All right. Good morning, everybody. My name is Matt Roberts. I'm the Packaging Analyst here at Raymond James. Welcome to the 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference and leading off the packaging group. Today we have Graphic Packaging. With us from Graphic Packaging, we have Mike Doss, President and CEO. Mike's been CEO since 2016 and with Graphic for nearly 20 years, so probably a very familiar face. Another familiar face you may know as well is Mark Connelly, who is here with us too. Mark is SVP of Investor Strategy and Development. He joined Graphic early last year and spent nearly 20 years on the sell side himself. So, like I said, likely a familiar face. So, Mike, Mark, thank you all again for joining us today. I know you have a couple of slides to kick off, and then we can go into some questions after that.
So we'll cede the floor to you all.
Great. Thank you very much. And thank you for your interest in our company today. I do have a presentation I'm going to flip through here. We've got some people that might be a little newer to the story. I think it might be helpful to do that, and then we'll engage in some questions. I do have one clarification to make. I've been CEO since 2016, but I've actually been with the company 35 years in July. We had a name change in there, so I know this company pretty well, know the industry real well, and happy to take any questions that you have here. So please let Matt know. Graphic Packaging at a glance, you can see it there on the board. Just a little under $9 billion in sales.
We did $1.7 billion last year in EBITDA, primarily food and beverage markets, so non-discretionary markets, if you will, and I'll profile those for you in a little bit. We got a little over 23,000 employees. We've got a lot of intellectual property. I'll get into what that all means. We're headquartered in Atlanta, and you can see the geographies we compete in, and the biggest one, of course, being North America. Roughly 80% of our revenue comes from North America, a growing revenue base in Europe, which is a very good market for us, and then specific customers outside of those two geographies, primarily large beverage customers, beer and soft drink. If you look at our company since 2017, it's changed a lot. Of course, the revenue's almost doubled, or it has doubled if you see it on the board there.
What's really important is the segmentation of the customer set we have. That's going to be a theme you're going to hear me talk a little bit about how we built this out. Our mantra is we move with the consumer. That's really important because if one segment of the business is down, others are doing better. That wasn't always the case. In 2017, if you look at where we were, we were in the center of the store. We had really good positions there in really low-cost positions too. Our top 25 accounts were roughly 75% of our sales. If one of those customers got a cold, we got the flu. That wasn't a great position for us to be in.
As part of our Vision 2025, we said, "Listen, we've got to develop additional sets of capabilities." And we went out and we acquired a company that was owned by International Paper and was focused on the food service business. And then I'll show you kind of how that plays out here. You can really see it on now where we're at around the perimeter of the store as well. And in the end-use markets around food service, you can see there's a drive-thru there on the far side. If you look at it right here, you can kind of see we're just kind of showing how that goes. The yellow boxes are club store. Club store is still a really big business for us. We weren't participating in that in a meaningful way. Now we are. So again, we move with the consumer.
One part of the market is down. The other part of it is okay. We were joking with some investors we were talking about this morning. It really means if you want to eat healthy around the perimeter of the store, we've got packaging that'll do that. If you want to eat unhealthy through a drive-thru, you can do that. Regardless of what those trends are on the macro, we're able to participate with packaging in the form of either cartons, cups, or bowls that ultimately people use with the largest manufacturer of paper cups in North America. If you look at what that revenue base looks like there, and I showed you the circular slide before that showed the pie chart, if you will, how we built it out, you can see there's a lot of balance there.
Food's still a really important part of our business, as is beverage, but we've got 21% of our revenue coming from food service. That was zero in 2017. Household, a very key market for us and one you'll see us continue to grow going forward. Now, 12%, those are things that people just buy and you don't even think that much about them. It's detergent, it's soaps, it's filter frames, all those types of things that you need in your house. We make a lot of those products now for consumers. Health and beauty, a growing business for us. We actually acquired that technology when we made a large acquisition in Europe, which I'll talk about here in a minute. It's an important market for us, albeit small right now, but it's a growing one, one that we think we can continue to scale.
