume, and primarily because of new products, it's because that's where we account for new products.
Dan?
Hi, Dan Ives, Jefferies. How should we think about margins for Plant Health versus diamides versus traditional agrochemicals? Is there a large difference?
Yes. There's obviously a portfolio mix that goes on there, but if I, if I think about in terms of the overall portfolio of the company, the new products introductions, diamides, and Plant Health are at the top end of the range. And then from a classical portfolio view of the synthetics, we have everything that ranges from as good as the diamides to below average. So I think the diamides, NPIs, and Plant Health are above average. Everything else is the mix.
All right. Jeff?
I just had a question about on the biological side. You gave the target of about $2 billion in revenue 2033. I was just curious, how much of that is pheromones technology, and how much is that contingent on acquisitions?
You want to talk about that?
Yes. So maybe to give you also the level of confidence towards those $2 billion. So if you break down those different paths, and I think it was highlighted, that the commercial portfolio per se, which is obviously identified there, will represent around 30% of the total. This, we will do geo expansion, and we will do new labels, so new pests and new crops. So that is pretty well known on that, and we are pretty confident on that piece. If you're looking in the middle one, which is the new product introduction, I think this one is around 50% total, and then I can break into one of them will be the non-pheromone, the other one will be the pheromone.
On that particular pocket, the non-pheromone, we have also the product identified in term of AI, and then we will really increase the lifecycle management there. In addition, we have a number of third-party technologies in that pocket that we are testing at the moment. So more than 15%-20% of our trials today are with external technology. So it will bring that pocket and more confidence even in there. The pheromone piece, within that pocket, we know already 70% of that pocket for pheromones, the molecules are in development. They are already upscaled for 3 out of 5, so we are also quite confident, and the results are really fantastic as we see it right now. So very excited. So you can see 80% is that pocket, and then less than 20% is that M&A and third-party technology.
This one, clearly, we see again, a lot of opportunities, not obviously, integrated or used now, but you look at the pheromone per se. We have a number of pheromones we don't have even in the pipeline, not even in discovery, that we could go for. Third party or basically doing and redirecting our discovery. And the fruit and vegetable market, very, very little in the numbers we have presented today. That's another opportunity for us to explore and address. So there is a lot to do here, and clearly, that's why we're excited.
I'm just going to give an opportunity for folks who've not had a chance already, if there are any questions. Chris?
Thank you. Chris Kapsch with Loop Capital Markets. So one of the dynamics that's contributed or maybe even amplified this global reset has been the aggressive exportation of pesticides out of China, and maybe it's been skewed towards you know, generic post-emergent herbicides versus categories where you participate in, perhaps. But it's not something that's been discussed today, but your competitors have flagged this dynamic. Just wondering if you could elaborate on how it affects your business, if at all. Also, how this dynamic has been taken into consideration as you see the evolution of your business into 2024. And do you think this is something that's you know, more transient in nature? Any evidence that it's more structural in nature?
Yeah, we don't see it. I mean, I know other people have commented on this. I think it was in relation to Brazil, actually. We pulled the data for exports to Brazil and imports to Brazil for generics. They're down in 2023. So generics are a big part of the market. I think 50%-60% of the overall market is generics. It's always there. We're not seeing any dynamics related to our portfolio where we compete, where generics are either more aggressive or suddenly expanding rapidly or excess supply. We're just not seeing it. So obviously, other people are seeing different things to us, which is fine. That's how the market moves. But we're not seeing that anywhere in the world. And Ronaldo, if you wanna comment on Brazil?
It's, they've been there forever. We have competed with them for decades. They're an important part of the market. I do not have any signal that it's disproportionately big this year, related or compared to past years.
All right, we can sneak in second questions then for a couple of folks. Aleksey, go ahead.
I just wanted to ask a follow-up question on the development pipeline. You talked about 18 AIs in the development stage right now, and you also talked about 4 AIs that will really drive the needle through 2020-2033. I believe one of those already launched, Arylex, right? So it leaves 3 that are yet to contribute through 2033. So does it follow that about 15 is really commercial impact after 2033, mostly? And then, a follow-up question on that is, you also discussed that 6 AIs have advanced the stage since 2020. Does it mean that 12 has, have not advanced since, in 3 years, essentially? Is that normal or not? Just trying to understand that.
Alexi, let's break that down into two. There's a lot of question there. Diane, why don't you take how the portfolio gets impacted by the products that are getting launched from now through past 2033, and then why don't you comment on the type of movements we've seen in the chain? Do you wanna go ahead?
Sure. It includes both the synthetics and biologicals. Those figures included both synthetics and biologicals. And so in my slide that showed the 4 active ingredients, that did not include biologicals. Those were captured in Bénédicte's. And we've launched 2 of those, Isoflex and fluindapyr. And the 18 that we're talking about, there's always a different mix. You know, go back to 20, our 2018 Investor Day, there's a different mix of what was in development, what was in discovery, what has actually come out of the pipeline because it's fully launched. And so we've made great progress, really exciting technology has progressed, and we've in that particular slide of Seva's, it was a combination of synthetics and biologicals.
