Good afternoon. I'm John Corkrean, H.B. Fuller CFO. Welcome. We're going to get the formal program rolling here in just a second, but I just have a few housekeeping items. First, a quick safety reminder. In the unlikely event of an emergency, please listen for announcements and follow the directions of the hotel staff and safety staff. Proceed to the nearest exit, and our rally point is in front of the hotel at the Irish Hunger Memorial. Fire department and police department are both close by, and hotel staff are trained in first aid and CPR should assistance be needed. Second, just a reminder, some of the comments today include forward-looking statements, so of course actual results may differ. We'll also be talking about a few non-GAAP measures like adjusted EBITDA and organic revenue.
These help give a clearer picture of how the business is performing and make comparisons easier, but they're not considered a substitute for GAAP results. For additional info, please refer to our 10-K. Also, please make sure that your phones are silenced during the presentation. Most importantly, thank you for joining us today. We're excited to have you here for our Investor Day. It's a great opportunity for us to share insights and highlights of our progress, and we think you'll find the information that you hear very interesting and insightful. Thank you.
Welcome to H.B. Fuller's Investor Day 2025. This is more than a strategy update. It's a look at what's possible when strategy meets focus and innovation meets impact. As the world's largest pure-play adhesives company, our focus is clear: accelerate growth, elevate our portfolio, and lead the industry with intention. Our commitment to R&D fuels progress, powered by dozens of technology centers of excellence and an innovation team of hundreds around the world. Across industries like medical, automotive, insulated glass, and electronics, our tailored technologies are driving progress and enabling our customers to bring world-changing advancements to the market. Our supply chain transformation is already delivering real results, unlocking speed, reliability, and transparency through automation and digital innovation. It's all part of a multi-year journey to drive operational excellence, elevate the customer experience, and improve profitability.
At H.B. Fuller, we don't just talk about innovation and execution; we make it happen. We don't just formulate; we unlock possibility. Our success is built on long-term customer relationships by our 7,500 employees around the world, powered by innovation and guided by a legacy 135 years in the making. Now, we're launching our new era with big ideas, bold moves, and unstoppable momentum. We're just getting started. H.B. Fuller, connecting what matters.
Please welcome to the stage H.B. Fuller's President and Chief Executive Officer, Celeste Mastin.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining H.B. Fuller's 2025 Investor Day, launching our new era. Our speakers today will be myself, Celeste Mastin, President and CEO, our CFO and EVP, John Corkrean, Nathan Weaver, Executive Vice President of Business Transformation, who will cover our global footprint optimization plan, now known as Project Quantum Leap, the modernization and streamlining of our supply chain and manufacturing operations. Finally, Brendon Kryzer, our VP of Corporate Development and Strategy, sharing more insight about our successful M&A strategy and execution. All these speakers will aid me in highlighting the key differentiators of this business and detailing our path to greater than 20% EBITDA margins here at H.B. Fuller. At the conclusion of our two hours of prepared remarks, we'll take your questions for 30 minutes.
I am very excited to offer you the chance at the completion of Q&A to attend four different breakout sessions showcasing our leading technology in four key growth areas: Insulating glass, Medical adhesives, Automotive, and Electronics. The breakout sessions will feature a five-minute overview by the global leader of those businesses here in H.B. Fuller, followed by 10 minutes of questions. We'll conclude by 5:00 P.M., but you'll have the chance to interact with the top leaders of our organization and ask questions about their specific fields at a reception following the breakout sessions for another 45 minutes. Those leaders and their areas of expertise are shown on the screen, and we'll make it easy for you to find them during the reception at the conclusion of the day.
My colleagues here today and many more make up our workforce numbering over 7,000 people, with 82 plants in 27 countries selling to customers in 150 countries all over the world. We sold over 24,000 SKUs in 2024 that were created in one of our 35 technology centers. As you'll hear today, this application expertise and formulating capability is at the core of our success. Let's start with the thesis, establishing that the adhesive space at H.B. Fuller is the largest pure-play adhesive company in the world is a good investment. You might be surprised to learn that adhesives and sealants comprise an $80 billion industry. We are everywhere, and in products from helicopters to baby diapers, from cell phones to skyscrapers, it is a large and expanding industry.
While the industry is expansive, most adhesive and sealant applications are small and precise, generally representing less than 2% of our customers' end product cost. While less than 2% of the end product cost, adhesives are critical in the manufacturability and performance of the end product, and often even add functionality. An example of an adhesive with functionality would be a wetness indicator in a baby diaper that changes color when insulted, or thermal management in an EV battery sealant. This is a highly fragmented industry, but H.B. Fuller has the scale to convert this game of inches into a critical mass of business, winning one application at a time, in one customer at a time, and compiling dozens of those wins to become the largest pure-play adhesive company in the world. I want to emphasize that we are executing successfully on our strategy to achieve a faster-growing, higher-margin business.
In the last couple of years, H.B. Fuller has acquired 11 companies and expanded EBITDA margins by 340 basis points through third quarter year to date. H.B. Fuller and two other divisions of public companies make up 25% of this $80 billion industry, and the remainder is dominated by smaller private companies and a few unique segments of some larger public companies. H.B. Fuller has advantages in this industry structure. With our extensive global footprint and strong balance sheet, we're able to serve large multinational customers better than our smaller competitors. Also, as the largest pure-play participant, we are wholly fixated on using our resource and capital investment only for adhesives and sealants, making us the most focused of the larger players shown here. Finally, this industry structure provides consolidation opportunities that tend to be very technology or market-specific.
We find that many of these companies are without a succession plan, are inspired to have the founders' legacy live on in H.B. Fuller, are great sources of talent, and are an efficient use of capital as we jumpstart a market entrance or expand a new technology across many segments through acquisition. Today, I want you to remember the three key takeaways that I'll share about the value creation opportunity here. Those are H.B. Fuller's leading position in an industry with scale and growth opportunities, H.B. Fuller's customer network and technology advantages as a differentiated formulator, and H.B. Fuller's self-help agenda and its related impact. Let's start with the first takeaway. This industry grows as the world modernizes around us, and H.B. Fuller has taken steps to position itself well.
Our strategy puts us in the middle of these higher-value, faster-growing spaces that generally require highly differentiated and thus higher margin products. That strategic positioning has evolved over the years. This slide shows H.B. Fuller's technology development from pre-2000 through today, with each new technology represented by a box on the staircase, culminating in the 32 platform technologies listed in 2024. I promise I'm not going into detail on each of these technologies. As tempting as it is, right, to talk about silane-terminated sealants or acrylic microsphere repositionable adhesives or octyl cyanoacrylates for surgical adhesives, and I know you're relieved. This is the chart where I'm saying that this is not your father's Buick. Twenty-five years ago, H.B. Fuller only had two major chemistry platforms to offer. Those were most relevant to today's lower growth and lower margin markets.
Over time, we've built and amassed more than 30 different technology platforms, meaning that we can solve more types of bonding challenges in more industries, especially those in higher-value spaces. I want to highlight we have increased our technology-dependent TAM from 43% of the $31 billion industry at the turn of the century to 92% of today's $80 billion industry. That gives us a $74 billion technology-enabled TAM that we can pursue. Today, we concentrate on the most attractive part of this industry, choosing to optimize our capital deployment and resource expenditure to the most valuable $56 billion opportunity.
We have diligently focused on identifying the highest returning parts to pursue, and in the past three years have exited some markets and de-emphasized parts of others to organically shift our portfolio where we have determined that the customer base is less desirous of differentiated solutions to enhance and uplift their products. Today, our share is 4.5% of the total market and approximately 6% of the attractive TAM we focus upon. Now let me clarify takeaway number two. We are a formulator operating differently from the standard chemical industry. Our business model revolves around providing unique solutions for challenging applications, and the execution by which we deliver it sets us apart. At H.B. Fuller , we're navigating the technical requirements for customers driven by megatrends and our customers' own manufacturing and design needs that occur in our 31 global market segments.
Any change in design, appearance, or functionality, any change in substrates, or any change in manufacturing process or equipment is our opportunity to bring a solution that wins business with a customer. Most importantly, the speed with which we can offer that solution is usually the determining factor in winning the business. Simply put, we design solutions. We spend $100 million on product development annually and develop 500- 1,000 new SKUs per year. It's not uncommon for us to work with a customer on a solution for their product change three or four years in advance of their launch. It's important to remember that because we've expanded our technology base from two to over 30 major chemistry platforms, our speed and accuracy has improved over time, meaning that we can solve more types of bonding challenges in more industries and do so faster, especially in those higher-value spaces.
The design and production of adhesives carries complexity unlike the traditional chemical industry. In fact, our role in the value chain is to formulate an adhesive that marries a variety of substrates in a unique manufacturing environment while giving an end product a specific look, feel, and functionality desired by our customer. Over half of our SKUs are custom-tailored, meaning that we make a single SKU that's used by only one customer, and many customers will buy multiple SKUs made for them alone. This plethora of customers, 28,000 of them, offer us an ongoing opportunity to grow by increasing our share of wallet with them because we are a trusted partner when new product designs or manufacturing and substrate changes are needed. In fact, 93% of our customers spend less than $500,000 on adhesives with H.B. Fuller per year.
For customers spending between $100,000 and $10 million per year, they spend on average $41,000 on any SKU annually, highlighting the unique nature of any product. You see, there's limited financial benefit in saving money by changing an adhesive and a high level of risk that product performance fails, leading to reputational damage, or manufacturability is compromised, leading to expensive scrap. Our customers in a cost-saving mood find that better than going to a competitor is to work with us as we reformulate a product that we originally built for them, redesigning it to save us both money and do so using our knowledge of their production environment. To further explain our formulator business model, I'd like to point out that each adhesive formulation requires 11 raw materials on average, and those raw materials are found downstream in the chemical industry.
In fact, 87% of the raw materials we buy are specialty chemicals. 11% of the raw materials we buy are considered intermediates, like VAM, and the remaining 2% are base chemicals, like ethylene, which is used in some water-based adhesives. You see, crude oil and natural gas are representative starting feedstocks, progressing downstream to base chemicals, then intermediates, and finally to the specialty chemicals that make up the bulk of our raw materials. For illustrative purposes, I'll point out that less than 0.5% of a barrel of crude becomes a specialty chemical that could be used to make adhesives. As a result, we aren't nearly impacted as much by the ebbs and flows of the underlying feedstock prices as opposed to many other specialty chemical companies who buy products further upstream. How do 10 ingredients creating one adhesive make such a big difference?
