We will go ahead and kick things off. Thanks everyone for joining us today. After two years now of mostly virtual events, it's great to be here in person, to kick off our Investor Day. We have presentations from our executive team on our key strategies and how we plan to achieve them. Perhaps more importantly though, we have a technology showcase in the room, to give you a little show and tell and a little bit more of a feel for how we plan to execute on some of our key growth initiatives.
For those of you participating in the webcast, you won't have the same benefit of being live in the room for these technology showcases, but we will have some videos that will play when we go do the live tours here, and then rejoin the live webcast about 90 minutes later. We do have a lot of material to make it through, so we would ask that you hold your questions to the specific Q&A times which we'll have in each of the booths, and then also a dedicated session at the end of the day, which will also take questions in from webcast participants. With that, I will get out of the way and turn things over to Ivo.
Well, as Bill said, it's great to see everybody here. Good afternoon. It's awesome to be in person. It is our second Investor Day. Again, I'm truly delighted that it is actually in person. For those who are in the room, thank you for coming. For those who are watching the webcast, as Bill said, we appreciate your time that you're committing to this meeting as well. We have a full afternoon today, and we'll provide you with an update on our strategy, on our end markets, and we will talk about through our initiatives. We'll talk about our framework of how we operate as well as the view where we see Gates headed over the next several years.
With that, let me jump straight in and make sure that I can actually advance the Investor Day. I'm not quite sure I can do that. Let's see. All right, we can do it. All right. Awesome. The key messages today on this slide six, our business is focused on being best-in-class provider of highly engineered components that perform mission-critical functions in demanding applications with natural replacement cycles. We are an industry leader in large fragmented markets that are benefiting from secular tailwinds, and we are executing on our growth-focused growth initiatives that will allow us to capitalize on those tailwinds. Our operating model is supported by our Gates Operating System, which leverages in combination with our in-region, for-region presence to efficiently serve our customers globally, including a very large replacement network of channel partners.
We are a company with attractive financial profile, demonstrating a track record of above market growth and a strong free cash flow generation. Finally, with our strengthened balance sheet, we have increased optionality to fund further growth and drive significant shareholder value creation as we move forward. Moving to slide seven, which provides some of the key facts and figures on our total revenue breakdown. Our strong financial profile is supported by over 14,000 associates, including over 750 engineers, who are the foundation of our innovation efforts. Our business is diversified across geographies and markets, products and channels. We believe we have the broadest distribution footprint globally in our product categories with over 100,000 ship to locations.
Roughly two-thirds of our business goes through replacement channels, and one-third goes through OEMs, which we believe is a nice mix that provides resilience for our business. Moving to slide 8, an overview of product line segments. Power Transmission is the company's heritage, and we are a clear global leader in our core market. We engineer and manufacture belts and related components that power drives in demanding applications across a broad range of end markets. They wear out and need to be replaced on a regular basis, and that's a good thing. In Fluid Power, we are one of the top 3 premier global players supplying hydraulics and fluid conveyance products across a wide range of applications and end markets also. Similar to Power Transmission, these products are highly engineered but operate in harsh applications and also need to be replaced regularly.
With the overview of the company behind us, let's move to slide 9 and provide some important context to the business transformation we achieved over the past few years. In the 2015, 2017 timeframe, our primary focus was to bolstering our organizational capability, deploying our Gates Operating System to deliver operational improvements while we refocused our innovation efforts. Over the next several years, we significantly invested in the business. We've built out capacity and improved our global footprint. We've launched over 30 new product platforms across our portfolio while substantially improving our new product vitality index, and we invested in our digital infrastructure. We've played offense while managing through a challenging economic environment and put our business on track to deliver strong shareholder value over the long term.
Here's our leadership team, nearly all of whom were here driving the transformation I just covered. They are responsible for fulfilling our commitment to all of our stakeholders. It is a collaborative group of highly experienced operators that is responsible not only for developing and executing on our strategies, but also equally importantly, for ensuring the company's culture and our values are cascaded throughout the organization. Moving now to slide 11. This describes our operating philosophy and our focus on our key stakeholders. Our employees have shown tremendous dedication and resilience, particularly throughout the last two years, while overcoming the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic. It is our responsibility to develop their skills and careers and ensure they have a safe, rewarding, and balanced experience while being a part of the global Gates team.
Our relationship with our customers is a set of long-term partnerships with many extending over multiple decades. Our relentless focus on serving our customers with differentiated technology to solve complex problems in mission-critical applications and providing a world-class service are key elements of our Gates DNA. We are not just an employer across global communities in which we operate. We believe it is our responsibility to become a part of these communities. We accomplish that through charitable giving, through our Gates Industrial Corporation Foundation, and by donating our time to worthy causes through personal engagement. Finally, to our shareholders who have entrusted us with their capital, we are committed to continuously improving our performance and efficiently allocating capital. In combination with maximizing value for all other stakeholders, we expect to deliver solid shareholder returns.
A key part of our commitment to our stakeholders involves our engagement on advancing our Gates ESG commitment. We have deployed a structured approach to ESG under the GTES framework you see laid out on this slide. Corporate governance for us means conducting business ethically and with integrity, guided by well-communicated policies and strong independent oversight from our board. The technology and environment are complementary and both work in harmony to drive improved sustainability. We have coined the term Eco-Innovation to represent a sustainability benefit of our new products. Our customers, they focus on delivering greater efficiency, safety, and environmental improvements. For ourselves, these products, in general, help to drive environmental improvements and reduced consumption.
Lastly, stewardship encompasses the responsibility we have for the well-being and development of our employees, as well as our goal of being a trusted and supportive member of our local communities. If you are interested in learning more about our ESG efforts, there is a link at the bottom of this slide to our sustainability website, which includes our sustainability reports going back to 2018. While I won't cover all of the figures shown on slide 13, they represent highlights across our ESG framework I have described, from board independence, and reduced emissions to charitable support. We are making tangible progress on each of our ESG pillars, and are committed to continuing to advance towards our goals. Moving now from our broader operating philosophy to slide 14 and the strategic priorities you will hear more today about above-market growth, margin expansion, and capital deployment.
We have a good track record of delivering above-market growth and margin expansion. With our stronger balance sheet, are excited about capital deployment optionality, which you will hear more about from Brooks today. Let's get to some of the highlights on how we anticipate delivering on these priorities. Moving to slide 15, which outlines the positive impact some of the more prominent secular trends have on our end markets, from global infrastructure build-out, through electrification of propulsion, to increasing levels of industrial application in factories and distribution hubs. These trends favorably impact the applications we participate in. More importantly, our products in general enable our customers to operate their equipment more efficiently, cleanly, and quietly, or simply ensure that it functions in the expected levels of safety.
To capitalize on the business opportunities ahead of us, we have specific initiatives in place to drive share gain against both traditional and unconventional competitors. Today, we'll be dedicating most of our time detailing a few of the more significant growth initiatives in the highlighted end markets. Starting with the diversified industrial end market on slide 16. This is a very large, fragmented end market for Gates, with our primary focus on operations in manufacturing plants, distribution centers, food and beverage production, and other processing facilities, to name a few. It is in this end market where we are seeing the most significant tailwinds related to process automation. Our customers' heightened focus on improvements to operating efficiency, safety, and reduction in energy consumption position Gates well over the long run to benefit from these trends.
While we believe we are in the early stages of driving a mass adoption of belt technology over industrial chains, the design wins I've outlined over the last couple of years give us confidence in our value proposition and the future size of the business opportunity. Our investments in new product technology, application engineering coverage, and digital capabilities are really paying off here. We target both the first fit and replacement channels, and we anticipate maintaining our high single-digit growth trajectory, taking our business in this end market to about $1 billion over the midterm. Moving now to slide 17, personal mobility. We have seen tremendous growth in this business since 2019. The secular trend of making mobility more personal is at play here in all of our regions. We are capitalizing on this business opportunity with our content and a strong value proposition.
In addition, as this market moves towards electrification rapidly, our value proposition gets amplified. A clean, quiet, strong and energy-efficient belt drive becomes something of a must-have with a clean, quiet, high-torque electric motor. We have established dedicated commercial and applications engineering teams in support of this market, and are expanding our product portfolio nicely to take additional share from legacy technologies. As the electrification trends accelerate, we believe we can maintain growth trajectory in a 30% range to take this business to approximately half a billion dollars in the midterm. Moving now to our automotive end market on slide 18, where we are primarily focused on the replacement channels, which account for about 75% of our automotive sales. Let me quickly cover the electrification of vehicle propulsion. We are very excited about this opportunity.
The transition to electric propulsion in vehicles and what it brings to Gates. We anticipate it will provide us with a significant uplift in content per vehicle over time, all in the product categories that we have a leadership position in today. While there are about 1.4 billion vehicles on the road globally today, about 600,000 of them are electric vehicles that are 7-12 years old, a key demographic of the target market where Gates is a leading player. Despite the relatively small market size today, we are investing to build on our significant lead in EV product line coverage and expect to be about 95% coverage over the midterm.
While EVs grow into the aftermarket over time, our strategy is to continue extending our leadership position we have in the legacy applications and capitalize on the nascent opportunity with the scale-up of the EV car park over the next two decades. On the OEM side, we will continue to execute our strategy of selective participation where we can differentiate with our technology. We plan to have approximately 75% of our automotive OEM revenue coming from new energy vehicles by 2030. Lastly, we have an exciting technology demo here today to provide a better context about what functions we serve and the importance of our products in vehicles with electric propulsion technology. Moving now to slide 19, which is a combined snapshot of our on-highway, off-highway, and energy resources end markets.
In the on and off-highway end markets, we are focused on heavy-duty truck, agriculture, and construction applications and have been driving growth through innovation and geographic expansion. The markets for our products remain robust, and we continue to expand our market share. While energy and resources is a smaller business for us, we expect to see higher levels of market growth over the midterm, supplemented with share gains from some of the new products we have been investing in during the downturn and are now introducing into the marketplace. Our business across these end markets is focused on replacement channels and driven more significantly by activity in the large installed base than by new equipment production. These are core industrial markets where we expect to continue to differentiate ourselves through innovation and initiatives. We expect our mid-single-digit growth trajectory to continue over the midterm.