It's important for us to keep an eye on what's going on. Again, if you're going to move with the consumer, you got to make sure you're in those markets. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the quarterly fluctuation. We just need to monitor those and make sure that we're being smarter on how we put our innovation efforts and tuck-under M&A that helps us kind of build that out over time. And you look at what that's really done for us, it's brought us a lot of stability. And that, again, was a big part of our Vision 2025 effort. Yeah, we had to get bigger with capabilities, but we needed to drive stability back to the business, and that's in fact what's happened.
If you look at the well-chronicled destocking phase there, when volumes went down, our margins held pretty solid in that 19%-20% range on an EBITDA basis. Last year, we talked about consumer affordability. I'd say that that is the same case here in 2025. You can see that we're holding in there, which hasn't always been the case in our space. And so that's one of the biggest changes that we can point to, kind of the from to Vision 2025 versus where we're at today. Again, back to Vision 2025 for a minute. I mentioned capabilities being one of the key pillars on that initiative. The next one was innovation. The biggest thing we did on innovation was we acquired a very innovative company in Europe called AR Packaging. That did two things for us.
We got a lot of intellectual horsepower and capability in terms of their innovation capabilities. We scaled those abilities, and we have the ability to move that really around the globe to our customers, and we also got scale in Europe. We now have 38 facilities in Europe. I'll show you a map here in a minute. We're in Eastern and Western Europe. And if you think about CPGs, about half the customers we service are headquartered in Europe, and about half are in the United States, so it's very important. We have presences in both those geographies, and we do now. Lastly, the third pillar Vision 2025 was a unique opportunity for us to drive competitive advantage on coated recycled paperboard. We made a big investment in Michigan with a brand new paper manufacturing machine that makes the paperboard.
We're doing the same thing in Waco, Texas right now. In doing so, we shut down all of our older, higher-cost, smaller-size paperboard manufacturing facilities, and we will only have two that remain. Waco will come online here in Q4 of this year. When that is done, we have everything we need to drive our Vision 2030, which we rolled out in April of last year. Vision 2025 was about capabilities, innovation, and unique competitive cost advantage. Vision 2030 is all about execution and innovation, and we have everything that we need to drive that strategy. If you look at AR Packaging, as I mentioned about earlier, you can see it was a sizable acquisition. We picked up three segments there in the middle: healthcare, food service a little bit, and then the household brands. Europe's still a pretty fractionated market.
There's more work for us to do there. We're probably approaching 40% market share in North America, and in Europe, we're about high teens. There's another competitor that's probably who ships the last truck at the end of the year, and then it's a really long tail, so there's a lot of work for us to do. You have 750 million people in that geography that need to eat and drink, so we like that market. We compete differently there than we do in the United States. Specifically, we're not integrated in paperboard manufacturing in Europe. We do ship some of our own paperboard over there, but for the most part, we buy from large Nordic suppliers, and we generate excellent ROIC because we don't have as much capital tied up to drive in the top line.
So if you look at North American ROIC and the European ROIC, it's very substantially similar. With the new innovation capabilities we have, we used to have a total addressable market of about $5 billion when we started with Vision 2025. We now call that market roughly $15 billion. You can see the big categories up there on the board. There's a lot of plastic replacement. And the way that we look at total addressable market is we either have a product that's in the market or we have one that's getting ready to launch. So this isn't some theoretical TAM that we really can't address.
This is truly opportunistic for us, and this is how we're thinking about our Vision 2030 over the next five years to really drive our 100 to 200 basis points of growth that we've committed to in terms of the algorithm we've laid out for investors. And we got real products that are resonating with consumers. You see them up here on the board. On the far left-hand side, we've got the KeelClip that replaces the ITW Hi-Cone rings that no one likes. You remember all the pictures of turtles and fish and snarl and those things. We now have paperboard that's got excellent merchandising capabilities. You can see it there. We can orient the cans with the machines that we make to put this package on so that every one of the logos is on the outside, which has excellent end cap merchandising ability.
In the middle, we've got some paperboard punnet trays that we have developed for our customer set that allow you to merchandise things like salads and fruits and vegetables in a way that you don't need the CPET trays anymore, the crystallized polyester trays, the black ones, if you will. So we're working to replace a lot of that. On the far right-hand side, this stuff's all on the perimeter of the store. This is provisioning for meals, a lot of chilled meals in the U.K. in particular and in other parts of Europe growing in the U.S. for consumers that want to shop that day and bring something home. We have the ability to do unique sizes. We have PaperSeal Shape is something we talked about on one of our most recent earnings calls. There's a machine involved in that sale too.