Every application we supply is specified and qualified on a customer's manufacturing line. Our customer's buying decision is primarily dictated by speed. The faster an adhesive solution is available, the faster the customer can launch a new product or save money in production or reduce the cost of expensive substrates by replacing them. Our breadth of technology and close customer relationships are critical to providing solutions quickly and winning business as a result. As opposed to the traditional specialty chemical industry, H.B. Fuller's business model is built on more customer fragmentation, a much higher number of SKUs, and we're a smaller part of the customer's end product cost than that found in most specialty chemical companies. All of these factors contribute to the investment thesis I outlined earlier through the levers we pull to create unique value for our customers.
Before covering takeaway number three, it's important to first provide an overview of how we've organized and run our business. We have 31 global market segments that are housed in our three global business units. The portfolio is very diverse, with no market segment in a region making up more than 5% of sales. The combination of our seven largest global market segments comprises roughly 50% of our revenue. Those are listed here in bold, and you'll see that three are in Building Adhesive Solutions, two are in Engineering Adhesives, and two are in Hygiene, Health and Consumable Adhesives. This has evolved as we concentrate our resources and capital in the higher margin, faster-growing, more demanding parts of this industry. These seven segments have grown 26% collectively since 2020, a compounded growth rate of over 5%, with I&M replacing Wood in this cohort during that time.
Each GBU plays a different strategic role in our portfolio. Hygiene, Health and Consumable Adhesives, or HHC, is our lead as we expand around the world. The business is first on the ground as consumers and developing nations start to buy the basics that require our adhesives in consumable goods like toilet paper, sanitary napkins, and bottled drinks. HHC gives us a beachhead in a region as consumers start to develop more purchasing power and demand more expensive goods, and companies grow up locally to produce cell phones and buses and other goods supported by our Engineering Adhesives group. Higher incomes also lead to the desire for more sophisticated building materials supported by our Building Adhesive Solutions group. HHC is the foundation that H.B. Fuller Company is built upon. While the longest tenured in the portfolio, it is in the midst of rebirth.
HHC plays an important role in the global sustainability renaissance, changing requirements for disposable goods. Circularity and recyclability must now be designed into our customers' products, offering an opportunity for this division to recreate itself in the process. It's also home to our burgeoning medical adhesives business, a very promising growth segment for us. Engineering Adhesives, or EA, is the home to most of our growth segments, the fastest growing, most demanding solution space. Most applications require precision bonding in complicated environments and long-lasting durability. Remember that this division requires a very broad technology portfolio to meet the abundance of needs in any application. The ability for this division to consistently meet and significantly exceed 20% EBITDA margins is an obvious proof point of our strategy.
In EA and HHC, we excel when we work directly with manufacturing companies, bringing technology unique to their needs that enables them to create a new product or change the materials used in that product or change their manufacturing process or equipment. In fact, over half of our products are uniquely formulated for a single customer's application in these business units. Until 2025, we had a construction adhesives business that similarly designed unique solutions for OEMs and that was particularly successful with large roofing customers. However, we realized we were missing opportunities in the broader building products trade. In the construction space, industry-wide specifications are often used and are influenced and established by other parties and not only our customer. These include commercial developers, government agencies, and contractors. This requires solutions that are market-based and require selling in multiple parts of the value chain.
Thus, we created Building Adhesive Solutions, or BAS, to expand our focus on multiple constituents and have access to a greater number of project-based opportunities. All market segments serving the construction end market are now housed in BAS, and products from a variety of BAS segments are used in the same big projects. This focuses on our management playbook, driving quick realization and response to cycles across the business unit, while efficiently and expansively bringing full pull-through spec-setting action to jobs. It also engenders transparency for investors on construction-related market drivers. Only 6% of H.B. Fuller's sales are directly related to residential construction. Think of schools and LNG projects and hotels, for example, when you think of our products.
One area where the group is leveraging these linkages is in data centers, where we've converted our roofing product success to other parts of the building, like electrostatic dissipating adhesives for elevated floors and walls, and sealants for HVAC systems that are so critical for cooling those structures. Our global business units are full P&Ls, with manufacturing facilities assigned to these GBUs based on the majority of their business. However, our plants are really more technology-specific and usually serve more than one GBU. This provides best fixed-cost utilization, and the shared infrastructure is conducive to optimal capacity management, which you'll hear more about in Nathan's upcoming presentation. Our operations are generally tailored to small SKU production, with variable cost far outweighing fixed cost. This is not a capital-intensive industry, as our production equipment is designed for small batches.
Within our three GBUs, we've designated our 31 market segments as one of two categories: growth or leverage. We're managing our growth segments to deliver greater than 25% EBITDA margins and grow at higher-than-average industry rates. These are segments where we spend more on innovation, as designs and functionality can change rapidly, where we invest in growth capital, and where we acquire companies selectively that bring a unique technology or certified products in markets with long approval times. Our leverage categories also play an important role. We manage them to deliver greater than 15% EBITDA margin, enhance our raw material position, and support a strong global network of plants and people. This gives us scale in structure, location, and raw materials across the enterprise in total.
In fact, the value of raw material scale is critical to margins because our raw material cost is roughly 75% of our cost of goods sold. In contrast to growth category investments, these business segments get investment in capital for cost-saving projects, consolidation acquisitions, and selected expansions into new regions, especially in developing nations. Going back to our industry overview, recall we focus on a selected $56 billion attractive target market. Of that attractive market, 70% or $39 billion is in the growth category, and 30% or $17 billion is in the leverage category. Our market research has established that the average growth rate for our growth target market is 7%, roughly twice that of the leverage market, and features gross margins 3,000 basis points greater than the market on average. Yes, I did say 3,000 basis points.
Today, our share of the growth category is 3%, and our share of the leverage category is 11%, reflecting the significant opportunity we have to expand our share in the growth category and grow the business faster and at higher margin. Now we're going to hear from each of these GBU leaders as they share how they win in these markets.
I think the excitement of leading HHC in particular is the differentiation of the 13 market segments. Each one has their own proprietary needs and investment strategies and strategic visions moving into the future. I think the innovations that we have within the Hygiene, Health and Consumable Adhesives group generally are circled around sustainability, compostability, and the new circular economy. We see the trend moving away from microplastics that are in the drinking water and then looking at how we are positioned in the food-safe area and supplying our products in a food-safe environment. There are multi-dimensional areas that we're supplying our products, and it's exciting to be part of that. When there are disturbances around the world or there are supply chain disruptions, we're able to supply from another facility as if nothing ever happened. Our customers continually tell us the reason why they're with H.B. Fuller Company is the service and the technology, the way that we embed ourselves into their business and make their business better. You know, there's a lot of times where a machine will go out at 2:00 A.M. and 3:00 A.M. Our group is there to help. Our group is there to keep that business online and make sure that there's less interruption. Something that we're concerned about making sure is serving the customer in the right manner, at the right time, and with quality.
EA is positioned to win in the market by being the innovative market leaders. We are pioneers of the future trends, and we are the first to partner with our customers to solve their challenges. Our team stands out because we have the best experts in each of the segments we target. We have a team of hunters that is thirsty to win, but also thirsty to win with the customer and growing with the customer. The major trends that are shaping EA are in mobility, of course, the EVs trend that is growing fast and with a lot of new technologies and new solutions for adhesives. We are growing also significantly in the aerospace, in the defense, in the future of air mobility, but in electronics also, the explosion on semiconductors and different devices for electronics is also a key trend.
Our EA customers are our partners, and we partner with them to solve their key challenges and enable their product success into the future. We have a high speed of innovation and a broad range of technologies that help them to enhance their products. My team is prepared to meet the customer needs because we have the best experts in the market that are anticipating and working with our customers to the future products they are going to launch in the next 5 to 10 years. Two to three years' success of EA will mean that we'll continue to grow substantially in electronics and automotive. Those are core markets that we continue to invest into innovation, to invest into our partnership and new customers, and we'll continue to grow in a substantial way.
The way Building Adhesive Solutions tries to win in the market is, first of all, we have to provide innovation to our customers. If you look at building science today and the solutions, the need for speed and ease of installation is ever-growing because contractors around the world are struggling with labor in terms of the availability and the quality of the labor. Everything we can do to innovate to make the application faster and easier is a key differentiator for us. The combination of innovation and a great sales technical knowledge has enabled us to have a number one position in market share in North America and Europe. Being agile as a manufacturer and being able to pivot as our customers pivot is a clear focused area of customer expectation today. Global expansion continues to be one of the things we're doing in BAS.
We're heavy North America, heavy Europe, Middle East. We're very excited about it. We just got started there almost two years ago, and it has tremendous opportunity. We're definitely looking for geographic expansion as part of our strategy. First thing we have to do is spend time with all of our customers. In building materials, you have customers you go to market with, which are OEMs and distributors and sometimes retailers, but the end users are the general contractors and the building owners. I think the more we can focus on the ultimate end user and the more we can focus on those that we go to market with and really listen to them about not just what their needs are, but what the unmet needs are, that's going to really benefit us. Spending time with customers is something we do.
As we think about the next two to three years and beyond for BAS, our opportunities are, we're really focused on those, and we've got a good strategy laid out ahead of us. When I look at the combination of our innovation, not only on the product side, but also on the operational side and what we're doing with people, we're going to scale this business tremendously over the next two to three years, but even beyond that.
Now you've seen how we win, and it will become even more evident when you see my talented teammates representing each of these GBUs who are in the trenches running these market segments every day. I guarantee you will feel their passion when they speak at the technology breakouts after this session. For today's third and final takeaway, I'd like to shift now to sharing with you our roadmap to 20+% EBITDA margins and solid organic growth. We'll deliver this journey through some key initiatives, including share gains and product differentiation through innovation that's reflected in our pricing, cost and capacity optimization through Quantum Leap, Portfolio mix shift through organic and inorganic means, including our M&A strategy, and disciplined execution in how we manage our growth and leverage segments.