Moving now to slide 20 and the summary of our growth enablers, which you will hear more about from Tom shortly. Our markets have historically not seen a significant level of innovation. We see innovation as a key enabler to continue expanding our market presence in applications we have served historically, but also in applications where our high-performance products offer a competitive set of solutions against alternative technologies. We use our material science expertise and focus on development of new manufacturing techniques to deliver solutions with benefits that lower weight, improve reliability, and reduce environmental impact, all while delivering superior performance. Again, we call this process Eco-Innovation. These efforts are delivering solid traction with new product introductions helping us progress towards our 20% NPI vitality target.
Our ongoing investments in digital capabilities are fundamentally intended to create an ecosystem which allows us to better serve our customers and improves the efficiency of our sales and marketing and customer service organizations, all of which is focused on maximizing the ease of doing business with Gates. Moving now to slide 21 and a summary of how we are driving operational excellence throughout the company. Briefly, the Gates Production System, or GPS, is foundational to the culture of safety, efficiency, and continuous improvement embedded in our operations. GPS has also played a key role in enabling us to deliver solid incremental margins in 2021 despite the challenges with availability of production inputs. Eco-Innovation is not only a growth enabler but also a pillar of our operational excellence framework.
From an operational perspective, manufacturing process advancements enable us to utilize the most advanced material chemistries that result in launches of differentiated new products. These new manufacturing processes also help to maximize manufacturing efficiency and reduce in-process waste generation and energy consumption. Another key benefit of Eco-Innovation helps to deliver is the reduction in portfolio complexity under the skin by enabling broad product application coverage with a reduced number of product constructions. We believe there is ample opportunity here to drive efficiency throughout our enterprise, and as a result, continue further margin expansion. You will hear more on these initiatives later on from Walt. Slide 22. 2021 was a challenging year for everyone operating within the industrial complex. However, I'm quite pleased with our level of performance.
Not only did we deliver revenue growth that is among the top performers against premium industrial peers, we believe our adjusted EBITDA margin also is on a trajectory to reach or exceed the average of this premium peer set over the midterm. Shifting to 23. We're to expand our performance against the same set of peers, in this case, expand the time horizon to 3 years, 2019 to 2021. As you can see, our performance has been ahead of not only the macro indicators like industrial production and PMI, but also this group of premium industrial companies. We believe the investments we have been making in new products in our targeted growth initiative, as well as the operational initiatives we have underway, position us well to continue these trends of outperformance. Moving now to slide 24, which contains our midterm targets.
On the left side of the slide, you will see the 3-5 year targets we set in 2019. While we did not anticipate a 3-year period of significant challenges from the trade war-induced recession, followed by a global pandemic and the resulting inflation, supply chain, and labor disruptions, we are quite pleased with the level of performance achieved. We reached our ROIC and net leverage goals, and hit our free cash flow conversion target in 2020. We are confident that we are on a solid path to consistently deliver strong cash flow performance. We exited 2021 at a record level of revenue and believe we are making solid strides towards our $4 billion revenue target based on our organic growth trajectory.
Similarly, we believe more normalized rates of inflation and easing production input challenges combined with our pricing and operational initiatives provide the opportunity for solid adjusted EBITDA margin expansion over the midterm. While we continue to see challenges ahead, we are pleased with the performance over the past three years and the business which is standing on firm foundation. Today, we are also introducing our new targets for the next 3-5-year period ahead, and you will hear throughout the rest of the day how we plan to achieve them. Moving now to slide 25 and a summary of the investment highlights. First, the value proposition of our products is closely aligned with strong secular trends in our markets and the investments we have made in the business position as well for sustainable long-term growth.
Next, we have a talented team that has successfully managed through challenging environments and embedded a culture of continuous improvement, supported by robust operating system. We have a track record of above-market growth, initiatives which are in place to drive margin expansion, and a business model that generates a significant amount of free cash flow. Finally, with a strengthened balance sheet, we are in a position to allocate capital to support growth and deliver solid shareholder returns. I'll now turn it over to Tom Pitstick, our CMO, who will explain more details how we plan to continue to deliver this above-market growth target. Thank you.
Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. It is great to see everybody in person again. It's been way too long. I'm sure you're hearing that a lot in these events now. It's good to be back. Thank you, Ivo. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Tom Pitstick. As Ivo said, I'm our CMO and SVP of Strategic Planning. I'm gonna spend the next 30 minutes talking about our growth initiatives and how we're performing in various end markets. Right after my session, we'll spend about an hour and a half in these showcase booths, kind of 30-minute rotations in each one to give you a little more hands-on perspective of what I'll cover in the slides. I hope you'll enjoy that. Let's see.
We believe, as Ivo said, that we have a great opportunity in front of us. As Ivo described, we participate in large, diverse markets with supportive secular trends. Roughly 80% of our sales today come from top three positions in the markets and the product lines that we serve. The core of what we do, as Ivo said, is supplying highly engineered products that are mission-critical to the applications that they're part of, and which have natural replacement cycles. The fact that they're highly engineered gives us an opportunity to differentiate with technology. The fact that they're critical to the applications they go into means customers may be a little bit less price-sensitive to something if it helps them avoid downtime, and they put quite a bit of premium on reliability of those solutions.
Finally, the natural replacement cycle of our products leads to some level of recurring, current recurring revenue for us, and repeat business. We have a world-class organization, strong global channels, and a widely recognized brand. All of this gives us confidence in our ability to execute our initiatives and continue the above-market growth we've been delivering. Those of you that have followed us for a while are familiar with our six key initiatives, Chain- to-Belt, Belt- to- Belt, Precision Motion Control, Personal Mobility, Vehicle Electrification, and Extend Fluid Power. We'll get into more details on how we're progressing with these as we go through the various end market sections. I'm confident in saying we've been growing above our core industrial markets, and as Ivo just showed, we've been growing above our industrial peers as well.
Now, Ivo mentioned Eco-Innovation, and I wanted to dive into it a tiny bit more as one of our key growth enablers. When we embark upon a new product development project, we really look at these three things, material science, process engineering, and product engineering at the same time. In my past lives in a lot of companies, you'll look at one of these and focus on it to make a level of improvement, but I think what really makes Gates system unique here is that we focus on all three at the same time. Walt will share with you later some of the advancements we're making from an operational side. From the standpoint of growth, we're delivering lighter-weight solutions that are more flexible. They're easier to use.
PT solutions that are more reliable and more efficient. These performance improvements are helping us open new opportunities in all of our end markets and supporting our growth initiatives. As Ivo mentioned, all of our innovations have an environmental sustainability element to them, either in the form of reducing the footprint of our operations, which Walt will talk about, or helping customers meet their sustainability targets, and in many cases, we're achieving both. ESG thinking is a foundation for our process and something our team considers at every step in the product development process.
Whether it's providing improved performance using less material in a hose or a belt, and therefore lower weights and more efficiency, improving the efficiency of electric water pumps that we'll talk about later, or the reduced CO2 footprint of a belt drive compared to a chain drive that I think you'll find pretty impressive. The proof is in the pudding here a little bit with our NPI launches and our vitality performance over the past few years. Since 2016, we have launched 36 new product platforms, which have been roughly split evenly between PT and FP. By product platforms, I don't mean just a handful of SKUs. I mean, really product families or product lines or sub-product lines.
On the FP side, our hydraulic hose platforms such as MXT and MXG and various PRO Series hoses, hose families are notable examples. Within PT, our PowerGrip GT4 synchronous belts are supporting our Chain to Belt initiatives, and some of the first versions of our next-generation V-belts have launched in support of our B2B initiative. In October of last year, we also launched our new Thermal Pro electric water pump, and John will talk about that in the EV booth a little bit later. These NPI launches have led to a vitality index of around 12%. We've been growing that at close to 25% annual CAGR since 2017, with some product lines actually running quite a bit higher than that. Our mobility group product line, product category is running at 50%+ vitality.
Our wire braid hydraulic hose product line is running at 30% plus vitality, and we continue to make progress across all of our product lines. It's a great progress by our R&D teams, our product management teams, and our commercial teams for driving that growth towards our 20% vitality targets. With digital enablement, you'll get a better feel for several of these things in the booths, but I wanted to touch on a couple of them, that we won't cover in the booths. We've deployed a number of customer-facing tools, such as our gatesconnect.com, which is a B2B portal for our channel partners.
It's really a self-service portal where they're able to place orders, track order status, and it's dramatically reduced the number of touches our customer experience team has to place on orders, freeing up their time to help drive demand and do more important tasks. We have a number of apps that help our customers select the right products for their application on their mobile devices in the field, which is important. In marketing, we've established a process we call the Gates Lead Machine, where we're using advanced marketing automation and in-house creative studio that we put together a couple years ago and marketing resources to generate leads for initiatives such as our Chain to Belt initiative.
I'm gonna skip over the GC20 crimper 'cause Cindy's gonna cover that in the industrial booth during the rotations, and Taylor's also gonna talk about some of our design tools on the PT side that are supporting our Chain to Belt initiative over in the industrial showcase as well. Let's dive into some of our end markets. Automotive electrification, which I know is quite top of mind. The business overall is about 75% replacement, 25% OEM. Geographically, we're well-balanced across all regions and have strong commercial and R&D presence close to key customers. Since 2019, we grew this business low single digits overall, despite shedding some lower margin unattractive OEM business through our strategy of selective participation.
As we look forward to the midterm, we expect to continue to grow mid-single digits, holding OEM roughly flat while we continue to grow AR at above market rates. In both segments, we are well positioned to capitalize on the shift towards EVs. Sitting here today, we've built a pipeline of about $190 million for OEM EV applications across the product lines we'll show you in the back today, and are leading the way in terms of AR catalog coverage for EV parts. Double-click a little further into our automotive OEM business. All of the forecasts we see suggest that overall production will grow from that low point of 2020 as supply chain issues ease. These forecasts also all show that EV penetration is rapidly accelerating, growing at double-digit rates annually to approximately 35% of new vehicle production by 2030.
In terms of our strength, we're known for our technology and systems engineering expertise, and since we're in region and close to key OEM customers, we have fairly deep insights into their needs and market trends. Going forward, we intend to continue our strategy of selective participation in this market segment, leveraging our thermal management expertise as the mix shifts towards hybrids and full EVs. You'll get a deeper appreciation of this in our EV booth shortly, where we'll walk you through the content opportunity on a typical ICE platform versus the content opportunity on a typical EV platform, sorry. The short answer is that thermal management requirements on EVs go way up versus ICEs. Even though we see a decrease in some PT content, it's more than offset by the thermal management systems you'll see.