So, very sticky innovation sales with our customers. We're committed to sustainability, and we kind of see it as three prongs. The first one, building better packaging. We want to be more circular, more functional, and more convenient. That's how you win on the packaging side of the business. So better package. We want the best team possible. How do you drive the best team? By having a work environment that people want to be a part of. We've got excellent safety rate. We've got excellent engagement scores with our workforce. And so we're building a great team, which then allows us to actually really respond to customer needs. And lastly, we can reduce the amount of carbon that we use in our packages, which is important for our customers because they've made some pretty significant pledges in terms of decarbonizing their footprint.
Remember, 50% of our customers are headquartered in Europe. So this isn't going away just because we've had a change in the U.S. here, and the end-use consumers care about that. They're making purchasing decisions based on how these brands are making their products and selling their products in the marketplace, and so we feel that's important, and we've got a plan. We've laid it out for everybody to see to cut our carbon down by roughly 50% between now and 2032, and the neat thing is these come with cost of capital returns for us. They're not outstanding, but some of the stuff's at end of life anyway, so the fact we can actually get cost of capital return, reduce our carbon by 50%, it's a real message and really supports our overall sustainability message, which is more than just a slide we put out there.
We've got real work behind it, which we're pretty excited about. And again, our people really like that too. I'm not going to hit this too hard. There's a lot of material out there on our Vision 2030. We have four pillars. You can see them up there. I've talked a lot about innovation already. Culture is a big part of what we do at Graphic Packaging. Sustainability, the planet is listed there. And of course, we have to deliver results. And we've got an algorithm that I'll lay out here for you in a minute. There it is. That basically shows 100 to 200 basis points of growth, drives double that in the mid-single-digit range on EBITDA growth and high single-digit, if not low double-digit EPS share accretion over time.
If you look at what I think is probably one of the most non-talked about but important aspects of our company right now, it's the cash flow we're going to generate over the next four or five years. I've talked a little bit about Waco being done and operational here at the end of this year in Q4. So cash will get going out the door for that investment. Last year, we spent $1.1 billion in CapEx. It was a record for Graphic Packaging. This year, we're going to spend $700 million. And we've publicly said when we're done with this, and remember, I said we have everything that we need to drive our Vision 2030, CapEx will be no higher than 5% of sales, $9 billion. It's roughly $450 million. So that's another big drop in terms of what we need to do.
So the cash flow that we generate is going to be available to do more shareholder-friendly activities. We're excited about that. And we feel we're in a really good spot to deliver on the algorithm that I laid out there earlier for you. So I'll leave that slide up there, Matt, and we can jump into Q&A if you'd like. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. You want me to just sit over here or maybe here? Okay. Thanks. I got a paper cup, by the way, in my hand. It's important. Good. On brand.
Exactly. I think, was that a Graphic one?
Yeah
Anyway, so first question, I want to talk about kind of where you left off there in regard to shareholder returns. So you talked about the shift to Vision 2030.
So with Waco nearing completion, what has changed in regard to either market dynamics, M&A opportunities you see out there, CapEx, or frankly, even your multiple that has shifted the commentary to prioritizing those shareholder returns versus any other uses?
Yeah, I think, look, if you look at 2024 and 2024 ended pretty quiet, as we talked about on our call. And if you look at the first part of this year, and Steve was at an, our CFO, Steve Scherger, was at an investor conference last week, and he talked a little bit about our volumes being roughly substantially similar to what we saw in Q4, at least early days here in January and February, so pretty flat. Most of you probably seen the CAGNY write-ups. Our customers are trying to figure out how to grow their volumes. That's a big challenge for them.
When we look at that, if we were looking at M&A, it's got a pretty high bar. We've got to find a way. We're trading at seven times in terms of synergies in order to drive those down. Everything's compared against buying our shares back now as we kind of exit this big long-cycle CapEx cycle that we've had. And so we get asked a lot, well, isn't there another big project out there? And the answer to that is no, there isn't that we can see. And so relative to what we want to do is we want to take that cash and really be much more shareholder-friendly. You saw us increase our dividend a little bit. We want to have a growing dividend. We think that's important to build a bigger tent. Some investors want to, even if it's modestly increasing, see that.