Of primary importance and highest priority to our organization is that our customers get our best formulated product to achieve their need and our best service each and every day. As that happens, we strive to ensure that our shareholders get the return on our efforts to deliver that. We have all the components of an advanced pricing management system to achieve it. We have the resources, including over 2,000 certified professionals across our organization, the tools with transparency down to a product-customer combination, and now an incentive plan that fosters the culture of getting a return for the time and money we spend generating solutions. In January, we announced a global footprint optimization plan, now called Quantum Leap, that reflects our plan to close 27 of our 82 plants from 2025 through 2030.
Quantum Leap is running on time and will culminate in run-rate conversion cost savings of $75 million and providing greater discipline in capital allocation to maintenance and growth projects that are targeted at our highest returning opportunities. This is a project we started in 2023, and the methodology we've used to populate the plan started with data and system development for a proper evaluation and the movement of the right people into the roles that can deliver it. Remember, our plants are technology-based, and our infrastructure was low on capacity utilization, even considering a healthy growth rate throughout and beyond the project lifetime. In addition, Quantum Leap includes the migration from 55 freestanding warehouses to 10 distribution centers in North America, with a shift to a centralized supply chain where we're building excellence in modern supply chain management principles.
This is a project we can now undertake as a company, given that we're nearing completion of full SAP deployment in all sites by the conclusion of 2026. Most importantly, we have the right leader in Nathan Weaver to drive the project execution. Nathan has 25 years at H.B. Fuller and has led multiple business segments. During his career journey, he was also Vice President of Global Strategic Accounts, R&D Lab Manager, the General Manager of our Latin American business, and most recently, Senior Vice President of Human Resources. Nathan's skills fit this assignment perfectly because the most challenging aspect of this change is not the engineering or the equipment choices. It is managing the cultural change of the people involved, and those people range from employees to customers. He'll tell you more about the timeline, the steps, and the impact shortly.
Our industry structure makes it a perfect environment for consolidation. There are thousands of smaller private companies that have developed very good, often unique technology offerings or masterfully penetrated a market. These companies tend to have specific positions in this very large industry. As we evaluate buy or build options to access what we've strategically designated as our top 20 growth accelerators, these companies are often a quick-to-market and best capital use option to enter. We typically buy at pre-synergy multiples that are at or near our trading multiple and reduce post-synergy multiples by three to six turns. About half of these synergies are raw material-based, given our scale as the largest pure-play adhesive company in the world. These acquisitions are also a source of talent that facilitates our growth.
What I want you to remember is that our M&A strategy is an EBITDA compounder because we buy companies addressing our top 20 strategic growth accelerators that we know we can grow, and we convert cost synergies quickly over the first two years of ownership to bring down the buying multiple. We're leaning into the value this M&A execution generates. Here you can see the benefit of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 acquisition cohorts. This industry has demonstrated 3% organic growth on average over time, with less in some legacy spaces. By having a good balance of inorganic EBITDA compounding and strong volume-based organic growth in more prosperous times, we strive to continue to grow EBITDA consistently and at twice that of revenue through cycles and fluctuating economic conditions.
Brendon Kryzer, our Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development , will cover the performance of our 2023 and 2024 acquisition collections at the conclusion of my remarks. Brendon is a 26-year veteran with H.B. Fuller . He's a chemical engineer and has managed our R&D lab, led both flexible packaging and the electronics business, and was the Integration Director for our 2011 acquisition of Forbo. Brendon's technical expertise, coupled with his strategic market outlook, has positioned him successfully for our new strategic focus, where we selectively grow the business. Inorganic growth is part of our portfolio mix shift. As I noted, we often choose to acquire into the fastest growing, highest margin spaces that we prioritized in our top 20 growth accelerators. However, we're driving organic shifts to remake our portfolio as well.
For example, we've exited customers in some very challenging regional segments, like older generation solar panels and commoditized Chinese baby diapers, to ensure we're focusing our resources and capital on the parts of this industry where solutions are truly valued. These are strategic choices that have impacted our organic growth rate over the last several years while we reposition the business to grow faster and more profitably in the future. Finally, we actively and regularly evaluate our portfolio and recently made the decision to divest our flooring business because it couldn't meet our financial targets for strategic reasons. More specifically, the raw material base for the industry was cementitious, where we lack scale, and the primary channels to market were through home centers and distributors, entities where working closely together to develop unique customer solutions is more difficult. In December of 2024, we acquired two medical companies and divested flooring.
The mix shift of that decision was a 70 basis point uplift through third quarter 2025. The net EBITDA impact of those transactions was relatively flat, but the acquired business grows over 20% faster and more profitably. All of these initiatives come together in our path to greater than 20% EBITDA margins. John will show you how we see each piece contributing to that target and beyond, with self-help actions driving our plan and volume growth, which is less predictable as additive. Now we'll play a short video showing you our strategy setting process, and I'll turn the stage over to Brendon Kryzer, as promised, to share more about inorganic growth at H.B. Fuller. Thank you.
The process this week is really where it all begins.
Our strategic process here at H.B. Fuller Company is a really extensive process, and it takes a lot of time and effort from our leaders throughout the organization. It's really a good demonstration of the direction that these individual business leaders want to take their business.
Each of those businesses presents a three-year strategic plan that's updated to the executive committee to get them familiar with what we want to do with the business and how we're planning to grow it, what resources we need, what decisions we're making, and how we're shaping it.
We get to hear from segment leaders who are really market experts.
This is how we build our strategy at H.B. Fuller Company. We're involved in 32 different market segments. We're involved in many regions around the world. Identifying where the best opportunities are for us to grow is what this is all about. Ultimately, identifying the top 20 opportunities that we want to pursue and focus our talent, our time, and our capital on.
It's a spirit of collaboration, insightful questions, engagement from the Executive Committee. Preparing for and entering into the room and our boardroom to give presentations is really entering into the stadium. It really is our Super Bowl every August. It's a fairly stressful situation leading up to it, but it's really rewarding to come through it and feel good about the strategy we've built over the last couple of months.
This process makes you state what you're going to do, why you're going to do it. It essentially provides who, what, where, when, why, and how you're going to accomplish something. For some people, it can be a source of anxiety, but for the people that know how to execute, that's a freedom.
We really did our homework going into the presentation. We have a lot of data that we were leaning on. We had a lot of customer feedback as well that's been really critical to us. I was really proud of the fact that the team had invested so much time in putting the right data and story together. I felt really confident walking into the room, felt confident delivering our strategy, and was really grateful with the awesome dialogue and conversation that we were able to have.
I'm reinvigorated, frankly. I'm excited about the challenges that we got, as well as the direction that we're moving right now as a business.
This strategic planning process is so in keeping with our core values, the power of collaboration. We have teams that work together to succeed in these markets and come tell us about it. The essence of courage, because it does take some courage to come in that room and deliver your great ambition, and the spirit of winning, because this is a company that really likes to win.
I feel like everyone's eyes are sort of fixed to the horizon of what is new out there, what's exciting, and then how do we get there together?
Collaboration is really key in this process, and it really pays tribute to the culture at H.B. Fuller Company. To get the strategy right, you really need to harness the wisdom and experiences of people who are in the market, a part of these industries that we serve.
I have an A team around me, and I'm really grateful for that. We take this very seriously. We've been preparing this for three months, so I knew they were well prepared and had their A game on. I always want to make sure that I feel like I can look in the mirror as the leader and say we're creating great value, and it's focused, and it's understandable.
I'm proud of how well we work together globally. We have three critical regions: Americas, EMEA, and Asia. While we have different cultures and we have different headwinds politically in each region, we're able to come together and speak a common language and drive opportunities forward.
I can't do it without the team. Whether it's R&D, product management, sales, everybody is intimately involved, and they each have a piece of it.
What makes H.B. Fuller so unique is that we're able to really leverage each other's strategies and segments and expertise, and help bring it into your segment for growth and to innovate.
We are very focused on the capital we spend and deploying it to the right projects and where we direct our time and our resources. It's fun to see our teams of people come in and tell us how they're going to do that.
Please welcome H.B. Fuller's Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development, Brendon Kryzer.
All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our Investor Day. I've been with H.B. Fuller for more than 26 years, and along the way, I've had a dozen different exciting roles. Right now, in my current role leading our M&A machine, I can honestly say I'm more excited than ever. Why? Because I truly believe our M&A strategy has become a real competitive advantage, one that's going to keep fueling extraordinary growth for years to come. Over the next 20 minutes, I'll show you how we're using M&A to accelerate our strategy and deliver strong financial results. We'll look at why the adhesives market is so attractive, how our disciplined process finds the right opportunities, and how we integrate new companies to maximize value.
I'll wrap up by taking a closer look at two recent acquisitions that highlight the types of companies we're adding to strengthen our portfolio. Let's just talk about our repositioning initiatives, focusing on the most profitable and fastest growing segments of the industry. Our M&A strategy is a major part of those efforts. We take a very targeted and disciplined approach guided by strict strategic criteria that vary across our business segments. For our growth segments, we focus on acquiring unique, differentiated technologies, products that are highly specialized in playing a large, fast-growing, and profitable market. We look for opportunities where we can help those companies grow even faster as part of H.B. Fuller than they could on their own. For our leverage segments, we focus on consolidation and geographic expansion opportunities.
We acquire businesses that can benefit from our scale, purchasing power, and broad operations network to lower costs and boost margins. For every deal, we build a clear business model that lays out the financial goals. John will go over into more details on the financial criteria later, but at a high level, we target highly synergistic opportunities, deals where we can significantly compound the EBITDA we purchase. Typically, we buy companies at or near our trading multiple, but after synergies, we're able to reduce that multiple by three to six turns. Celeste mentioned this earlier as well, but it's worth repeating again. We're purchasing companies near our trading multiple and then creating three to six turns of value through integration and synergy. That's incredible value creation for H.B. Fuller .
Since the start of 2023, we've acquired and fully integrated 11 companies, and our pipeline of new opportunities remains very strong. Let me now remind you how attractive this market is for M&A. Celeste also showed a version of this slide earlier, but it's worth revisiting because the opportunity here is really unique. The adhesives market is a large $80 billion fragmented industry where the top three players make up only 24% of the market. There are thousands of small and mid-sized companies that thrive by offering niche technologies or services. These dynamics allow us to be very selective in who we acquire, targeting only the most strategic and synergistic assets. Many of these smaller companies are profitable and successful on their own, but they become even stronger as part of H.B. Fuller . We are EBITDA compounders. We have a strong competitive advantage as an acquirer.