For example, a mechanical water pump on an ICE engine might cost between $8 and, say, $15, whereas an electric water pump on an EV could cost up to $135. There may be even more than one on an EV, as you'll see in the example in the back. Similarly, the coolant hoses on an ICE platform might cost $15-$28, whereas on an EV they can total $200. Quite a bit more thermal management content. Another key point here is that while thermal management platforms are imperative on all vehicle types, they're particularly important on EVs given the risk of damage to the battery systems or power electronics from freezing or overheating, and even the risk of fire. We're investing in Eco-Innovation in the automotive segment as well.
I'm quite excited about this electric water pump technology that we launched late last year. John will talk about it more in detail in the EV showcase, but this new pump architecture is based on axial flux, an axial flux motor design, and has a number of advantages over incumbent technologies, not the least of which is improved efficiency, which you can imagine is quite important on an electric platform. We're also working on several adjacent industrial applications for this technology outside of automotive, things like e-bike drives, industrial cooling and other motorized applications where this highly efficient, nicely packaged water pump motor technology has applicability. These are great examples of how we're able to leverage our automotive technical and manufacturing expertise to support other market opportunities. All right, moving on to automotive replacement.
The chart on the left here is the same one I showed a few slides ago, OE production forecast out through 2040, split by EVs and ICEs and hybrids. Each year there are roughly somewhere between 80 and 100 million new vehicles produced and of course, those are mixing quite rapidly towards EV. The chart in the middle shows the total car park, and pay attention to the scale 'cause it's on a quite a bit different scale. There are 1.4 billion vehicles in the car park. Every year, 80-100 million come into the car park of 1.4 billion. Obviously it takes quite a bit more time for the total car park to mix towards EV. The chart on the far right is the aged car park.
These are vehicles that are 7-12 years old, the typical first repair window. As you can see, and as Ivo mentioned, there were about 6 million EVs on the road globally in 2021 in the total car park, and only about 10% of those were in the aged car park. About 600,000 vehicles in the aged car park that are EVs sitting here today. This chart takes the unit volume of vehicles by mix in the car park and translates it to dollars on the right-hand side. A couple notable takeaways here. The ICE hybrid dollar portion of the chart on the right is essentially flat over time. Even though the units decline, there's a mix within that column towards hybrids where we have incremental content.
You'll also notice how the EV market ramps up and its contribution to the overall market growth between now and 2040 grows at more. That causes an overall market growth rate that's 2x the unit volume growth rate in the aged car park. This provides us with a very nice tailwind for our AR business well into the future and an opportunity that we're quite excited about. Many of you have asked this question around what about replacement rates on EVs versus ICEs. You'll see this more hands-on in the booth in the back, but there's a number of factors that play into what causes a part to fail or wear out on an EV. Duty cycle. How often is the system operating?
On an ICE and an EV, of course, when you're driving down the road it's similar. The thermal management systems are operating. But on EVs, when you plug the vehicle into your garage to charge, the thermal management system also kicks in to make sure the electronics are cooled during that charging process. Temperature cycling is the range of temperatures that a system will see during operation. The low end is basically determined by weather, so freezing weather is the same for both vehicle types. On an ICE platform, this is slightly worse. ICE engine compartments get hotter than you would see on an EV. Aging is another key factor. Plastic and rubber parts age over time, irrespective of what kind of vehicle they're on.
They become brittle, crack, and fail eventually, and exposure to contaminants and ozone and other materials can accelerate this process. Regarding road vibration, we think this factor is similar between the two vehicles. Driving down the road, you're hitting potholes and speed bumps, it has the same impact on both types of vehicles. Perhaps most importantly, the thermal management systems on EVs are much more complex. The connectors, the branches, the long lengths of hoses in these systems on EVs. It leads to a higher degree of complexity. If you compare a mechanical water pump to an electric water pump, there's bearings, there's impellers, there's seals that are similar between a mechanical pump and an electric pump, but an electric pump has the added complexity of a motor control board and the motor itself.
We're seeing similar replacement rates between the two vehicle platforms, and the team will be able to give you some more insights on that in the back here in a bit. In terms of investments in that we're making to continue to grow our automotive replacement business, we've touched on some of these already. Catalog coverage is key in this market, and here we combine best-in-class product management processes to ensure we have the right parts with compelling digital content that we syndicate to our channel partners to enable their e-commerce operations. I've touched on innovation in the electric water pump, but we also continue to innovate around our traditional product categories, whether it's next generation Micro-V belt that Walt will talk about in his section or kits that make it easier for installers to complete the job.
Finally, we have dedicated commercial teams around the world who work closely with our channel partners, as well as promoter teams who call directly on shops that create demand for our products with the installers on the shop floor. This model is typical in mature markets like Europe and North America, but we've also deployed it in places like South America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India. In summary, automotive is not a melting ice cube for us in the short, medium or even long term. It's actually a growth opportunity that we believe we are well-positioned to capitalize on. All right, let's shift to personal mobility. Personal mobility for us is two-wheelers, bikes, scooters, motorcycles, power sports vehicles, small last mile delivery vehicles, as well as fitness equipment there for good measure.
The two-wheeler market here is about 180 million vehicles in 2021, growing at low single-digit growth rates with electrification happening in this market segment much faster than that overall market growth rate. It's frankly easier to electrify a bike or a scooter, and there are fewer hurdles related to grid infrastructure, charging infrastructure, battery supply, et cetera, that need to be solved for these vehicles as compared to, say, automobiles. We've put a lot of focus on this market over the past several years, and as a result, we've been growing this business at over 60% per year and expect to continue growing at north of 35% through the midterm.
Given our current pipeline of opportunities of $260 million in this space, the supportive market conditions, the right products, and our team's dedication and focus on this market, we're well positioned to capitalize on the trends we're seeing. Joe and Jonathan will share a little bit more with you on the market here in a bit, our value propositions, and the opportunities over in the mobility showcase. Joe and Jonathan will also touch on this too, but I'll point out that we have a solid content opportunity here that tends to increase as you go from traditional vehicles to electric vehicles. Furthermore, and this is worth highlighting, in many cases, our PT content on an e-bike or an e-scooter is greater than our PT content on an ICE engine.
If you've looked at the board over here, the unit productions are quite a bit higher in this space than in the automotive space. We're quite excited about the opportunity. There are also a number of potential content adjacencies related to shifting systems and e-drives, which we can access through partnerships, acquisitions or even organic development, which will drive our content per vehicle up substantially. Mobility growth enablers, much like the other areas, we're investing in innovation, our commercial front end and digital tools. Walt will talk about some of our belt innovations that are supporting the 50%+ NPI vitality in this business. Joe will talk about some of the things we've done from an organizational perspective to drive growth.
His team is calling on OEMs around the world and has strong technical capability to support these customers with drive designs using our new mobility drive design software tool. They are also focused on selling full belt drive systems to provide the best possible solution for our customers, which also happens to maximize our content in these applications. Before I move on, an important point about this market, I believe, is that we transitioned from our technologies being viewed as somewhat niche to being mainstream. We have OEMs knocking on our door now asking for belt drive solutions. We have their customers knocking on their door asking for belt drive solutions, and I think, the mobility team that you'll hear from later deserves a lot of credit for driving that shift. All right, moving on to another key growth market for us, diversified industrials.
This is a very large market opportunity for us, representing roughly $30 billion across traditional fluid power and power transmission product categories, as well as across alternative product categories such as chain. The four initiatives that we're driving here, Chain- to-Belt, Belt- to- Belt, Precision Motion Control, and Extending Fluid Power, are supporting our growth in this market area. In more traditional areas like V-belts and hydraulics, we're taking share via innovation and commercial focus. In areas like Chain to Belt, we're winning based on innovation, the strong value propositions of our products, as well as our commercial front end and application engineering capabilities. We're winning business in every region across a wide range of applications and have a sizable pipeline of $185 million sitting here today.
We've been growing this end market at close to 10% CAGR over the past few years and expect to continue this level of growth over the midterm. We get questions a lot around how are we winning and where are we winning and how are different customer segments thinking about our products in this diversified industrial space. You can kind of think about these as two high-level customer categories or application categories. There's retrofit applications where you might be going into an existing factory and replacing an existing drive or replacing their legacy hydraulics with our new hydraulics. There's greenfield applications where you're working with a machine builder and you're getting in with their engineers and getting your product specced into the application.
You know, our retrofit customers think about payback, total cost of ownership, as well as the ESG benefits like reduced noise, improved safety, cleanliness, energy efficiency and low maintenance products. They aren't necessarily engineers, so having tools that make it easy for them to select and design and retrofit their systems with our products are key. The fact that we're an OEM supplier gives them comfort that we provide high-quality products. Greenfield applications are where we've been designed into the machine builder, and OEMs tend to focus a little bit more on first cost versus total cost of ownership, but they're also seeing increasing pressure from their customers to deliver ESG benefits in their solutions. Things like safety, reducing the use of lubrication, and other ESG measures are very important to our OEM customers.
These are all areas where we're continuing to focus our innovation efforts. These customers also tend to be more technical, so they appreciate our product performance and our innovation, as well as our application engineering support. These opportunities tend to have longer design cycles, but once you're designed in, you can kinda think of it as an annuity, where they're just building your products into their machines and into their aftermarket cycle, as they go forward. Our personal mobility business is predominantly a greenfield OEM business, so we are taking learnings from the successes we've had in the mobility business and applying that in our industrial business, and I'll share an example on the next slide. Diversified industrial, similar to the other areas.
In addition to our belt innovations, we've been working on sprockets, and we'll show some examples in the booth over along the sidewall here. We'll also talk about some of the things we're doing to add targeted capacity in support of these business opportunities. In Japan, in the middle column here, where there's a strong machine builder base, we put in place a dedicated commercial and application engineering team to go after Chain to Belt applications, replicating the mobility model, but in an industrial context. This is working quite well and leading to a number of interesting wins in robotics, warehouse systems, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, HVAC systems, and a variety of food and beverage applications, to name a few. We're building out similarly focused teams in other parts of the world based on this experience.