Just to follow up on that, as Dan mentioned, the numbers that we show refers to both discovery and development pipeline, so. Then on the development side, there is contributions from pheromones, Plant Health, and synthetics. And every time the synthetic changes the stage gate in development, as we count it, at least, you know, one advancement since 2023. I would also mention at this point that our development pipeline, that in order to clear it and go to the next stage, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to move it to the next stage. So I wouldn't necessarily look at the total number of ACREs we have and the total number of stage transitions. Each one of those stage transition is a major milestone in the life of a compound in a development.
It goes through, you know, different planning stages, different amount of work is accomplished to make sure that we generate, you know, studies for regulatory and generate our gap and other data that will help us to register those compounds. So that's, that's really is a significant milestone when something goes from one stage to another.
There's more products in the pipeline than there were when we reviewed this in 2020, when we had our Technology Day. In other words, the discovery process is working really well. Products are moving through discovery and then jumping over into development. So that pipeline is richer and more robust and more balanced than it was the last time we talked about this.
All right, maybe one or two more questions we can sneak in here with the scheduled time. Okay, I'm going to give John your second one. Go ahead, John.
John Roberts from Mizuho. Related to the China question. China is a large AI contributor in the world. One of your largest competitors is Chinese-owned. The tech industry got surprised by the disengagement of China from the West, or disintermediation. Do you do any scenario planning around China's role in the world? Is that like a risk factor that you look at?
Yeah. I mean, listen, we have a very, very robust enterprise risk management process that takes into account all variables, everything from macroeconomic to socioeconomic impacts because of relationships between countries. Raissa, I'll let you comment a little bit in a moment on China. China is a big producer of active ingredients, but so is India now. I mean, India is becoming a very large producer of active ingredients. Many companies now involved in the production of active ingredients, we have many relationships with them. We have done scenario planning around what happens if China shuts down, for instance, just like it did in the pandemic, how do we continue to run our business? And Raissa's comments earlier about what she's doing with her group around ensuring surety of supply is a big piece of that.
Raissa, why don't you just make a few comments?
Yeah. So if we look at what is coming out of China from a supply of active ingredients, you can notice that the majority of the molecules are the ones that are older in terms of the life cycle. And yes, there are very large producers that have been there for a long time, and they supply that portion of the market. But as Mark said, and historically, a lot of the ag chem companies source from there because that's where the supply is coming from. If you think about the strategic initiative that I mentioned on de-risking our supply chain, and evaluating the asset-light model that we had with the legacy FMC business, which was very heavy on this light assets in China, what we are doing right now is reevaluating our global footprint.
So what we had before, what came over with the Cheminova acquisition, with the DuPont acquisition, which became like an evolution of the footprint that is very mixed right now. So we're looking at the entire portfolio. We're taking into consideration the new molecules that are coming from the pipeline, the Plant Health business, and we are rebalancing it around the world. I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing in and outside of China, India. I actually have been there about three times this past year. A lot of assets being put on the ground, but most importantly, they are investing on starting chemistries that were not in other places before. So we are starting to see the dispersion of the production of these new chemistries, and we are seeing a lot of technology coming out of India as well. So it's very interesting from a supply base, what...
This rebalancing that is naturally happening, in India, and then, of course, continuing to happen in Europe, where you have a lot of technology naturally happening from a manufacturing perspective.
All right, very good. All right, Steve, sneak one in real quick.
Question for Ronaldo. What would be your estimate of the percentage of your sales, where the molecule and the product is actually chosen by the grower, rather than that decision is really based on the retailer or distributor on what they're going to carry? And you talked about trying to access that grower, you know, so that clearly is targeting that one bucket. But for the fraction that it's really up to the distributor, which is your primary customer, how are you effectively reaching that channel with much larger competitors?
The more novel the technology is, the more the growers will need to get to know the technology before they, they make their minds. If it's a new active ingredient or a new formulation that is very similar to an existing one, there is an immediate and very large influence of channel partners to move the growers to adopt that technology. But when we are talking about new modes of action, and, and Seva talked a lot about new modes of action, or when they are talking about pheromones, we study these products for decades, and it takes a lot of explaining and demonstration and education to growers to get them to adopt those technologies. They rely on us, and they rely on research institutes, institutions to adopt those technologies. So that percentage, as you said, it grows as the differentiation of the products grows.
I'll just take one example that Bénédicte shared with you. Pheromones. It's a whole new paradigm of pest control. This industry never had a tool to control insects, actually preventing them to lay eggs and the population to grow. The way of controlling pest pressure in the history of the crop protection industry has been, one way or another, killing the insects. Pheromones tackle that problem from a completely different way. So we take ownership on the communication and education of those technologies and that novelty to take it directly to growers with our channel partners. I, high-tech products that are similar to the ones that are existing today, our channel partners are very, very well equipped to take them to growers.
We want to partner with them for the products with new modes of action or even game changers like, like the pheromones.
Okay, I'm gonna hand it over to Mark just for a closing comment, but just wanna call out, when you exit through the lobby, we have a few local Philadelphia cookies to help you get through your train ride back. Mark, any closing thoughts?
No, listen, we really appreciate you all being here, physically here, and for those of you on the web, we really appreciate your time and attention. Hopefully, you've got a better perspective of what is really happening at FMC and how important technology and new products are to our future growth. So thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you.
Thank you.