We make the businesses we acquire more profitable through better raw material purchasing, leveraging our vast operations network to reduce manufacturing costs, and streamlining SG&A. We help them grow faster, using our global scale to commercialize and expand into markets they couldn't access on their own. How do we decide which companies to acquire? It all starts with our strategy process. You just watched the video a few minutes ago describing that process. During it, our business leaders, who are experts in their respective segments, walk us through the markets they serve and outline their strategy to win. As a result, we gain a deep understanding of the megatrends, subsegments, and growth opportunities across our portfolio down to a very granular level. Our segment leaders recognize that M&A is a key lever to drive their strategies forward.
During the strategy process, they identify acquisition opportunities that could help accelerate their plans. Last August, more than 250 ideas were presented. These ideas are prioritized by our executive leadership team based on several factors. Those factors are profitability, growth rate, and market size. The outcome of that exercise becomes part of our corporate strategy, what we call our top 20 growth accelerators. The bubble chart on the slide shows a redacted version of this year's top 20. Each bubble is plotted by profitability and growth rate, with the bubble size representing the market size. Just to clarify, these aren't specific companies we want to acquire. They're broader strategic themes that point us toward the types of businesses that fill our growth objectives. For example, one bubble is specified technology for medical device manufacturing. While we have our own innovation efforts in this area, the qualification timelines are long.
Acquiring a company that already has products and established customer relationships allows us to grow much faster in this strategic segment. The other bubbles represent 19 additional growth areas with similar potential. With these top 20 growth initiatives defined, we can now be highly strategic and targeted in the companies we pursue. The next step is identifying and profiling companies that could fill our top 20 growth accelerator needs. This effort is deeply embedded in our culture. I get ideas brought to me constantly from across the business. For each potential company, we create a profile that clearly outlines the strategic fit, the synergy potential, and the ownership structure. So far this year, we've built over 110 of these profiles. Once they're complete, we start directly engaging with the companies to understand whether an acquisition might be possible.
This is a very different process than just sitting around waiting for the bankers to call about the next auction. No offense to the bankers in the room. We love you. I'll take your call. The chart on the slide shows how we track our prospecting efforts. We pass entirely on some opportunities when they don't fit. Most are placed into a monitor status, meaning they're very attractive, just not for sale right now. We stay close to these owners so that when the time comes to sell, we get the first call. Each year, we actively engage with 35- 40 potential targets and close three or four deals. Just think about how selective that process is. We start with 250 general ideas, narrow that down to our top 20, build profiles in around 110 companies, and end up closing about 3% of them.
Most of our current opportunities are in the Engineering Adhesives business unit, but there are also attractive possibilities in HHC and BAS. As a result of our approach, every one of our deals has been a proprietary deal, meaning we were able to enter into an exclusive arrangement with the sellers and avoid an auction process. This is an important feature as we can control the timeline of the deals, increase certainty of closure, and reduce transaction expenses. This approach to M&A is a unique competitive advantage for H.B. Fuller . There's a long runway of opportunity for us. I just mentioned that all of our recent acquisitions were proprietary deals. Why on earth would sellers want to work exclusively with us and skip an auction? The adhesives industry is a pretty tight-knit community, and in this industry, reputation matters, and we have a great one.
We are the buyer of choice for sellers. We have a strong track record of getting deals done and offer sellers a high level of certainty that the deal will close. Our diligence teams are highly experienced and move quickly. We're experts in our segments, which helps us understand both where the synergies lie and where the risks are. We also value the talent that comes with our acquisitions. We provide a place where legacy founders and their teams can continue to thrive. In fact, one in five of our top 150 leaders joined H.B. Fuller through an acquisition. Sellers are coming to us more now than ever. Now let's turn to integration. We fully integrate every company we acquire, with a strong focus on delivering the business model. I've overseen many integrations at H.B. Fuller.
In every kickoff meeting, the first slide shown is what I call the North Star slide. It lays out the priorities that guide decision making. Priority one, take care of the people that we acquire. A business is made up of people, and it's critical that we reduce uncertainty and bring them into our culture. Priority number two, take care of the customers we've acquired. We don't want to disrupt the business we bought. Priority number three, aggressively go after synergies. That's how we quickly make the acquired company more valuable. Finally, priority four, bring our systems together, integrating operations, processes, and tools so the organization functions as one. We have very experienced cross-functional teams with a proven track record of success. Each integration team is assigned pre-close, led by someone from the business, and supported by seasoned workstream leaders with deep integration experience.
Because planning starts early, we're able to begin capturing synergies on day one and implement cybersecurity controls before closing and bring companies into our SAP platform within one year. We elevate every acquired company to our safety and EHS standards and, over time, move back office functions into one of our three global centers of excellence. To ensure accountability, we hold executive-level integration review sessions every two months for at least two years post-close. These meetings, attended by Celeste and John , maintain focus, reduce risk, and enable fast decision making. Each review tracks performance against the deal model and monitors synergy capture. In short, our integration experience de-risks execution and maximizes value capture. Let's now take a closer look at the 11 acquisitions we've completed since 2023.
On this slide, you can see each company we've acquired, along with a brief description of the strategic intent behind each deal. While every acquisition has its own unique strategic purpose, collectively, they've had a major impact on the mix of our business, shifting us more toward the most attractive markets in our industry. Taken together, these deals have significantly improved our profitability and created a long runway for continued growth. These acquisitions are well balanced across all of our GBUs and in multiple regions, which helps minimize the execution risk. The average deal size is relatively small, around $70 million per acquisition. These smaller tuck-in deals allow us to be highly selective in getting exactly what we want while also enabling lower purchase price multiples and greater synergy potential. Now let's look at the same collection of deals through a slightly different lens.
We view our acquisitions as a balanced portfolio of deals, each with its own risk and reward profile. The mix is thoughtful and intentional, designed to advance our strategy while managing execution risk and financial payback time across the portfolio. On the left side of the matrix, you'll see our new market entry acquisitions like Gem, Medifil, and ND Industries. These bring us into high-growth, high-margin markets we couldn't reach easily on our own. They enhance the quality of our business, but typically have fewer upfront synergies and longer payback times. Commercial expansion deals such as Aspen and Adhesion Biomedical fall into a similar category. Here, we already have a market presence but acquire differentiated technologies to strengthen it. These deals have more synergies than new market entry acquisitions, but their returns still depend on commercial growth over time.
Deals on this side of the matrix are typically done in our growth segments, where we focus on innovation, market expansion, and building long-term value. On the right side of the matrix, we have consolidation, capacity expansion, and geographic expansion deals. These are great opportunities for our leverage business to improve profitability. They deliver high synergies, strong near-term returns, and significant consolidation benefits. Baird, for example, is a consolidation deal offering high, easily captured synergies and immediate ROI. Sanglier is a capacity expansion play that addressed production constraints in our profitable roofing segment, and LemTapes, XCHEM, HS Butyl, and ND Shanghai were all geographic expansion deals, taking proven business models into new regions far faster than we could by building organically.
As you can see, by acquiring companies across the full matrix, we're able to balance short and long-term returns, manage execution risk, and strategically expand to the most attractive markets in our industry. Let's n ow look at the financial performance of our deals. This is the best slide in my presentation. If I've lost you with all the culture and process talk, now is the time to come back. I'm going to focus on just two key financial metrics that best show how we're performing. First, let's look at EBITDA across the collection of deals. We've increased the EBITDA of the acquired businesses by 60%. We acquired $55 million of EBITDA and expect that same group to deliver $88 million by year-end. We've achieved this by selecting the right deals, executing on our cost synergies, and continuing to grow the acquired businesses. While integration work is still ongoing and there's more upside ahead, this already proves one thing: we are EBITDA compounders. The second metric I want to highlight is EBITDA margin. At acquisition, the collection of deals averaged 17.6% EBITDA.
By the end of 2025, we expect those same businesses to deliver more than 29%, an improvement of over 1,100 basis points. That's powerful proof that we're repositioning the portfolio, buying companies that bring us into the best segments of the industry and making them more profitable. These acquisitions have been a major driver of H.B. Fuller's overall EBITDA margin improvement. As you can see, M&A isn't just helping us grow; it's transforming who we are as a company. Next, I'm going to highlight two of our most recent new market entry acquisitions: ND Industries and Gem. Both of these are great examples of how we're expanding our presence into the most attractive areas of the market. These deals reposition our product mix toward more specialized, highly differentiated offerings, and they come with very strong profit margins. I hope that after seeing where we're growing, you'll think of H.B.
Fuller as much more than a specialty chemicals company. ND Industries. ND Industries is a formulator of structural adhesives, but with a unique twist: they encapsulate the reactive components of the adhesives and then apply it directly to fasteners as a service. They do this for critical applications in fast-growing markets like aerospace, automotive, electronics, defense, and heavy machinery. The sales and specification process is truly a partnership with OEM engineers. It's highly technical, highly collaborative, and the adhesive plays a critical role in the performance of the final product. On the screen, you can see a photo of fasteners coated with our encapsulated adhesive. These are used when customers assemble their products, and the adhesive's job is simple but vital: keep that bolt in place.
You can imagine the cost of this service is a very small part of the total cost of our customers' products, but the function it provides is absolutely critical. Just how critical? You may recall last year a door plug fell off of a plane that was in flight. Properly secured bolts ensure airplane doors stay on. Who do you think decides which adhesive gets put on that bolt? Is it the sourcing department at our customers or the engineers? It's the engineers. This is not a commodity chemical. This is a fast-growing, high-margin business with very low working capital requirements. We've made it even more profitable, now delivering EBITDA margins in the mid-30% range. Integration has gone extremely well. We've captured meaningful cost synergies and brought the ND team into our entrepreneurial culture. We're not stopping there.
ND was previously a family-run company with a primary focus on the North American market. We're now expanding the model globally, investing in additional capacity and reaching new regions. We expect around 12% EBITDA growth for the foreseeable future as we continue executing this strategy. The next acquisition I want to highlight is Gem, but before getting into the details, I want to first show how it fits into the larger roll-up we've been executing in the medical space. The adhesive class that's become widely adopted for medical applications in recent years is cyanoacrylate adhesives. Our journey into medical cyanoacrylates actually began with the CyberBond acquisition back in 2016, which brought us that foundational chemistry. From there, we expanded our offering with Tissue Seal, which held North American distribution rights for a topical skin adhesive.