As I mentioned earlier, Taylor's gonna talk quite a bit about our design tools, so I won't touch on those here. You know, overall we believe we're in the early innings of these diversified industrial initiatives with a lot of runway ahead of us. We're a little further ahead on our fluid power portfolio revitalization, but on the PT side, we're catching up quickly, and our legacy PT products have quite strong value propositions in the applications we sell them into. As we get all of our technologies in place and software tools fully rolled out, as well as the additional investments in our front-end org, we anticipate our progress here will continue to accelerate. All right. Shifting gears a bit here to inorganic growth.
I also have responsibility for our corporate development function, and I'll give you a little overview here of our strategy and some of the activity we've had in this area. We think about M&A as an accelerator to our organic growth strategies. We look for companies with Gates-like product characteristics, so highly engineered, natural replacement cycles critical to the applications they go into. We, of course, also look for assets with differentiated technologies, and access to channels that we may not currently have access to. We've got to see clear synergy potential when we bring something to the table in terms of running the business better and/or driving top-line synergies through cross-selling or geographic expansion. Finally, we are very diligent in our financial approach and target double-digit ROIC by year three with a path to accretive margins.
We remain disciplined here to ensure that we're delivering value to our shareholders and accelerating our organic strategies. In the spirit of our overarching Gates Operating System, we put a process in place here too. We have a well-defined and robust M&A process. We have a dedicated team with feet on the street in multiple regions, supporting our regional leadership teams and global product teams to build pipelines and evaluate deal opportunities. Our pipeline currently contains over 200 companies that we've engaged at various levels. More than 75% of these are outside of North America, and a similar percentage would grow our exposure in diversified industrial end markets. Our target growth model is pretty straightforward. It has three elements. First of all, we focus on markets with strong secular trends.
We're trying to mix the business towards the markets that we've shared earlier in the day. On top of that, our goal is to grow above market with our initiatives to deliver MSD growth organically, and we've been demonstrating this level of performance, I think, quite nicely and quite consistently over the past few years. Given the investments we've made, our progress on innovation, and the traction we have with our growth initiatives, we believe we're well positioned to continue to deliver this growth. Brooks will talk about this a bit more, but our balance sheet is in great shape, so we're also now in a position to add M&A to our growth options and are targeting low single-digit growth from inorganic sources on top of that organic base. In summary, four key points here.
One, we participate in attractive markets and are focusing our efforts in the areas with the strongest secular trends. Two, we are investing in growth, whether it's new products, tools, or our commercial organizations. Three, we've been executing and will continue to deliver on our growth initiatives to drive above-market growth. Four, we now have M&A optionality with a team and process in place to supplement our growth with accretive inorganic opportunities. Across the board here, our midterm organic growth targets are in line with what we've already been demonstrating. We've executed during challenging times and have continued to fund our innovation and growth initiatives, all of which gives us confidence in meeting our goals. All right, so with that, we're gonna pause, take a break, get out of our seats, and move around. Here's how this will work.
Hi, my name is Joe Menzel. I've been with Gates for five years, and prior to that, I have over 10 years of manufacturing, industrial manufacturing experience in product management, sales and marketing, operations strategy and continuous improvement, and general management, and currently with Gates in leading the mobility business globally for Gates.
I'm Jonathan Weinert, responsible for marketing within the Personal Mobility Business Unit of Gates. Been with Gates for three years. Prior to joining Gates, I was working for a leading e-bike system supplier, and I have about 15 years of experience working in these various industries.
Life is about charging forward. That's why at Gates, we're always pushing the limits, leaning into the curves. Our mission is nothing less than powering a revolution in how the world moves. That goal drives everything we do and has for more than a century. Just look at our Carbon Drive system. It's redefining personal mobility and recreation. Built into the sprockets, belts, and cranksets is unmatched engineering excellence and cutting-edge material science. Field-tested, you ask? Yeah, you could say that. We've pounded and punished it around the world and back in electric two-wheelers, bikes, fitness equipment, and power sports. Carbon Drive is clean. That means no oil, no grease, no rust. The system is quiet. Lose the chain noise, no matter your ride or the terrain. Carbon Drive is smooth, every ride. Your ride will never be the same. This drive is strong. Push it. Go ahead.
These carbon fiber-reinforced belts will outperform and outlast any chain. Whether you're a cruiser, a commuter, or a competitor, whether you're pushing pedals or twisting a throttle, unchain your ride with Gates Carbon Drive. Find your Carbon Drive at gatescarbondrive.com.
As you heard in the prior presentations, we're very excited about the mobility market. It has strong secular tailwinds, and our product offering delivers significant value to the customers in the segments we serve. We started a mobility initiative in January 2019 with the vision and mission to progress the electrification revolution within mobility, embrace environmental sustainability, and advance how the world moves, all with the vision of being the leading drive system solution supplier for electric two-wheelers, bicycles, power sports, and fitness equipment. Today, we see a number of leading market trends as well as technology trends, which are delivering favorable opportunities for growth for Gates. The first being electrification. Electrification is everywhere. For electrified solutions in drives in our end markets play very favorable to having belt drives being the obvious solution.
Secondly, we're seeing increased power and torque of mid-motors, also combining gearing into a single unit. This also leads to a belt drive system value add. Lastly is around urbanization and population growth. Many cities around the world are pouring concrete and paint to make way for multiple micro-mobility transportation methods to improve congestion but also the environment. For example, in many cities around the world, internal combustion scooters are a significant contributor to pollution. When you look at an electric scooter, that contributes one-tenth of the amount of carbon dioxide emissions to that of an internal combustion traditional passenger vehicle, and over the lifetime, less than half of the amount for an internal combustion scooter. Now, these market trends happened well before COVID. We've seen e-bike adoption in Europe accelerating. We've seen electric two-wheelers growing in Asia.
While the pandemic helped accelerate the adoption of two-wheelers, we feel that these trends are long-standing for the foreseeable future. With that being said, I'll turn to Jonathan to talk about market and competition.
Thank you, Joe. Let's dive more into market growth and electrification. As you can see from this slide here, in the markets that we're showing here, bikes, scooters, motorcycles, the markets are both growing, and they're electrifying. The electrification rate, as you see on the slide, it's increasing in all of these segments. What we predict is that by 2030, one in every three two-wheelers sold will be electric. Now, the wall behind us shows the content value that Gates adds to these various vehicle segments. In general, the other thing we wanted to show on this wall is that for the electric types of vehicles, the content is generally higher than the human or gas-powered forms of these bikes, scooters, and motorcycles.
The other thing we wanted to show here is that, in general, the content that we add to these vehicles, the PT content, can be twice as much as what we have on an automotive ICE engine. Also the overall annual production volume, as you can see in this chart, actually is almost 2 times as much as the annual production volume of vehicles. We're not claiming that we're getting 100% of this business and that 100% of these vehicles will become belt drive. At these content levels, the midterm revenue growth targets that we are aiming for, they're very achievable. The next thing I wanna cover is the value proposition that Gates brings to these vehicles.
It's all about the value proposition of belts versus the incumbent technology, chain or shaft. What we're showing here is that belt far outperforms chain or shaft in these segments. There's really the key advantages that we have, stronger, smoother, quieter, lower maintenance, more reliable, even more lightweight. Those are some of the key advantages, and these advantages are even more pronounced on the electric versions of these vehicles versus the human and gas-powered equivalents. For any of you that ride out there, once you've ridden a two-wheeler with a belt drive, you don't go back to chain. Another thing I wanted to add about Gates technology specifically, Gates belt drive technology specifically, we're using the most sophisticated carbon fiber reinforced belt drives and cutting-edge sprocket designs as well.
These designs are actually protected by patents that last through 2027 and beyond. So in general, we believe we're the clear leader in the space, and we're positioned well with all our innovation activities to stay in that leading spot.
Thanks, Jonathan. Yeah, you know, in order to continue to fuel the growth, the accelerated growth that we've realized, we have a number of growth enablers. The first, as Jonathan was alluding to, is around innovation. We have a broad proven portfolio of belt drive system solutions and continue to innovate through advanced engineering and also material science to bring new solutions to market, which are underway now and will be brought to market in the near future. Secondly, we've established a dedicated global cross-functional organization that's sole purpose is to drive growth in the mobility space for Gates.
This is really the best of both worlds because it gives us the ability to tap into all of the great assets that Gates has on a global scale, while still being able to operate in a nimble and agile fashion for the changing market demands as we see them. Then thirdly, we continue to invest in advanced selling tools, both physical and digital, that allow us to really educate our customers on what our products are, but also help them specify the correct drive system for the application that they're working on. Speaking of applications, we have a number of vehicles here with some of our state-of-the-art technology that we'd like to walk you through.
All right, let's start first with the Zero SR/S. For those of you that don't know Zero, based in California, total pioneer in electric motorcycles. Gates worked with Zero on this solution that the challenge was super high performance electric motorcycle, designing a belt drive that could withstand the high torque of such a high performance race proven application, but that could also still be whisper silent, which an electric motorcycle, that's one of the key advantages. The next vehicle that I wanted to highlight is the CAKE Ösa. CAKE, based in Sweden, came out with this CAKE Ösa just a couple years ago, and it's really a one of the pioneers in cargo e-moped, a cargo e-moped that features a belt drive.
It's got many other utility functions, and the thing that's great about the belt drive is not only does it use the Gates Poly Chain belt, but it also features Gates MudPort sprockets, which are excellent at debris shedding in muddy environments.
The last vehicle we have on display here is the Serial 1 powered by Harley-Davidson. This e-bike or electric bicycle has an internal geared rear hub, which does the shifting, and it's driven by the Gates Carbon Drive system, which includes the belt and two sprockets. Now, what you don't see is that the mid-motor between the pedals also has a Gates Poly Chain belt inside of it, which propels the pedals forward as the cyclist is cycling. This bike alone has two Gates belts and two sprockets. You know, in conclusion, I think overall we're very pleased with our progress that we've made with our mobility business.
The future trajectory for growth in the markets are very favorable, and I look forward in the future to sharing more about how Gates is advancing how the world moves in mobility.
My name is Mike Haen. I lead Industrial Global Product Line Management for Gates, and will be providing some more information on how we play in the diversified industrial space, including how we win and some of the opportunities we have. If I were to look first at the sub-markets within diversified industrial to add some color, in food and beverage, we have cleanliness advantages with our chain-to-belt solutions and a wide variety of applications in industrial hose. Looking at HVAC and building automation, a lot of belt-to-belt opportunities there, whether it's in DCs, plants or even hotels, all moving air using our products. Within logistics, a lot of belt drives and chain drives for opportunity for conversion where reliability is very important.