But the big thing for us is putting that cash to use in a way that's smart, and we've got a track record of buying back shares at attractive prices, and we've got a share repurchase plan in place right now, and we're talking to our board of directors about it, so that's how we're thinking about it.
Okay, I appreciate that, Mike, and you also did touch on kind of near-term how the quarter's playing out, but maybe we could talk about, to an extent, the promotional environment, but if you were to examine my personal monthly expenses, you might think I have an affinity for jewelry when really I'm just buying groceries, so food inflation has been high. It's happened pretty quickly, and it seems to impact anyone, whether they're shopping at an organic market or hitting the drive-through.
So while CPGs historically do not cut prices, how has the rise of private label impacted either the volume dynamic or what you see playing out in your customers and ultimately your own volume?
It's a great question. And what we're seeing actually on the innovation side is more store brand or private label, depending on what you want to refer to it as, is actually taking a little bit more risks relative to some of the new innovation ideas that we have. We've publicly talked about our Boardio package as an example that started off in a confectionery item that was a gum. And then it transitioned into Mother Parkers, that's the largest manufacturer of private label ground coffee in North America with customers like Costco and Target. That one's going. And there's even some other applications for different protein mixes and things like that that we see happening.
We see them taking some more risk than even some of the branded folks. And I wouldn't expect that to change, quite frankly. That's not uncommon. If you look at North America, your store brand's probably about 20% of the volume versus parts of Europe, the U.K. in particular, where it's closer to 40%. Walmart's talked about different types of stratification of their branded items. And when I call them branded, branded for them. And it wouldn't surprise me that they continue to go for a more value, well, they got the value brand and Great Value, but a more high-end brand that's even different than that. And we see them talking about that publicly. And I think that earnings release that they had a week or so ago probably is pretty telling.
They're talking in that one about the consumer with over $100,000 of discretionary or of income shopping for value. And so the types of products that we make are important for consumers because we've got to find a way to help our customers drive some lift in a tough and crowded marketplace.
Right. That makes sense. And if anybody out in the audience does have a question, feel free to raise your hand accordingly. Oh, we have one right there.
Yeah. So if you think about pricing, we tend to look at, obviously, what's going on on the input cost side of the equation. We are going to generate around $100 million this year of what I'll call performance. Last year was an exceptionally good year for us because we lapped a bunch of market downtime and we earned on that.
We've got other labor and benefit inflation that we have to offset. Our customers aren't going to pay us for that in some kind of all-other inflation. Think of those two things kind of playing to a draw. So the performance kind of wipes that out. So if we see input cost inflation in a material way and we think it's structural and just not transitory, like January, we paid some higher rates for natural gas or electricity because it was really, really cold out. You kind of got to work through that kind of stuff. But if we see natural gas becoming like $5 an MMBTU, it's going to have an impact on our business. We got to take price. And we've been a leader in doing that.
If you really go back four or five years, we've pushed price on all substrates and ultimately the packages because that's what we have to get it through. We have to get it through the end-use packages, cups, and cartons. And our agreements are structured to be able to do that increasingly more towards indexes that are proprietary for those customers and us with a lag that's roughly six months.
If I could just add to that, when we go out to a customer and say, "Hey, we've got a new container we're going to sell you," we're not looking at that. And we're not saying, "Here's the price of the board that went into it." We're saying, "What is the value of this container?" So when we sign that contract, it's a value-based contract. And let's just say the margin is here. Okay?
Then we have these price adjustment mechanisms because our contracts are two to three to five years. So you've got to have something to sort of hold those margins. But the margin is determined in that initial sale. And then the price adjustment mechanism is just to keep that margin there. And you're hearing a lot about us moving away from a third-party mechanism that really doesn't bear a lot of relationship to what we see in our own cost structure to our own more transparent things. You can literally go to your Bloomberg screen. You don't have to wait till the third Friday of every month to get a surprise. And so far, customers are very receptive to that. But remember, we're not using that to change the margin. We're using that to just hold the margin that we already had that we got right up front.
So it's quite different from the way these are used in other businesses.
You look like you might have a follow-up on that. Is that me?