We moved further up the value chain and went global with Adhesion Biomedical, a company that not only manufactures its own medical devices for topical skin bonding but also holds the only FDA-approved catheter securement adhesive. Medifill followed, adding additional topical skin adhesive options and clean room manufacturing capability. All of that groundwork brought us to Gem, a company that manufactures medical adhesives and application devices sold together for internal surgical use. Simply said, Gem's products allow surgeons to use adhesives instead of sutures, staples, tacks, and other fixation methods. I'll go deeper into Gem next, but to close this slide, our strategic goal for the medical adhesive technology segment is clear. We're building this into a $100 million EBITDA business, driven by organic growth in the strong portfolio we've already built and through selective high-value M&A going forward. Now I'd like to share a bit more about Gem.
Gem's products are used by physicians in operating rooms across a broad range of approved indications. They serve as adhesives, sealants, hemostatic agents to stop bleeding, or as a combination of these functions. Gem manufactures and supplies not only the adhesive materials but also the patented delivery devices, as you can see on the slide. Gem has medical devices approved for more than 80 indications. We don't have time to cover them all, but let me describe just one so you can get a sense of what Gem brings to H.B. Fuller. One procedure Gem's products are used for is blood vessel embolization. In this procedure, physicians intentionally block a vessel by injecting our adhesive through a catheter under image guidance. The goal is to stop or redirect blood flow.
Using adhesives for these kinds of internal procedures is being rapidly adopted by surgeons because it aligns perfectly with several major medical megatrends: less invasive procedures, lower risk, faster recovery, lower cost, and most importantly, better patient outcomes. During the breakout sessions, I encourage you to visit with our Medical Adhesives Technology segment leader, Zuzana Tuso. She will be demonstrating some of the medical devices we're selling and can share more about this exciting new segment for H.B. Fuller. This is a highly profitable business with EBITDA margins north of 50%, and it's growing rapidly as surgeon adoption increases. The use of Gem products, now H.B. Fuller products, is truly a game changer in the medical industry. In summary, here are the key points I'd like you to take away from this presentation. First, remember that the adhesives market is a highly attractive space for continued M&A.
It's a large, fragmented, $80 billion market with thousands of potential targets. That gives us the luxury of being very selective, using M&A strategically to accelerate each segment's growth plans. Our approach is disciplined and thoughtful. We pursue only the best opportunities identified by our business leaders, and we balance our portfolio of deals to manage both workload and timing of financial gains. Once acquired, we fully integrate these companies with experienced, cross-functional teams who know how to deliver results. Through cost synergies and growth, we're able to compound the EBITDA we acquire, and we have the track record to prove it. We are getting outstanding results from our M&A strategy. It's a true competitive advantage for H.B. Fuller. It's by far the most exciting job I've had at H.B. Fuller, and it will continue to be a major driver of our growth in the years ahead.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions later today.
Please welcome H.B. Fuller's Executive Vice President of Business Transformation, Nathan Weaver.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Nathan Weaver. I'm the Executive Vice President for Business Transformation at H.B. Fuller. I just want to express my gratitude for all of you investing some of your valued time with us this afternoon. I'll be sharing details about our supply chain transformation initiative that we refer to as Project Quantum Leap. A Quantum Leap is defined as a significant increase or advance in something. In our case, Project Quantum Leap will result in a significant advance in the capability of H.B. Fuller's global supply chain. Project Quantum Leap focuses on various aspects of the supply chain, including the reduction and optimization of our global manufacturing footprint, the implementation of best practices in total supply chain management, and the redesign of our product distribution model.
I will give you a glimpse into how this project will strengthen our ability to meet the needs of our customers, drive growth, increase profitability, improve capital deployment, and expand shareholder value creation. Let's take a look at our global footprint. This map shows the 82 sites that were in operation during 2024. Organic growth, as well as acquisitions, have expanded our manufacturing footprint and strengthened our technology portfolio. Some sites came into the footprint by way of acquired companies. We also built sites to support business growth. While there are benefits to an expansive geographic footprint, there are also considerable opportunities to make it more efficient. To make a simple illustration, every site, no matter its size, requires investments in capital maintenance, for example, supervision. These are necessary but also costly. It's time to tackle this opportunity.
There are several reasons why we are taking on this bold initiative now. Capacity utilization is not optimal at all sites. A streamlined footprint will enable us to more fully leverage every site in the network, driving higher productivity. Some of the sites that remain in the network will have more advanced systems and equipment, leaving a higher efficiency manufacturing base. Also, we have increased investments in automation to reduce our dependency on increasingly scarce labor. We currently have unnecessary manufacturing redundancy across some technologies in the footprint, and we will seek to optimize that. This will also streamline the scale-up of new innovation and facilitate the integration of new acquisitions. With over 80% of our revenue now on a state-of-the-art ERP system, we have a common platform to drive process discipline across the company.
Project Quantum Leap will ensure that we amplify the benefits of the investment that we have made in this platform. This includes enhanced demand and supply planning functionality and more robust capacity planning, which is particularly meaningful given that our supply base is increasingly global and that our manufacturing base will be more global for specific technologies. A good example of this is our site in Cairo, Egypt, shown on this slide. It was commissioned a couple of years ago. The efficiency of this site positions it to supply various parts of the world with hot melt adhesives. This shift for parts of our business from what has typically been a regional manufacturing model requires a more integrated approach to supply chain. We are confident in our organizational capability and capacity to execute this initiative.
We have built strong muscle memory dating all the way back to the Forbo acquisition from 2012, where we consolidated seven sites in the first year. More recently, following the acquisition of Beardow Adams, we reduced three of the five sites in just 180 days. We have retained detailed internal playbooks documenting key processes and learnings associated with these examples, as well as many others. Importantly, many members of our team have had roles in transformation or integration projects. They are well prepared to tackle the various work streams associated with Project Quantum Leap. Finally, we have strong alignment across the GBUs. This is critical as we transition from a supply chain model to a supply chain model that is center-led that will maximize value across our GBUs.
The new supply chain operating model was launched at the beginning of 2025 in North America and is going well, and we will extend it to the other regions in the coming year. Now, the impact of Project Quantum Leap will be measured in several ways. First, reliably servicing our customers is at the top of the list. Service reliability is key to long-term revenue growth and retention. We are measuring customer sentiment through biannual customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys have helped us identify opportunities to improve. Internal metrics such as on-time delivery will also give us visibility into the improvement that we are driving. In some cases, we will be asking our customers to adjust how they are supplied by H.B. Fuller. This often doesn't come without effort on their part. That said, the benefits customers will experience are numerous.
We will launch an enhanced customer portal, providing greater visibility to their account and order information, freeing up valuable time for them. Customers will experience more consistent on-time delivery to support their planning and production. Reduced lead times will support their working capital challenges and provide greater flexibility. Ultimately, the changes will make it easier to do business with H.B. Fuller. We will reduce our manufacturing footprint from 82 sites in 2024 to 55 sites by 2030. I'll show you a summary by year and share some additional thoughts in just a moment. Our North American network of warehouses will be optimized from 55 locations to 10 distribution centers. The network will provide shorter lead time for customers for make-to-stock products. It will maximize load optimization with our carriers and cut average miles shipped for less than truckload shipments in half.
We estimate freight savings from this part of the initiative of $4 million- $6 million. We will replicate this work in other regions based on our experience in North America. The project will support capital deployment objectives, and John will discuss this in greater detail later in our agenda. By the end of the initiative, we expect to optimize inventory levels, reducing working capital. This will result in a one-time cash flow benefit of $35 million. We expect to also see a reduction in maintenance capital of $15 million/ year. Project Quantum Leap will ultimately deliver $75 million in cost savings by 2030. We are confident that we will achieve this goal, and we have built sufficient contingency in our plans to de-risk our ability to do so. Now, turning to the next slide, this graph shows the estimated footprint timeline.
As I mentioned, we expect that our global footprint will be reduced to 55 sites by 2030. Over the past few years, we have added high-efficiency manufacturing sites that will enable this. The example of Cairo that I shared a moment ago is one such site. As we have successfully done in some market segments, such as electronics, we will leverage the new network to build manufacturing centers of excellence for high-growth, high-profit market segments in our portfolio. These dedicated centers assure that we can penetrate markets that have a high degree of adhesive specification and stringent service requirements. This investment supports the ongoing work to adjust our portfolio and move to EBITDA margins greater than 20%. We have active work streams underway that will result in the closure of nine sites, several of which will be completed by the end of 2026. There are many factors influencing this timeline.
Customer qualifications are often the longest critical path in our projects. Individual project timelines contemplate this, and actions are taken to manage customer needs and deliver the overall timeline. When appropriate, we will communicate site closures publicly, and we will share periodic updates of our progress with investors. Finally, we will invest $150 million in capital to support Project Quantum Leap. $60 million have already been invested across 2024 and 2025. The remaining investment will be balanced over the next few years. Now, how are we going to get all of this important work done? We have a program management office in place to support Project Quantum Leap. Individual projects are carefully scoped to ensure that we manage the change impact effectively. I want to emphasize the importance we place on comprehensive planning to ensure successful execution.
We deploy a staged process, and the first three stages are focused on clearly defining why we should take on the project, the feasibility of the project, and the detailed steps required to execute it. We contemplate multiple scenarios and have adequate contingency plans. This sets the stage for proper resourcing, cross-functional alignment, and ultimately accountability to deliver the expected outcomes. As I mentioned earlier, we have significant expertise in customer qualifications and have a track record of delivering excellent results in this area, and we will seek to accelerate opportunities wherever possible. In conclusion, Project Quantum Leap will deliver significant value to our investors, our customers, and our employees. Strengthening our supply chain will support sustained profitable growth for years to come.
We are on track and remain confident that we will accomplish the goals of this project, and we look forward to keeping you apprised of our progress in the months ahead. Now, I'd like to invite you all to enjoy a five-minute break, and following the break, John Corkrean will continue with our presentation. Thank you.
Please take your seats. Our program will resume shortly. Please take your seats. Our program will resume shortly.
Please welcome to the stage H.B. Fuller's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, John Corkrean.