In general manufacturing as well, a lot of high pressure hydraulic applications as well as a lot of use of roller chain. Beyond the broad industrial markets that I went through, we've also got supporting trends behind us. Whether it's industrial automation where we have high or small power transmission requirements as well as positioning needs, we play very well in there, particularly with our synchronous product line. Whether it's sustainability, our products can eliminate or reduce the contaminants used and also use either more beneficial or less materials in our products. E-commerce, warehouse and logistics, whether it's lifts, forklifts, conveyors, all providing opportunities for our products. Infrastructure investments tend to get into more of the heavier equipment and hydraulics. Really, all of our products play across all of those opportunities.
When we look across our industrial portfolio, there's really some themes of how we win. One, we've got a very simplified portfolio, which gives us broad coverage across all of those end markets, going with one portfolio in the market. We also make those easy to use so that they can be applied reliably and safely. We have a proven product performance. We are able to differentiate ourselves by taking on some of the challenging applications. We also continue to introduce new products, which gets us opportunities with new customers. We have an established global channel and footprint in commercial capability, including product application engineering, which gets us a lot of opportunities, particularly with multinational OEMs. Finally, digital enablement and tools.
This is something that we are continuing to invest in, makes our products easier to apply and be self-applied so that we can continue the trajectory of our initiatives. If I look at the types of customers we have, there's really three types. There's the multinational OEMs. They have defined engineering requirements, a lot of times with component level test regimes that our products need to pass. They've roadmapped out what their expectations are on their equipment, so we can start to align either our existing portfolios or our new innovations to their requirements. We win there with product performance and differentiation, taking on a lot of the challenging solutions that they are looking for. Obviously, with our global capabilities and supply, we're well aligned with the multinational OEMs.
Looking at regional OEMs, they tend to use more the local specifications and also rely on field trials to evaluate our products. There, our product application expertise is really valued because, one, we can add productivity either through how the products are assembled or how they perform, and also eliminate warranty issues or whatever challenges they're having. In looking at replacement channels, there we're very reliant on the industry specifications. They're looking for very broad coverage, so that they've got the right product for whatever opportunity comes to them for an MRO solution. There's a preference in, particularly in some regions, for the brands that are on some of the major OEMs, and they also tend to have limited application expertise, in part because of high employee turnover.
Anything we can do to make the overall product application or the product selection simpler is really appreciated. We do that a lot through our digital tools and some of the training materials that we have available. Then also within this market, anything that adds more features or differentiation from our competitors is really appreciated as they go out and engage, either with small OEMs or MRO opportunities. Now Cindy is gonna get into details with our fluid power initiative.
Hi, I'm Cindy Cookson, the Vice President of Global Product Line Management for Hydraulics. For the last few years, our technical team has been very focused on developing technologies and tools that address some long-standing application challenges in both OEM and replacement applications. All of our new MX designs include several common features. They're lightweight, they're flexible, and they're compact. We leverage material science technologies to deliver leak-free assemblies, and our designs, coupled with our crimper technology, both contribute to these leak-free assemblies. Finally, we talk about simplicity. We cross-rate our hoses to meet multiple industry standards, and this drives value in a variety of ways for customers. Let me give you an example of how one of our first fit customers is deriving value from our Eco-Innovation approach. This is an injection molding customer.
They were plagued with continuous problems with reactive maintenance where hoses were failing early. On top of that, it was hard to install replacement hoses because the systems were really congested. Enter our new technologies. This customer is using MXT and MXG hoses, and they're seeing good benefits. They're seeing less reactive maintenance, so more uptime, and they're seeing fewer field warranty issues. This is a new $2 million account for Gates, and we have additional opportunities to continue growing at this customer. Plus, we're using this success as a launch point for going after additional injection molding opportunities. That was the first fit example, but distributors also get a lot of value out of our Eco-Innovation approach. In particular, it comes around portfolio simplification. That means that we need less working capital involved in stocking our hoses.
Fewer hoses to stock means we need less floor space to stock them as well. Also because our hoses are rated for multiple industry standards, we see better service levels in servicing these distributors with fewer SKUs. The operators at these distributors also see some value. First, they make less errors in pulling the wrong hose because, you know, there's fewer SKUs to choose from. They also get ergonomic benefits. Because the hoses are flexible and lighter weight, this means that they are easier to handle, to assemble, and to install in applications. Weight savings brings some additional benefits for these distributors when they are shipping hoses from their warehouses to the end users. They're seeing some freight savings because the hoses weigh less.
Finally, the pure innovation that we offer brings value to distributors because they now have something unique to talk about. When they're going to visit end customers, they have something to talk about other than just price or commodity-related issues. Not only are we addressing our hoses and our hose portfolio through our Eco-Innovation approach, it also encompasses our crimper platforms and the tools that we provide to ensure that customers can make safe hydraulic assemblies. In 2019, we launched our Cortex platform. Since then, we've continued evolving this platform to address additional customers and the values that they need or the tools that they need to assemble hoses. Specifically, the Cortex was launched on this GC20 crimper.
It's a baseline crimper that there's tens of thousands of these in the market today. Since then, we have evolved the Cortex platform to also be available on a digital app. This means that customers who have legacy crimpers, they haven't yet updated to our new GC20 Cortex crimper, they can still access some of the features of our Cortex platform, even though they're using one of those legacy crimpers. Both the Cortex crimper and the app are both cloud connected, so they're receiving updated information from the cloud. They're sending information back to the cloud. This comes a long way from how we used to do it, where we relied on printed manuals, and we relied on an analog dial in order to make hydraulic assemblies.
Honestly, our distributors couldn't be more pleased with how this technology is impacting their business. Here's one example of a distributor who has a counter service. Basically, someone's coming to them with a busted hydraulic assembly, and they need a replacement made on the spot. This distributor, like many of us, struggles with employee turnover, so they're constantly training employees and we're finding they were having to turn business away because they didn't have someone that was qualified to operate the crimper and make a safe assembly. Enter the Cortex platform. The Cortex really shines here because it makes it really easy to train employees. It's an intuitive touchscreen interface that walks the user through the process of making a safe hydraulic assembly, so it kinda takes the guesswork out of hydraulic assembly fabrication.
On top of that, this distributor is also using our MXT and MXG hoses. We're further simplifying their portfolio by allowing them to use just one or two hoses to cover a wide breadth of industry specs to further eliminate any errors in pulling the wrong hose. What's the outcome here? This distributor did a four-store study. Year-over-year, they saw a 55% increase in hose sales, and they directly attribute this to the value that the Cortex platform brings to their business. It's easier to train employees. They're not intimidated by the technology, and they're not having to turn business away. We are continuing to evolve this Cortex platform, and we're really focusing and prioritizing on features that are driving benefit for those end users.
We're doing that partially because we want them to be able to make safe hydraulic assemblies, but we're also doing it because of the value of the information that we extract from this platform. We now know where the crimpers are located, where the customers are located, what they're crimping, how often they're crimping, what hoses and couplings they're using the most. On top of that, we see that we're seeing great adoption of our MXT and MXG, our innovative hoses, in these platforms because it's so much simpler for us to roll out information about our new products to these customers. Our digitalization efforts aren't really stopping with the Cortex platform.
This is in the Fluid Power space, but we also have a lot of digital tool development ongoing in our Power Transmission space, and Taylor's going to talk more about that now.
Well, thank you, Cindy. As she mentioned, my name is Taylor Jung. I'm the global product line director for industrial synchronous. As you've heard from Tom and Ivo earlier, Chain to Belt is one of our major growth initiatives, and I'd like to talk briefly about it, just to catch you up to speed on all of our value propositions and why Chain to Belt is an appealing opportunity in the market. When you convert from a chain to a belt, as you've seen in the demonstrator over here, you get a bunch of advantages out of that. The first is belts are a lot cleaner. They don't require any lubrication. That means that you don't have oils or greases that could become contaminants either in your product or for your people.
They're much quieter in operation, as you can hear, than chains, whether chains are running quickly or whether they are contacting equipment around them because they run with very low tensions. Belts are more reliable. Usually we see that on average or as a rule of thumb as lasting about three times as long as average chains. You're seeing less downtime, you get more production, and or you have less maintenance people required to keep things going. That leads us directly into the low maintenance and all of that ties to lifetime and reduction of lubrication and the elimination of any retensioning requirements. Belts are also significantly lighter weight than chains, sometimes as much as 90% or 95% of the weight. Less weight, excuse me. That can come into a factor if you need interesting locations that require access via a ladder or scaffolding.
That drives into the safety component, carrying less weight when you're installing things, not having the lubrication. Honestly, the safest drive that a facility can install is the one that nobody has to maintain. If you keep your hands off of it and out of it's inherently a safer design. That is a brief overview of the value propositions that we utilize in the Chain to Belt initiative. Now I'd like to talk about a couple of examples where we've used those. The first is a global logistics provider. They have multiple locations, 40 regional hubs around the globe. This is an environment where it's a really critical power transmission drives that keep these conveyors running. The downtime on one of these drives for a single line can lead to up to $10,000 per hour of downtime.
They're very interested in that low maintenance and reliability that we have. We did 79 chain conversions in this particular facility. You can see that the savings over time is really monumental. We're leveraging this success across multiple other locations and at a corporate level. Second example is a global food manufacturer. Here you can see that you have the contamination and the grease can be a challenge for all food environments. Their chain drives were failing very quickly, predominantly because of the washdown environment where they're constantly spraying it down with hot waters and chemicals really hard on chains. Whereas belt drives, you can rinse down all day long and are effectively completely unaffected by that washdown environment. You're also having to come back and lubricate those chains every day because you washed them down, leading to more downtime, leading to lost production.
did 12 drives in this particular production line, but there are a whole bunch more throughout the facility and within this customer globally to go and pursue going forward. One of the challenges that we have with Chain to Belt is helping people understand what the right drive is for their application. As Cindy mentioned, we're working with digital tools and advancing them, developing the next generations of our digital tools to do so. This is what we call Design Power. It is our digital tool for designing drives. It contains all of our power transmission products and can help people select based on horsepower, RPM, some specifics about the drive can all be entered. You can see kind of how that drive lays out. What you get on the output of it are a whole variety of drives that will meet your application requirements.