Yeah. Not all of them. I mean, there are some that do, but increasingly less because we're moving away from that type of market index, if you will, as Mark just alluded to.
The European part of our business is mostly a direct pass-through, so we don't really care about the price of the board. Here in North America, we've got this funny system that we are moving away from because it doesn't work anymore. We can debate whether it worked in the past, but it clearly doesn't work these days.
Maybe just to put even a finer point, so we sold our Augusta mill, which was almost 100% indexed to open market sale of paperboard. It was a good mill.
It just didn't have any competitive advantage that we needed. We don't want to be an open market seller of paperboard. We're in the mid-90s now in terms of our integration rate. So we're not exposed like many of our competitors are to selling the paperboard. Yes, if the markets were to go down, it would impact some of our contracts. But we really want to sell cartons. We want to sell cups. And our customers want something that they can fairly see over a period of time, certainly the medium term, that they can plan on and they can actually have some predictability on. And that's why we're getting a lot of interest in these indexes that we're talking about.
Yeah. Yeah, there's ups and downs, right? Different things that happen. But that's the goal. As Mark said, we contract at a market price.
And really, all we're trying to do is match the input cost inflation or deflation to that over time. Because then when that contract comes due in two or three years, we got to compete against it again or for it again. And you see it in the numbers that we pushed up there on the board or posted on the board, I should say, in terms of our margin stability. And I think that's one of the biggest things that's maybe misunderstood about Graphic and just how things have changed over that period of time since 2017 with the capabilities we have, the scale we have, and how we've changed our commercial approach to the marketplace around. We are a packaging company, not a paperboard company anymore.
Mike, maybe if I could also ask about other margin opportunities and capacity projects of your own that are coming online in terms of Waco. So you talked about a $160 million incremental benefit over the 2026, 2027. So how should you think about the timing of that cost scaling up? And you've also talked about closures. So when you think about the incremental capacity that comes online, how much incremental capacity does the market need to absorb? And is there a way to really de-risk that, as you've alluded to in certain commentary from your CPG customers related to volume?
Sure. So again, Waco will start up here in Q4 this year. And we've publicly said that our investors should write down $80 million of EBITDA improvement in 2026 and $80 million of EBITDA improvement in 2027. $80-$100 million of that is math.
We're going to take down old paperboard manufacturing facilities that we've publicly said we're going to do, and they'll go down relatively quickly, and ultimately, that volume will go into Waco. And then there's probably about 200,000 tons of growth, which we need. Again, we're approaching 95% integrated rate. So when we look out into the future, this is our growth paperboard that we need out there. And it's got a $150/ton cost advantage, and the quality is substantially better than what anybody's making. If we had five packages of the five manufacturers of paperboard up here, you don't need a pre-printer to see which one is the one that we're making because it's real obvious. And so the marketing departments of these customers that we're working in and across about it, actually.
I believe we have time for one more.
So maybe I'll ask, so you do have the free cash flow ramping up, and we did talk about capital allocations earlier, but maybe thinking about M&A specifically. And I know you've also talked about potential for tuck-under M&A. Are there certain product gaps or end markets, or is Europe ripe for consolidation, or is it a potential growth opportunity? Really, just how do you think about M&A?
Yeah. And I want to hit this again just because it's on investors' minds, particularly people who've been with us for a while, because they'd say, "Listen, your investments have all worked, but it just seems like there's always one after another." For us, we have everything that we need to be successful here. And Waco is a key part of that. Anything that we would do on the M&A side has to compete heavily against share buybacks.
When we look at where our stock is trading right now, I don't have a lot of diligence I have to do on my own stock. I know what it is. I understand what our pro. Anything, these would be tuck-unders in a category like health and beauty and/or maybe household where we're a little under-indexed, but they need to have a clear path towards value accretion in a hurry. Otherwise, we should be allocating that back for repurchasing our stock. That's how we're thinking about it. We're having a lot of discussions both in the boardroom and with Steve and I and Mark. I like the phase we're moving into in terms of our ability with the free cash flow to be shareholder-friendly.
Mike, Mark, thank you all again.
There will be a breakout immediately following this downstairs in a quarter of an hour. One for anybody that has follow-ups.
Thanks for your interest in Graphic.