Okay, so my goal for this section is to distill all that information you've just heard into some clear, quantifiable financial targets, demonstrate how we plan to achieve these targets, and explain what that means for shareholder value creation. All right, so this slide shows the topics I'll cover. I plan to show how the significant enhancements we've made to our business model over the past 10 years have allowed us to accelerate growth, improve margins, and generate strong cash flow, and that these enhancements are key factors of our recent resilient financial performance. I'll outline our financial targets, which are both clear and achievable, and discuss our focused, disciplined approach to capital deployment. I'll also present our roadmap for achieving an EBITDA margin of greater than 20%, a goal that's both straightforward and attainable.
I will finish with a comparison of our financial performance and valuation to companies that have similar operating models. I wanted to start with a longer-term view of our financial results. This slide shows our revenue and EBITDA all the way back to 1989, so 36 years ago. You can see that the company's growth trajectory, both in terms of top-line growth and profit, changed significantly around 2010, with the last 15 years reflecting a significantly higher rate of growth. You can see on this slide the company's financial profile has significantly transformed over the last decade. We've achieved a 70% increase in revenue, more than doubled our EBITDA, growing at about twice the rate of revenue, and improved our margins by nearly 600 basis points.
This performance is attributable to several key factors, many of which Celeste highlighted earlier, focusing our portfolio on the most attractive segments of the adhesive market, expanding our technology platforms, enabling us to innovate and address customers' biggest challenges with speed, enhancing our pricing excellence journey, and successfully executing on our M&A strategy. These strategic initiatives have been crucial in driving strong financial performance, even in a challenging environment. This change in the financial profile of the company is evident in our results for the most recent quarter and year. On this slide, we present a snapshot of our financial results for Q3 2025, which we announced last month. Despite facing a challenging operating environment, we successfully achieved growth in both EBITDA and EPS. Notably, our gross profit and EBITDA margins saw significant expansion. Our organic revenue performance was slightly negative, but in line with our expectations amidst economic headwinds.
From a profitability perspective, our execution drove strong results for the quarter. EBITDA grew by 3% year-on-year to $171 million, with our EBITDA margin expanding to 19.1%, up 110 basis points from the previous year. This performance included positive EBITDA growth and margin expansion across all three GBUs, driven by strategic pricing, raw material cost actions, contributions from acquisitions and divestitures, and targeted cost reduction efforts. Adjusted EPS for the quarter was $1.26, up double- digits compared to the same quarter last year, driven by higher income and a lower number of shares outstanding. Year to date, we're delivering organic revenue growth in a very challenging environment, led by strong pricing execution.
That pricing execution, as well as raw material cost management, mix improvement, driven in part by the divestiture of our flooring business, and the acquisition of two high-margin medical businesses, as well as restructuring savings, have helped drive about 80 basis points of gross margin improvement and about 70 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement on a year-to-date basis. We've grown EPS on a year-to-date basis, driven by higher income and lower shares as a result of the approximately 1 million shares we've repurchased year to date. Given our strong performance and execution this year, we've raised our full-year guidance for both EBITDA and EPS from our initial guidance for the year. The midpoint of our updated guidance now projects 4% growth in EBITDA and 9% growth in EPS compared to fiscal 2024.
Now I'd like to move from the discussion of our historical financial results and spend a minute on our key financial targets going forward, which are shown here. Specifically, we aim for constant currency revenue growth of 5% or greater, supported by industry growth trends, our pricing power, and our acquisition strategy. We plan to achieve pricing that more than offsets raw, wage, and other inflation, with a target of positive pricing every year. We aim to leverage this top-line growth into EBITDA growth greater than double our revenue growth. This is supported by our strategy to achieve a greater than 20% EBITDA margin, driven by organic and inorganic revenue growth, our pricing power, the continuous improvement of our business mix, and the savings from our manufacturing footprint consolidation and supply chain redesign, or what we're referring to as Project Quantum Leap.
I'll provide more detail on how each driver will contribute to that margin improvement and over what period of time. We target working capital of less than 15% as a percentage of revenue, and finally, we target an ROIC in the low teens. Over the next few slides, I'll outline why we have confidence in delivering each of these financial objectives. I'll start with our target of greater than 5% constant currency revenue growth. This slide shows a revenue growth bridge from trailing 12 months Q3 2020 to trailing 12 months Q3 2025. During that five-year period, we grew revenue by a compound annual growth rate of 4.9% and, adjusting for exchange, at a compound annual growth rate of more than 7%. Acquisitions and divestitures were a big contributor, delivering a net $257 million of revenue as a result of 15 different acquisitions and one divestiture during this period.
These acquisitions generally come at higher margins than our legacy business, particularly after factoring in synergies, as we'll discuss in the upcoming slides on margin drivers. From an organic revenue standpoint, revenue increased at an average rate of 5.1%, led by pricing. We delivered significant pricing gains during this period of unprecedented raw material inflation, which allowed us to offset the impact of raw material, wage, and other inflation. Volume's been harder to come by in this industry in the last few years due to a global manufacturing slowdown and tariff-related uncertainty. We've also been very selective about where we play, focusing on the more attractive parts of the market where we've grown and taken share while exiting some of the lower margin businesses.
For example, we've chosen not to participate in older generation solar panels and commoditized baby diapers, and our businesses in those markets have become smaller but healthier. At the same time, we've doubled down our focus on more attractive, more profitable businesses in areas like automotive and electronics, and those businesses have become much larger and more profitable. The net of these moves is helping drive a meaningful mix improvement in our business and driving margin expansion, as you'll see in a couple of slides. Regarding our goal to show positive pricing every year, Celeste covered several factors that support our ability to deliver on this objective. Specifically, pricing's not a one-time decision, but rather an ongoing cycle of evaluation, adjustment, and optimization as market dynamics, customers' values, and perceptions constantly change.
We've invested in tools and training to enhance our pricing capabilities, and we've reduced the number of index-based pricing arrangements to give ourselves more flexibility. Finally, we're including pricing metrics in more of our variable compensation programs to ensure that pay is aligned with delivering on this objective. On this slide, we show bridges from trailing 12 months Q3 2020 to trailing 12 months Q3 2025 for EBITDA and EBITDA margin that provide key proof points for the deliverability of our financial targets. Specifically, that our pricing execution, accretive M&A, mix improvement, and efficiency savings have driven EBITDA growth and margin improvement, and we would expect to continue to capitalize on these levers going forward. During this period, EBITDA grew from $396 million- $599 million, an average annual growth rate of 9%.
Adjusting for FX, EBITDA grew at an average annual growth rate of 12%, about double the rate of revenue growth. M&A was a key driver, representing just under $100 million of incremental EBITDA during that period. During that period, we acquired a net $54 million of EBITDA and nearly doubled the impact to the P&L through synergies and growth that we captured from those acquisitions. We delivered on pricing execution that more than offset historical level of raw material inflation during this period. The restructuring program that we announced in early 2023 and the changes that we have already made to our manufacturing footprint have delivered about $60 million in annual savings, and volume and mix added another incremental $27 million. On the right-hand side of the slide, we show the walk for EBITDA margin for the same period.
During this period, we increased EBITDA by 270 basis points through a combination of pricing execution, accretive M&A and M&A synergies, restructuring savings, and an improvement in the mix of our business. On a constant currency basis, EBITDA margin increased 330 basis points during the period. By acquiring higher margin businesses, improving them through synergy capture, and divesting one low margin business, we delivered 160 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion. While pricing more than offset inflation from a revenue standpoint, it was about 70 basis points dilutive to EBITDA margin due to the unprecedented period of raw material inflation. Our restructuring actions have allowed us to capture about 170 basis points of margin improvement, and the improvement in our business mix through being very selective where we play delivered another 70 basis points.
This performance gives us confidence that we can generate higher EBITDA growth than revenue growth through a combination of continued accretive M&A, volume and mix improvement, and efficiency savings, all of which will be key contributors to our objective of delivering an EBITDA margin of greater than 20%. Regarding our fifth financial objective, we have a highly cash-generative business model, partly because of our capital-light profile, but also because we have made working capital a key part of our financial strategy. Here we show the trends for our net working capital as a percentage of revenue, as well as our cash conversion cycle over the last five years.
You can see that we've driven net working capital as a percentage of revenue from about 19% at the end of 2020 to 15% at the end of last year and reduced our cash conversion from about 69 days at the end of 2020 to about 54 days at the end of last year. We believe we should be able to run this business at working capital that is consistently below 15% as a percentage of revenue. However, we would expect this number to be above 15% for at least the next couple of years, as we need to carry slightly higher inventory as we complete Project Quantum Leap. We're turning to below 15% as we complete those actions. This slide shows a couple of different return on capital metrics and our performance against them over time. The blue bars show ROIC over the last five years.
If you look at our return on invested capital over the past five years, you'll see an improving trend. While our overall ROIC is still lower than our target, it's important to recognize what's behind these numbers. During this period of time, we've made a number of strategic acquisitions, all of which have strengthened our business, expanded our capabilities, and positioned us for long-term growth. Naturally, these acquisitions add to our invested capital and can weigh on ROIC in the short term. The underlying improvement we're seeing demonstrates that the business is becoming more efficient and more profitable over time, and acquisitions are improving our financial profile, as evidenced by their contribution to EBITDA growth and margin improvement on the previous slides.
As the benefits of these acquisitions continue to be realized and we continue to drive EBITDA margin above 20%, while simultaneously reducing invested capital through Project Quantum Leap, working capital improvement, and lower capital expenditures, both related to our SAP spending wind-down and a reduction in maintenance capital, we expect ROIC to strengthen in the low teens. The second metric is return on tangible assets, which measures how effectively a company generates profits from its tangible assets, operating assets like factories, equipment, and working capital. Unlike ROIC, it excludes goodwill and other intangibles from the capital base. Return on tangible assets, which neutralizes the impact of goodwill from acquisitions, highlights the underlying operational performance of the company. It also improves peer comparisons, adjusting for situations where companies have different levels of acquisition activity. On this metric, we've shown consistent annual improvement and compare favorably to our peer group.
Next, I want to spend a few minutes on our capital allocation philosophy, which is shown on this slide. First, we target internal capital expenditures of between 3% and 4% of revenue. We focus on strategic acquisitions that drive shareholder value accretion. We pay an annual dividend equal to 20%- 25% of average trailing three-year net income, and we raise the dividend every year. We use share repurchase as needed to offset dilution from shares issued through equity compensation plans. We do all this while targeting a long-term net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of between 2.5x and 3x . Now, let's touch briefly on each one of these. Starting with capital expenditures, we have a very capital-light business model with predictable, modest annual capital requirements. We target approximately 3% - 4% of revenue for capital expenditures.