You can sort them by relative cost, or maybe you have some specifics about your application that it needs to fit within a particular package. You can sort all of those opportunities or options by those attributes. When you select one, you get a great output. Looks like this over here on the left. You get a drive report that contains everything you need to go and buy the parts by part number, Gates part number and description, every detail of it. You could walk into a distributor or contact Gates directly and be able to tell us exactly what you would need to install that drive. Also included in there are savings reports. Whether it's energy savings or whether it's maintenance and uptime savings that I talked about in the value propositions, all of that can be calculated out of that as well.
The next phase is we're going to be moving this into a mobile environment where you can do all of this on a mobile tool. Along with that, an end user can take their drives, save them into the tool, share them with their distributor or with Gates, get some guidance as to when likely replacement cycles will be needed, et cetera. We're calling that Facility Management. One of the other things we've been working on is how to quantify the ESG or the carbon footprint of the Chain to Belt initiative. What you can see here is the equivalent CO2 cost of a chain drive versus a belt drive over a 10-year life cycle.
Because you're replacing those chains more often, because the chain requires lubrication, all of the materials from the extraction of the materials to make the product to the manufacturing of the product to the disposal and including the maintenance of that product is stretched out. You can see almost a 90% reduction in the carbon footprint of a belt drive versus the replaced chain drive. All of this comes back together now as we bring these digital tools and they give end users some really great values. You know, they can do their drive designs, they can sort and store their drive designs, they can understand how to properly tension their drive designs with their drives with these tools and get their replacement reminders. All of that is really great value for an end user.
These tools also give us vision, much like Cindy mentioned in the Cortex examples. This helps us understand how people are applying our products, how often, whether they're designing with one product versus another, how many drives they're designing. Then it gives us the ability to understand the market in more detail and also facilitate lead generation for our commercial teams. Now, I'll throw it back to Mike for some closing notes.
To sum things up, we've got large opportunities within the diversified industrial space across the various sub-markets. We've got value propositions that are offering clear value to our customers in that space. We continue to use innovation as a way of enabling the simplification of our portfolio. Similarly, we're also investing heavily into digital enablement to continue to make our products easy to apply. Thank you for your time, and we'll now take questions.
Good afternoon. I'm Dave Miller. I'm the Global Product Line Manager for our automotive replacement business. I've been with Gates for 37 years, and during that time I've been a part of our product development, our OE sales, our logistics, as well as our global automotive replacement business. As Tom mentioned, you know that Gates is very focused on our replacement business. About 75% of our automotive business is replacement parts. We offer a number of different parts to replace on internal combustion engines, so let's focus on internal combustion engines first. We offer belts, tensioners, and pulleys for our accessory drive systems, as well as belts, tensioners, and pulleys for our timing belt systems.
Timing belt systems, as well as accessory drive systems, are often kitted up into complete packages to allow the service technician to do the complete job when they're replacing our products. We also provide belts for electronic power steering and electronic power brake systems. These systems are becoming more and more popular in vehicles as they become more electrified. In thermal management systems, we provide mechanical water pumps and hoses for cooling the engine. Mechanical water pumps pump the coolant through the system, and hoses are shaped in multiple different styles to meet the OE designs. These products, specifically, are located at the very front of the vehicle and in very short lengths because the radiator and engine are close together.
In an internal combustion engine, these products are exact shapes to replace the OE applications, and they're designed specifically to make the job easy for 280,000 service bays in the U.S. and millions of service bays around the world that service automobiles. The systems we provide a product breadth that's about $125 on vehicles at the OE. I'm gonna throw it over to Drew Conkling now and have him talk about our electric vehicle strategy and how we're going to move as electric vehicles roll out and become more popular.
Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon. My name is Drew Conkling, and I'm Gates' Global Product Line Director for Electric Vehicles. I've been with Gates for 8.5 years in a variety of product-focused roles within our automotive replacement business. Prior to Gates, I was a factory-certified technician for Ferrari. When it comes to EVs, there is a significant shift in content to meet the unique requirements of this technology. While Gates loses some of our power transmission components, we will continue to supply uniquely designed PT products, plus we gain a significant amount of thermal management content. As you can see on this map here, we are not new to these technologies. We have been designing, manufacturing, and selling water pumps since the late 1990s and thermal management hose for almost a century. Now, let me take a minute and orient you to this electric vehicle.
This is your standard skateboard style EV here with the battery in the middle, the gearbox, inverter, and motor in the back, and the fluid reservoirs, heat exchangers, and thermal management control unit up front. Gates' power transmission content can be found in the electric power steering system up front and the electric parking brake systems here and here. What I specifically wanna call your attention to is the significant amount of thermal management content in front of you, starting with the 2 electric water pumps up front. Depending on the design, we see anywhere between 2 and 4 electric water pumps on EVs today. These pumps are tasked with managing flow of coolant throughout the entire vehicle, and John's gonna talk about these in a little more detail coming up shortly. What you can also see is the incredibly complex hose system in front of you.
This design has 15 hoses, which is average for what we're seeing on EVs today. Now Gates' hose technology in particular features highly engineered synthetic rubbers as well as thermoplastics. Our advanced material technology includes electrically resistant materials to prevent the transfer of electricity through the hose, which leads to premature hose failure. We also employ a variety of clamping technologies, including Gates' patented PowerGrip shrink band clamps, which can be seen on the display here. These clamps are thermally active so that they ensure optimal sealing throughout the life of the product. Gates also boasts complete in-house design capabilities. We include sensors, ports, valves, connectors, and flow restrictors within the hose for enhanced coolant flow control as well as temperature management. Finally, our quick connect couplings offer a complete leak-free port-to-port solution for ease of installation on the assembly line or in the service bay.
Now, when it comes to replacement drivers on our products, there are five key criteria that we consider, the combination of which gives us a strong confidence that replacement rates will not change from what we see on EVs today. Starting with duty cycle, we know that in an ICE, when it shuts off, everything stops, including wear on the products. In an EV, the thermal management system runs almost constantly. On cold nights, it maintains battery temps. It dissipates heat during charging. It's even running while over-the-air software updates are being installed on the vehicle. All of this leads to greater operating times and wear. On the flip side are temperature fluctuations. An ICE engine generates a significant amount of heat from the combustion engine. This leads to accelerated aging. Speaking of aging, this is a very critical factor.
Just to be clear, our products are replaced because they wear and age, and that will not change on EVs. Age-related deterioration will continue to be a primary driver of replacement on our products. Road vibrations once again lean more favorably towards ICE replacements. This is due to the inherent vibrations of a running engine. However, EVs are very heavy, upwards of 50% heavier than their ICE counterparts, and they boast an incredibly low center of gravity due to their skateboard design. All of this results in a very firm suspension, which means even the smallest bumps are harshly transferred throughout the vehicle. These vibrations can weaken connection points and lead to accelerated wear. I cannot stress enough how important the significant increase in product complexity is when it comes to EVs. With hoses, we have additional components as well as additional connection points.
While electric water pumps share the same basic design features as mechanical pumps, significant complexity is added with the motor and the electronics. Finally, although not mentioned here, I would be remiss if I didn't also address the criticality of the thermal management system in each of these applications. Although cooling is important in an ICE for efficient engine operation as well as passenger comfort, failure of the system simply results in you needing a tow to your destination. However, on an EV, not only is the thermal management system critical for maximizing range and vehicle performance, but failure of the system can result in catastrophic thermal runaway events. Given all this, I hope you can see why we're so excited about the opportunity that EVs bring to Gates. I'll now turn things over to John, who will discuss our water pump technology in additional detail.
Thank you, Drew. My name is John McGowan. I'm the Vice President of Product Line Management for Engine Systems Power Transmission Group. I've been with Gates for five years, and prior to joining Gates, I've spent my entire career in automotive and industrial applications. Specifically prior to Gates, I worked at Infineon Technologies, a semiconductor company, a tier one automotive supplier, and I started my career with Ford Motor Company. Today, I'd like to speak to you about Gates' electric water pump portfolio. As you can see, we've segmented the market into three separate power classes: low, medium, and high. Gates' first entry into this space was a low-power single-phase brushless DC motor. Here's a variant of it, but our original entry was over a decade ago, and since that time, we've sold this product into OE as well as replacement market applications.
We've also improved the design such that we've improved the important performance as well as made the product more applicable and configurable for replacement market applications. The next power phase is the 30-100 watt phase, which is used primarily for charge air cooling and some EV and HEV applications. We offer a brushless DC three-phase motor for this product. Here's an example of a production pump. This product is offered in 12, 24, and 48 volts. The 24 and 48 volts are typically for heavy duty applications, where the 12 is more typical for a passenger vehicle. Finally, the high power class of pumps are typically higher than 100 watts. We offer a three-phase axial flux motor for this product class.
An axial flux motor is different than a traditional motor such that the rotor and stator are oriented differently, so that the magnetic fields run axial along the rotor rather than traditionally radially through the motor. What that means is you have a reduced air gap, which allows the product to have higher power density. That translates to a more efficient motor. For our applications, we're seeing a 30% improvement for the technology. What I have here is an example of a 250-watt pump and a competitor's 250-watt pump. As you can see, we've translated the improved power density into a reduced mass pump, which drives cost savings as well as packaging and weight.
Axial flux motors are often called pancake motors, and the technology isn't necessarily new, but Gates has taken this technology and applied it to this application in a unique fashion. Gates has also filed IP to protect its technology. We're excited about the advantages that axial flux motors provide. In addition to electric water pump, we're looking at outside of automotive applications for this technology where a lighter, more efficient motor can be used. Currently, we're investigating applications such as e-bike, server farms, and lawn and garden equipment. In summary, this axial flux technology provides Gates a competitive advantage that we're well-positioned to apply. Thank you.
Good noon. I'm Walter Lifsey, the Chief Operating Officer of Gates. I hope you'd enjoyed the technology showcase presentations. It's always nice to get a chance to see and feel what we're working on. We certainly have a lot of exciting things happening around the company in terms of our new products and great market opportunities. Over the next several slides, I'm going to share with you some of the things we're doing to improve our global operations and implement new manufacturing capabilities to support these initiatives. At the core of what we do is the Gates Operating System, something we put in place back in 2015 to establish a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making. We started off with GPS, the Gates Production System, which is focused on optimizing our factory performance, and evolved from there to build out our innovation system.