This slide shows that we've consistently been in that range with about 60% of capital expenditures related to maintenance capital, including the SAP-related expenditures, and about 40% related to growth and efficiency capital, including capital for our footprint consolidation and capital required to realize acquisition synergies. CapEx as a percentage of revenue stepped up last year as we started to make investments related to Project Quantum Leap. We would expect that capital expenditures will run closer to 4% as a percentage of revenue the next couple of years, but decrease to closer to 3% as a percentage of revenue after we complete our SAP implementation and reduce maintenance capital as a result of fewer manufacturing facilities. As Brendon discussed earlier, M&A has played a crucial role in our growth strategy. This slide highlights our key acquisition criteria from both a strategic and financial standpoint.
Brendan already covered our strategic approach, so I'll focus on the financial criteria. We prioritize deals that offer significant cost and revenue synergies. Our disciplined approach to M&A ensures that the average post-synergy multiple for our deals is well below our trading multiple. We seek deals with an internal rate of return of over 20% and that our earnings per share are accretive within the first or second year post-acquisition. Only after a transaction passes these screens would we pursue it. Regarding our dividend, we consistently return cash to shareholders by targeting a dividend equal to 20%- 25% of prior three-year average net income. It's worth noting that we have a very strong track record on dividends, demonstrated by the fact that we've increased our dividend every year for the last 57 years, including this year.
We pursue share repurchase primarily to offset share dilution resulting from benefit plan issuances. Additionally, we deploy share repurchases strategically when it represents the most effective means of returning capital to shareholders, factoring in our leverage, alternative investment opportunities, and the company's valuation. Following the Royal acquisition in 2017, we suspended share repurchase to prioritize cash for debt reduction. Recently, we've resumed the program and expect to continue utilizing share repurchase, which will significantly increase the annual cash return to shareholders compared to previous years. Next, I wanted to provide a little more detail on our roadmap to the greater than 20% EBITDA margin, including the levers and how each contributes to this goal in terms of both impact and timing.
As you can see from this chart, there are three primary drivers: Project Quantum Leap, pricing and innovation, and mix shift that enable us to achieve our goal of greater than 20% EBITDA margin. Let's start by discussing the total impact of each driver. Project Quantum Leap, which was covered in detail by Nathan , will be the most significant contributor, providing about 200 basis points of margin improvement over the next five years. Mix shift, which reflects acquiring and growing higher margin businesses faster than our lower margin ones and capturing synergies associated with those deals, will contribute between 100 and 150 basis points. Lastly, pricing and innovation, which reflects our ability to manage pricing effectively to offset raw material and other inflationary pressures, will add approximately 50 basis points to our margin improvement over this period.
We've included the impact of expected raw material, wage, and other inflation in this category. While it has the smallest impact of the three, our target of positive pricing every year should allow us to offset overall inflation while being modestly accretive from a margin standpoint. You'll note that we show a volume bar that we expect to be positive, but less easy to predict in terms of timing and impact. We believe that volume will be a positive contributor to margin expansion, but we're showing it separately because we want to underscore the fact that we don't believe we need to count on volume growth as a driver to greater than 20% EBITDA margin. Any contribution from volume would be additive. Now let's break down the approximate impact by year.
In 2026, we expect approximately 50 basis points of improvement split between the impact of Project Quantum Leap and pricing and inflation, the latter related to the carryover of pricing gains and raw material savings actions that we executed this year. The impact from Project Quantum Leap will step up in 2027 as more projects come online and more benefits are realized. We'll also start to see about 30 basis points a year from mix shift as we expect the pace of acquisitions to pick up starting in 2026. As we move forward, the cumulative impact of these drivers will continue to build, driving our EBITDA margin from approximately 18% this year to well above 20% in the next five years, eclipsing the 20% level by the end of 2028 based on our current estimates.
Now I want to spend a few minutes on how that historical financial performance and capital allocation profile, as well as our valuation, compares to our peers and other companies. Unfortunately, there are no other public standalone pure-play adhesive companies like H.B. Fuller to compare to, but we believe there are several companies that are good comps, but companies that we have not historically been compared to. As Celeste highlighted earlier, H.B. Fuller often gets compared to especially chemical companies. However, our operating model is quite different. For example, we tailor our formulations to meet specific customer needs. As Celeste noted, more than 50% of our SKUs are tailored specifically for one customer. Additionally, our products represent a very small percentage of our customers' cost of goods, making us an integral yet cost-effective part of their supply chain.
This unique positioning allows us to deliver specialized solutions that drive value for our customers and differentiate us from the broader chemical companies. H.B. Fuller 's business model is much closer to the flavors and fragrances companies and industrial coating companies in terms of customer concentration or lack thereof, as well as the percentage of costs that our products make up of our customers' cost of sales. Collectively, I'll refer to these companies in this group as the differentiated formulators. If you look at our EBITDA growth and margin trends over the last four years, our differentiation certainly shows up in our financial results. This slide shows the performance of H.B. Fuller , represented by our stock ticker FUL, compared to the differentiated formulators, which is the combination of the flavors and fragrances and industrial coatings companies, as well as versus the specialty chemicals group.
EBITDA for 2020 is indexed to 100 for all three groups. H.B. Fuller has outgrown both groups from an EBITDA standpoint, demonstrating our strong operational performance and strategic execution. Over this period, we've delivered 200 basis points of expansion in EBITDA margin, while the differentiated formulators have lost 30 basis points and the specialty chemical companies have lost 130 basis points. This trend highlights our ability to drive profitability and maintain a competitive advantage even in a challenging environment. Finally, let's compare H.B. Fuller individually and collectively to this higher class, higher value, differentiated formulators group from a financial metrics standpoint. This includes revenue growth, EBITDA growth, EBITDA margin, and capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue. Even when compared to this higher class group, H.B. Fuller has superior metrics in most areas, the only exception being EBITDA margin, where the differentiated formulators group is about 170 basis points higher. However, it's important to note that H.B. Fuller's catching up and has strategies specifically aimed at delivering higher margins. Despite this, our stock trades at a discount to the differentiated formulators group, making it an attractive investment opportunity. This slide underscores the value proposition of H.B. Fuller and our potential for continued growth and value creation. In summary, we've made significant enhancements to our business model over the past 10 years, which have accelerated growth, improved margins, and generated strong cash flow. These enhancements are key factors in our recent resilient financial performance. Our financial targets are clear and achievable.
Our focused, disciplined capital deployment philosophy, supported by our capital-light business and strong cash flow profile, allows us to make prudent, value-added investments both organically and inorganically. Our roadmap to achieving an EBITDA margin of greater than 20% is straightforward and deliverable. Achieving these targets and executing on our capital deployment plan position us for significant growth and shareholder value creation for the foreseeable future. Now I'll turn it back over to Celeste to wrap us up.
Please welcome back to the stage Celeste Mastin.
Okay. As we reach the end of our Investor Day presentation, I'd like to thank you all for joining us. To briefly summarize, I'd like to go back to where we began and reiterate the three key points that we hope you walk away with. First, you heard me talk about how attractive this market is. The adhesives market has grown by $50 billion over the last 25 years to $80 billion. We're confident the market will continue to grow, given the prominent role of adhesives in everyday life and their importance to some of the fastest growing end markets, such as electronics and data centers. More importantly, our innovation engine has significantly expanded the tech-enabled piece of that pie that we can successfully go after. We continue to position our portfolio to capitalize on the highest returning segments within the market.
We have a 6% market share in the $56 billion market we're primarily focused on, and we're committed to continuing to gain share by innovating differentiated solutions, delivering the most reliable service, and expanding our share of wallet with existing customers. Second, our business model is focused on providing unique solutions for the most challenging applications. The adhesives value chain is much more complex than most people realize. On average, adhesive formulation requires 11 raw materials, and every application we supply is specified and qualified in our customers' manufacturing lines. Notably, more than half of our SKUs are custom-made for a specific customer. We showed you a few different charts today.
That m ake clear our business model is nothing like that of specialty chemicals companies. We have a more fragmented customer base, a higher number of SKUs, and represent a smaller percentage of our customers' end product cost. All this makes us much more comparable to the differentiated formulators group that John highlighted. When you consider H.B. Fuller Company alongside that group of companies, you see that we currently trade at a considerable discount, even though we are delivering faster revenue and earnings growth. We are confident in our ability to close this valuation gap as we continue expanding margins. That brings me to our third key takeaway and our path to greater than 20% EBITDA margins by year-end 2028. As you just heard from John, our roadmap is straightforward and deliverable.
It is entirely dependent on factors that are within our control: the Project Quantum Leap footprint consolidation that Nathan detailed, pricing excellence, continued innovation, and mix shift. Our M&A strategy that Brendon walked through is a key component of this ongoing mix shift, and we have consistently proven our ability to be an EBITDA compounder. To wrap up, what makes H.B. Fuller a compelling investment opportunity? It's simple. We are the largest pure play company in this highly attractive, highly fragmented industry. With our extensive footprint, deep customer relationships around the world, and strong balance sheet, we firmly believe that we can continue delivering above market growth and achieve the financial targets that we've outlined today. Thank you again for joining us. I'd like to invite John to join me back on stage so that we can take your questions.
Following the Q&A, just a reminder, we'd encourage you to join the breakout sessions with our talented leaders from each of the global business units to hear more about our differentiated solutions. Thank you.
Come on up. Okay, we have some mics, and we've got some questions. All right, we've got some mics.
If you don't mind, please say your name and company name.
Hi, thanks. Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners. One of the early slides that you showed, Celeste, said that the adhesives market was growing 2% from 2020- 2024 and then 3.5% from now through 2030. I'm curious, what are some of the key drivers of the improvement in market growth? As kind of a related question, I was hoping you could speak to, you just mentioned that you expect to be able to grow faster than the underlying market. How should we think about your ability to grow faster than underlying markets and what kind of placeholders should we use to think about maybe some further, you know, less attractive markets that you're going to be exiting maybe in the future? Is that an ongoing headwind to your volume growth? Thank you.
Okay, I'll start and then if I've forgotten part of that, then help me fill in the blank. That's correct. On one of my earlier slides, we use Markets and Markets as a reference, and they had pointed out market growth rate had previously been 2%, and they anticipate 3.5%, 3.5% for the next five years. When we look at that growth rate, that figures in, of course, to the greater than 5% revenue growth that John mentioned we're driving for over the next five years. What you'll see is, on top of that market growth rate, you'll see us able to grow a percent or two faster than market as we're shifting more of our business into the growth segments and out of the leverage segments.
Your question on kind of how much headwind is still there as it relates to what I call organically repositioning the business and kind of stepping away from things like solar things or kind of older generation, I should say, solar panels, as well as some of the commoditized baby diaper space. If we speak just about solar specifically, that's a business that a few years ago was $130 million in revenue, has declined to $80 million this year upon design as we've stepped away and made that business more profitable, however lower revenue. We're anticipating about $50 million for that particular business to settle in on into the future until it regenerates itself.
That will help happen in that solar space as newer technology panels take over and two of our current three product lines in solar become like increased sales because they're so critical to the performance of that next generation technology. I would say there's always going to be this organic shifting that we're proactively doing to move away from markets where older generations are just not appreciating our technology, but staying in place so that we can grow with them again once they transform themselves.
Yeah. Just make us look up a proof point or a point you can use as a point of reference. If you think about that five-year period I showed with the revenue trends and you look at the constant currency growth, about 70% of it was related to organic growth and about 30% was related to acquisitions and divestitures. Now we had one divestiture in there. If you adjust for that, it's probably more like 65% organic, 35% from M&A. It's probably not a bad proxy. I mean, we did have that period. During that period, pricing growth was probably higher than what we're going to see in the near-term future, but I think volume growth was depressed. I think those are good data points. As Celeste said, we're going to continue to reposition this portfolio.
We will gain share in some places and we will purposely move away from share in other places.
See, Scott has all the hard choices to make.
Patrick Cunningham with Citi. You talk about pricing to more than offset inflation. How should we size that structural pricing opportunity over time as part of the sales growth? Celeste, you touched on it briefly in your opening remarks, but what are you doing differently on the pricing side? How is that evolving among maybe your largest customers? How are you getting compensated for these differentiated custom formulations?
Yeah, so there's a few shifts we're making as it relates to pricing. The most important and dramatic is that we are shifting our portfolio to operate in more differentiated, higher value spaces. I think that's really the fundamental underpinning of having that strong capability to generate value with the customer, and that comes through price. That's one big step. We talked about some others. We have over 2,000 certified professionals running our pricing teams as resources. We really have the tools and transparency now that we continue to penetrate down through the organization. We've changed the way we look at compensation as it relates to pricing. Just considering philosophically, this is a business that should be price positive year on year, every single year. It's that kind of a business.
We've had some changes as it relates to strategy, but we've also had kind of a cultural awakening as it relates to this.
I think, Patrick, to your question about what should you assume or how much could we see that showing up in the organic revenue, it won't be the, I would anticipate volume will be a bigger driver than pricing, right? If it's adding 1% consistently per year, that's a nice tailwind to have that all goes to the bottom line. I think that's probably the way to think about kind of future impact.
Thank you. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Celeste, on volume trends, can you discuss what you've seen quarter to date in fiscal Q4? We're thinking about 2026. How are you thinking about volume? What's in your control? What's not in your control? Thank you.
Yeah, as we look at 2026 as it relates to volume, Q4 through 2026, there's not been any real catalyst in the world that has changed the current state of play. When we look at 2026, we are thinking, okay, we're probably going to be in a volume environment a lot like we were in this year. For two hours you heard more about the self-help drivers we're initiating in recognition that we're not going to rely on volume to grow this business. We're going to do it ourselves, and we're going to do it through managing the top line better based on where we play, but also continuing to drive projects like Project Quantum Leap and generate solid synergies from acquisitions we've made in order to get there.
Thank you, Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. Celeste, I thought you featured M&A rather prominently in the discussion this afternoon. I want to ask you about a few facets of that. How do you think the next three years will compare to your experience with the deals that you outlined from early 2023 until now? Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there in the private market. Have multiples come down at all? Are they stable? What's your view there? What kind of confidence or visibility do you have? I think John has got a mix-up grade tranche of your margin uplift to the 2030 goals. How are you thinking about confidence level in that M&A component to the margin ascent?
Yeah, let's just start big and go back to the pie chart, right? This is an incredibly fragmented industry. We strategically are very aware of what we need to be able to further grow the business, our top 20 growth accelerators. I hope you saw the process that we've developed around M&A just really have created a machine that is capable of evaluating 35- 40 deals a year. We have a very busy pipeline. We've got a busy acquisition agenda. I think if you look at the next few years, you should expect a similar cadence of M&A like you have seen in the past three years. Have multiples changed in the private market? I mean, we're acquiring in a space where sellers are not really focused on comps when they think about the value of their business.
They recognize that we have a good reputation in paying a very good price to come acquire their business, to bring their talent on board, and to grow their legacy. It's not really about the multiple. I don't see that that will change much in this kind of a seller's market.
If you think about the, you kind of alluded to, you know, the contribution that we would expect going forward. We showed in our forward-looking roadmap about 100 to 150 basis points of margin expansion through mix shift, which is acquisitions and synergies associated with those. If you looked at the historical chart for that five-year period, it was about 160 basis points. We probably started kind of in earnest on the acquisition strategy maybe a year and a half, two years in that period. It's potential for that to be more. I'm hoping that's conservative, but I do, you know, every deal we've done has been accretive from a margin standpoint. I think it's a pretty solid assumption.
Thank you. Ghansham Panjabi, Baird. Thanks again for hosting this event. As I think about the targets you've outlined through fiscal year 2030, a lot of it is self-improvement-based, right? Project Quantum Leap, etc. At the same time, you're talking about some of these growth verticals, highly specified markets like medical adhesives, to get it over to $100 million+ of EBITDA, which will require a fair amount of investments. How are you sort of balancing the self-improvement piece versus investing for some of these growth verticals, R&D, resourcing, etc.? Thank you.
It is a balance. I mean, it's a constant balance. In fact, as we look at our capital allocation philosophy, we're consistently weighing CapEx, in other words, building out those top 20 growth accelerators with buying. In the medical space in particular, because of the long certification times, that is more of a buying space. What you can anticipate we'll do, and Brendan touched on this a little bit, is in any given year, we're trying to pair up consolidation deals with higher growth like medical deals to really kind of balance the impact shorter term on the business.
Hi, Lydia Huang with JPMorgan. It looks like the EBITDA growth of the acquired businesses since 2023 mostly came from margin expansion, which offset some maybe revenue slowdown. Was it just the general economic conditions, or were there other challenges to top line growth? What do you think needs to be done to re-accelerate revenue growth of these businesses? Thank you.
Do you want to go ahead?
Sure. Lydia, I think I would say that the fact that most of the improvement in growth has come from margin improvement is not a surprise. That's kind of what we expected when we did the deals. I think revenue growth has probably been slower, but I don't think that's a reflection of the deals we're doing or H.B. Fuller . I think that's just the market over the last two to three years. I'd say going forward, I think doing the same set of deals, we would expect to get a similar type of margin improvement and probably a little more volume growth.
Any more questions?
Rosemarie Morbelli with Gabelli Funds. I was wondering if you could touch on the potential top line growth rate following up on the previous question. I mean, you are expecting $100 million of EBITDA. That is going to be with a, what, a 40% EBITDA margin? Is it going to be lower because of all of the investments you need to do in order to grow the top line? Could you touch on that?
Rosemarie, you're speaking specifically to the medical adhesive technology business?
Yes.
Revenue growth there, as we're on this path to $100 million EBITDA. Those are the medical businesses that we're selecting. It's a big space, but we're very selective about where we want to participate in it. Those are businesses that are higher margin, higher margin than our current EBITDA margin in medical today. You get the operating leverage as these businesses grow, particularly because in part of that medical adhesive space, we go to market differently and in a different channel with medical professionals than we would with the medical device manufacturers. I would strongly encourage you to go to the medical adhesive technology breakout session today because Susanna is going to get in more detail about the business. Suffice it to say, we're anticipating that's a 40%+ EBITDA margin business on into the future.
Thanks. Separately, you have focused a lot on acquisitions. What about divestiture? You recently divested the flooring. Do you have a ballpark number in terms of what we could see happen?
We're really actively evaluating the portfolio all the time. The flooring business was a little unique, and I mentioned that, right? It was a different raw material base than we usually work with, where we didn't have scale. Over 80% of the sales were through distributors and contractors, distributors and home centers, which limits innovation. The other piece of this is that there are six dedicated facilities to the flooring business that couldn't make anything else in H.B. Fuller. That was a very unique situation. In the rest of H.B. Fuller, we tend to use our other 31 technology bases and put those in plants where we're sharing capacity across market segments. There's a much higher bar to exit, to inorganically exit one of our other segments because there is such a fixed cost utilization benefit in some plants where it exists.
We'll keep looking and where there's options that make sense, we may take advantage of that, but it's not going to be a regular occurrence. It's not that kind of business. We have one more, Scott. We don't want to take any time out of the technology breakouts.
You have one minute.
Okay, Mike, let's do it.
I'll try and keep it short then. In terms of the Project Quantum Leap plan and the footprint optimization, a lot of those facilities have already been closed, and then it looks like kind of there's kind of rateably over the next four years. I'm just curious, how much flexibility are you trying to retain if market conditions change, if you guys come across an acquisition that maybe you decide to keep a facility open or something? Like what goes into that planning process as you're thinking about the future closures and the future footprint?
Yeah, it's a very complex planning process. We do try to keep flexibility as long as we can in the process. You know, Nathan mentioned that out of the 27 plants that we're closing in the upcoming five years, we have nine project work streams underway. We are working on nine plant closures right now. Can that process shift a little? Yeah, absolutely. It may experience delays. It may get speeded up. If we acquired someone, we would certainly reconsider closures that may or may not still make sense. It is in flux. You know, we're going to be constantly evaluating and optimizing capacity as situations change. I think this part of Investor Day is a wrap, and we are really looking forward to seeing you outside at the technology breakout sessions. I just want to say for everyone online, thank you again for joining us.
We really appreciate having you with us. Take care.