More recently, we advanced our approach to complexity reduction. I'll cover these three areas in more detail on the coming slides. Before we go there, I want to highlight that we also use our operating system framework to look across all of our functions and to find opportunities to improve, whether it's in talent management, S&OP planning, pricing, product line management, just to name a few examples. The Gates Production System, when I joined the company in 2015, it became quickly apparent that we were not leveraging best practices or a structured operating model across our global facilities. We established the Gates Production System and went about deploying it across the footprint. GPS, as we call it, is about running our plants better with a key focus on safety, quality, and optimizing machine efficiency, uptime, and utilization.
We've made tremendous progress on safety and quality, bringing both of these areas to world-class levels. We will never be satisfied there, but we have made great product progress. A safe place is a place people want to work at. No one should risk their lives coming to work. In terms of operating our assets better, we've made solid progress in terms of standardizing work and implementing global best practices. In many cases, we found that we weren't properly staffing our factories or addressing bottlenecks systematically. Through GPS, we have been able to address these and increase our outputs nicely. We target 50 basis points of improvement from GPS every year and have been delivering that or more. However, given the operating challenges over the past couple of years, these improvements have helped to offset the disruptions from raw material supply and COVID-19-related inefficiencies.
We are confident that our GPS system is making sustainable improvements to our operating results today and will continue in the future. When I joined Gates, we had partially deployed an in-region, for-region strategy, and we're still shipping quite a bit of product between regions. Through the significant investments that we made in 2017 to 2019, as well as other smaller focused investments since then, we've deployed our in-region, for-region strategy. With the exception of some niche products, each of our regions is now fully capable to produce our core PT and FP products. These investments served us well during the pandemic, both in terms of somewhat mitigating the need to ship finished goods around the world, but also by providing the added benefit of enabling us to rapidly flex capacity and support the significant above market growth we've been delivering.
I know it's not news to anyone in this room, but sourcing supply chains have been very volatile over the past several years. Even before COVID-19 hit, we have been working in three key areas to improve our supply chain optionality. Oops, sorry. The first one is around identifying and qualifying alternative sources with a significant focus on our most constrained materials. We also put concerted effort into making sure that each of our regions were able to source materials from within their region. Today, approximately 82% of our spend is sourced in region for region. Where it has made sense, we've also went as far as insourcing certain components or materials into our own factories to better control our own destiny. As part of our Eco-Innovation efforts, we also leveraged our material science capabilities. This effort also improved our ability to support demand.
Our teams have been able to develop a number of alternative material compounds that perform better, are more environmentally friendly, and sometimes cost less, and in general are more readily available than some of the materials we have traditionally used. Furthermore, we put a strong emphasis on standardizing our raw material supply and manufacturing processes, both to support in-region capability, but also to make sure we could harmonize around the globe product standards. Leveraging global knowledge allows us to improve every region at the same rate. While we have not been able to offset all of the obstacles we have faced, through these focused efforts, we have significantly improved our availability to source materials and to continue to service our customers today, and this will certainly serve us well into the future. Here we go. Okay.
Tom introduced Eco-Innovation in his section and described how we're delivering improved product performance to our customers. Eco-Innovation is equally important in terms of the benefits to our operations. By taking this integrated approach of looking at materials, product design, and process engineering simultaneously, we've been able to derive a number of improvements inside our own four walls. I'll talk about some of these in more detail in the following examples, but through these efforts, we're making significant improvements to reduce waste, greenhouse gas emissions, water, and energy consumption. Here's a great example of how innovation has improved our products and our operations. I know you've heard from Ivo, Tom, quite a bit about our MXT product line. What we did here was to engineer new materials and a proprietary wire reinforcement manufacturing process. This resulted in a product line that provides a number of customer benefits.
From a manufacturing perspective, this innovation uses less polymer. It also uses less wire reinforcement and has a higher throughput per unit of manufacturing floor space. It requires fewer people per unit output on an equivalent legacy than the equivalent legacy hoses. All significant improvements. Another example. This slide is a great example from power transmission. Micro-V belts represent a major portion of our power transmission portfolio. Legacy Micro-V constructions require a series of complex manufacturing steps to build up the thickness of the belt. Then, in the final step, about 27% of the material is ground away to form the ribs. As you can imagine, this consumes additional energy, and these ground away raw materials end up in landfills with no reuse. In our new high-efficiency Micro-V construction, we actually mold the rib in place. No grinding required.
This not only avoids wasting material, it also allows you to tailor, through the application of engineered materials, the performance of the belt. This improves belt performance across a number of applications. Through a combination of material advancements and product design, we were also able to make the belt thinner, which again uses less material and is more efficient in its end use. From a manufacturing perspective, we combined this advanced belt construction with a new high-speed manufacturing process. As a result, we're using significantly less power and raw materials, which supports our ESG goals. We also get significantly more output from the same floor space. Given the increased output, we've also been able to repurpose the legacy manufacturing lines to support new and other product areas, okay, without additional significant CapEx. A better product made in a more efficient way, advancing our competitive position to the market.
As I know you heard earlier, we're growing quite nicely from our mobility and Chain to Belt initiatives. In operations, we are working hard to make sure we have products and capacity to support these initiatives. To accomplish these objectives, we've been working on new synchronous belt technologies that check a number of boxes I've mentioned in the previous examples. These new products perform better, use more readily available raw materials, and are able to be made on our standard globally available manufacturing assets. Overall, through process and product innovation, we're able to more than double our daily output using less factory floor space, 90% less energy, and requiring less staffing, all fully aligned with our key company objectives and initiatives. Complexity reduction is important part of our overall operating model at Gates.
Back in 2017, when we really refreshed our innovation process, one of our big focus areas was on simplifying our portfolio under the skin. By this I mean finding ways to reduce the complexity that our operations see without really changing much of what the customer sees. Through Eco-Innovation, if you look at the core wire-braid hydraulic hose constructions I shared earlier, we've gone from 127 different build specifications to just 35 based on our portfolio of products in this area. The Micro-V's example I mentioned is similar where we're in the process of going from 20+ constructions to just a few. In V-belts, we're earlier in the portfolio refresh, but our roadmap has us going from 23 different V-belt families down to six. There's lots of opportunity here still on the below the skin part of complexity reduction.
Last year, we kicked off phase two of the process and are going after what we're calling above the skin initiatives. We've been deploying a number of analytical tools to go after optimizing our SKU and customer portfolio and developing targeted product strategies for select product, customer, and market segments. Brooks will talk more about how to expect this to flow through our financials. From an operation standpoint, we're targeting improvements in a number of areas from this reduction in complexity, service levels, working capital, and margins, to name a few. To summarize quickly, we're driving continuous operational improvements through GPS. Our Eco-Innovation process is delivering significant improvements to our operations, improving our flexibility, reducing our capital intensity, and supporting our ESG efforts. The investments we're making in manufacturing technology are helping to accelerate new product introduction to support growth and improve our competitive market position.
Finally, we've been making progress on our complexity reduction efforts with much more still to come. Thank you. With that, I'll hand it over to Brooks.
Thanks, Walt. My name is Brooks Mallard. I'm the CFO for Gates. This is my first time being able to meet a lot of you in person. You know, the one thing that Zoom doesn't do justice for is how tall everyone is. I finally figured out who I have to look up to today, Deane. That's always good. I'm really excited to be here and deliver the financial message for Gates. If we start on page 67, we delivered a strong performance in 2021 while managing through significant volume increases as well as inflation, supply chain, and production input availability issues. We made great progress on strengthening our balance sheet, and we expect this trend to continue with strong cash flow underpinning our capital deployment options.
Since the end of 2020, we've deployed about $400 million of capital on debt reduction. We've done two secondary offerings, and we've also done an authorization of a $200 million share buyback. Our balance sheet is in really good shape as we work our way through 2021. We will continue to fund internal organic investments and initiatives to support both growth and profitability. In addition, we will continue to deploy capital on share repurchases and debt reduction to contribute to earnings growth and free cash flow margin expansion. Finally, we're taking the opportunity to reaffirm our 2022 full year guidance that we issued on our Q4 earnings call. Moving to slide 68, which shows some of the highlights from our performance in 2021.
Core revenue growth of nearly 22% was well above market, driven primarily by new products and focused growth initiatives. In a very challenging operating environment, we delivered adjusted EBITDA margins of 21.2%, representing expansion of 310 basis points and mid-thirties incremental margins. Our strong operating performance resulted in adjusted earnings per share growth of 96% and free cash flow growth of 22%. Slide 69 lays out our performance over the past 3 years as well as our guidance for 2022. We have a consistent track record of above-market growth with a core revenue CAGR of 6% when using the midpoint of our 2022 guidance. In 2021, we began to see the acceleration of key secular trends, which our commercial initiatives are well-positioned to capitalize on, as well as an increase in new product adoption.
Turning now to profitability, the midpoint of our 2022 adjusted EBITDA guidance would imply an 8.5% CAGR over the same historical period. With the operational priorities Walt mentioned and our higher margin-focused commercial initiatives, we believe there's significant runway to drive future margin expansion. The midpoint of our 2022 adjusted earnings per share guidance implies a CAGR approaching 10% since 2019. We expect higher operating income will be the primary driver of this growth, with capital allocation actions potentially driving further earnings per share expansion. Moving now to slide 70, which provides some additional detail on our plans to achieve our 24% adjusted EBITDA margin target. As you've heard, our investment in product development is focused not only on higher margin products but also on optimizing their design for manufacturing efficiency.
We expect this focus, combined with related investments in process engineering, to provide margin tailwinds. You've also heard about our complexity reduction efforts, from which we expect to see meaningful savings. We believe these initiatives, combined with benefits from volume and ongoing GPS activities, provide us a path to our 24% target. These investments have already begun paying clear dividends, enabling our strong performance in 2021 and positioning us well for the future. On slide 71, you'll see more detail on complexity reduction as part of our broader goal to streamline the business. On the front end, which is order, sales, and customer interaction, some examples of the initiatives we are working through include service agreements, digital tool enhancements, value pricing, and focused selling efforts. We believe this will help drive revenue growth, gross margin expansion, and more efficient use of our SG&A dollars.
The above-the-skin complexity reduction initiatives include things like branding optimization, finish on demand, and SKU simplification. Two benefits we expect to see here are lower working capital levels and better free cash flow. By standardizing the supply chain, we expect to drive additional revenues as well as lower freight and distribution costs. Some examples include standardized order quantities and segmented lead times. Lastly, we continue to work on standardizing our back-office function. We currently have two shared service centers, one in Poland and one in Mexico. We will continue to expand our capabilities in both of these locations. In addition, we will continue to enhance our system and digital tools to automate transactional processes. This will drive back-office efficiency and lower SG&A costs. Moving to slide 72, which provides an overview of cash flow and capital efficiency.
The ongoing capital needs of our business are relatively low, with maintenance requirements in the range of 1%-1.25% of sales. As revenue grows, we believe we will continue to improve our organic capital spend efficiency. We believe our business has demonstrated its cash-generating capabilities through the cycle, and we have initiatives in place to drive improvements in working capital efficiency. Cash generation also drives our strong returns on invested capital, which have typically been in the 20% or better range. Both free cash flow and return on invested capital have the potential to benefit in tandem with future gross debt reductions. On slide 73, you'll see an overview of our current capital structure and the significant reduction in net leverage, making progress toward our new goal of getting below 1.5x EBITDA to debt.
In looking at the tranches of our debt, the majority appears to be floating. However, we've entered into derivatives to synthetically increase our percentage of fixed rate debt, which is currently 75% through June 2023. Thereafter, approximately 60% through at least June 2025. Because of this dynamic, we would expect interest rate increases to have a minimal impact on the business. With respect to ratings, we were upgraded by Moody's just a few weeks ago, bringing their rating more in line with S&P. This can have benefits for our overall debt cost as we look to optimize what we believe is a strong and flexible balance sheet. Moving now to slide 74 and an overview of our capital deployment strategy, which we believe reflects a balanced approach to investing in growth, returning capital to shareholders, and reducing our interest costs.
We expect to generate roughly one and a half billion dollars of deployable free cash flow over the midterm, and we believe that delivers a path to our midterm earnings per share target of $2 per share on an organic basis alone. Any potential M&A, which continues to be a capital allocation priority, would augment the path to that target. Quickly on slide 75, you'll see the full year outlook for 2022. We provided this during our Q4 earnings call, and earlier, I reaffirmed this guidance. Finally, on page 76, in looking at our updated and now current midterm targets. We believe we've positioned the business to deliver sustainable above market growth, which we're reflecting in our mid-single digit organic growth target.
As I've discussed, we believe our initiatives, combined with a normal benefit from volume, give us line of sight to our adjusted EBITDA margin target of 24%, and that $2 of adjusted earnings per share is achievable entirely on an organic basis. We remain committed to 100% free cash flow conversion. In addition, we are introducing a new target of improving free cash flow margin to the mid-teens range, driven by improvements in profitability and working capital as well as reduced interest cost. We're also increasing our return on invested capital target from 20%-25% and believe we have already demonstrated good progress toward that goal. Finally, given our rapid pace of deleveraging and expected cash generation, we're now targeting net leverage below 1.5x.
We believe these targets are achievable given the capital we can deploy and will support the creation of significant value for shareholders. With that, I'll turn it back over to Ivo to wrap things up.
Okay, thank you everyone for your time. I think what we're gonna do now is just jump right into Q&A, as we're getting close to the end of the session. Although it would cut into the cocktail hour slightly, the team is happy to stick around and keep the Q&A going past 5:00 P.M. Certainly, if there are any of you that need to leave, we understand that. We would just ask that you wait until a microphone makes it to you so that everyone has the benefit of hearing your question. Again, those of you on the webcast, please feel free to submit your questions through the webcast functionality. We'll start right here.
Hi. Good evening. Jamie Cook from Credit Suisse. Just wanted to get some more color on sort of the M&A strategy. I thought it was interesting you said when you looking at the opportunities, I think 75% was overseas, I guess, which sort of surprised me. And then 75% of the M&A opportunities were also in diversified industrial, which maybe doesn't surprise me as much. Just trying to understand whether we're trying to rebalance the portfolio to diversified industrial, and then why overseas when the portfolio in terms of geographic mix seems fairly balanced today. Thank you.
Yeah, Jamie, thank you for the question. Look, we see the opportunities of kind of the mid-size companies, more of the bolt-on type nature of acquisitions to be available, you know, in places like Europe, Germany, Italy, and locations such as that. We've had a tremendous amount of engagement with potential sellers over the last several years, and we have been developing those relationships. We believe that the opportunity is there for us to be able to add to our portfolio, add to that capability, and bolster our capability in Europe in particular, to advance our agenda vis-à-vis diversified industrial applications.
Thank you. It's Deane Dray with RBC. Appreciate your hosting this in person. It's nice to see everyone three-dimensionally, and I would have been fine combining the cocktail hour with Q&A, but you know, so be it. So question on the new debt leverage target. It just strikes me as more conservative than I would have expecting. 'Cause you've already proven yourself to be good managers of capital. You paid down six months ahead of time. I would have expected a bit of a range, especially since you've got M&A ambitions and the ability to say, "Hey, we will flex up," and maybe that's part of it.
when you give a point estimate of 1.5 or below 1.5, it seems a little bit more rigid than having a flexible balance sheet, but maybe you could clarify that, please. Thanks.
Yeah. What I would say is, look, you know, we think given our capital deployment options in terms of debt pay down and share repurchase and how much cash we're gonna generate over time, even with doing some things on the M&A side and some things maybe on the share repurchase side, you know, we feel pretty confident in that 1.5 times number. I would say also, you know, we're trying to look at this on a balanced perspective and while, you know, certainly M&A is a priority, it's kind of an unknown.
We're trying to provide, you know, provide that glide path where people say, "Wow, you know, even if they do M&A and even if they do share repurchase, they're still generating cash and improving profitability," so that we're gonna continue to get ourselves in position where we're as good as, if not better than the industrial peer group. That's really the target we wanna get to. We wanna be with everybody else who's in our peer group, and we wanna be as good or better than them from a leverage perspective. Ivo, I don't know if you have anything else.
Andy Kaplowitz, Citigroup. Ivo, you kept your margin target basically the same, but you've got all these initiatives that you've, you know, sort of laid out today. When we think about incremental margins, is it still sort of that 35%-40%? You know, can you do better than that in a normalized environment? And maybe, you know, Brooks reiterated the guidance for the quarter, for the year, but, you know, you talked about green shoots and material availability the last time we talked to you, and now of course we have Russia-Ukraine, so maybe you can update us on sort of what you're seeing.
Thanks, Andy. Look, a lot to unpack in there. Let me, you know, let me start with maybe some of the material availability issues. As I stated in my Q4 earnings call, we certainly see green shoots in what is happening vis-à-vis material availability. We think that the situation is getting better. We believe that probably it will require us exiting Q1 into Q2 before we actually have materials more readily available at our sources of manufacture. We still have some challenges to overcome getting the material to the point of consumption at the time that we need the material. But we definitely see a greater availability.
When we have spoken about our guidance for 2022, you know, maybe some Freudian sense, we you know, we were looking at each other as a management team and says, "Look, if there's one thing that we know, it is that we don't know what the next unknown is going to come forward and that we will have to deal with." I think that you know, it's kind of proving to be the case where you have some upside on certain things, and then you have some impediments that you are dealing that have been introduced, frankly, post setting the guidance.
Where we sit today, as Brooks outlined, we still believe that our guidance is rightly set and that we have a line of sight to be able to deliver what we have committed to the marketplace here. Now, vis-à-vis leverage and incrementals. Look, you know, we have stated that in a normalized environment, our incrementals will be in a kind of the 35% plus or minus range. You know, we believe we have a tremendous amount of opportunity, as Walt and Brooks both outlined, in reducing some of the complexity. Walt has outlined some of the tremendous innovation that we are driving in our manufacturing organization and manufacturing processes.
We believe as we are driving the adoption of these new products, we do have a confidence that we will be able to deliver that 35±% of incremental revenue leverage and incremental revenue, getting to a degree of some resemblance of normalcy in terms of inflationary pressure. Now, we certainly don't expect inflation to get any easier in 2022. We didn't expect it when we were setting the guidance. You know, we've got to be forward-leaning as more challenges come forward. We are ready, and we'll be dealing with them to address them.
Hi. Hi, Mike Halloran with Baird here. You know, you look at all the things you guys showcased today, whether it's Chain to Belt, mobility, electric vehicles, you know, these are much higher growth rates relative to the historical growth rates of the portfolio. Maybe talk a little bit about the competitive dynamics you're seeing. Are you seeing competitors go as hard at this space as you are? And more broadly, how are the win rates looking here in some of these areas versus maybe what they would have looked like in the more traditional markets?
Yeah. I think it's a great question, Mike. Look, let me take it one by one in here. Let me start with mobility. I think that you see an incredible amount of enthusiasm about what's happening, and I think that Tom might have used, if I'm not incorrect in his prepared remarks, that we are transitioning from being a niche participant to a mainstream supplier. That's simply because folks are now pulling on our technology. You're right. We have highlighted a pretty robust growth rate of 30%+ in mobility, and it very quickly scales up from a reasonable, reasonably sizable base into the $500 million plus or minus in the midterm.
It's a very accretive to our growth rate. We are very positive about that. We have a very robust pipeline of opportunities. Frankly, I think that the statement somebody else has maybe in one of the presentations says, "Look, now customers are calling us rather than us calling the customers and trying to demonstrate the validity of our technology." We are well-positioned there, and we believe that obviously, that's something that is absolutely attainable over the midterm. When I take a look at Diversified Industrial segment of our business, we are also very enthusiastic about what's out there, both from our product segments. We've spoken a little bit about the opportunity in diversified industrials with fluid power or hydraulics.
Look, a vast majority of industrial automation has hydraulic systems on them, and that bodes well for us. As people continue to build out greenfield factories, we have the opportunity to convert our latest technology against entrenched competitors, we believe that we are gonna deliver a nice growth rate in hydraulics. When it comes to power transmission, we believe that we are slightly behind personal mobility in terms of driving the adoption of Chain-to-Belt technology. We also believe that it now resonates much more robustly when we talk to somebody that is running a food and beverage plant or that is running a pharmaceutical plant as an example, where we offer true differentiated value, cleanliness, energy efficiency, and by the way, no maintenance. You get economic benefits in addition to ESG benefits.
People are starting to recognize that. We believe as we scale up our front end and as we get some of the technologies developed, or complete the development of, we should see very positive trajectory. We are being, I think, more realistic about how fast we can scale Chain to Belt in industrial, but also very positive dynamics. We have a very strong pipeline of opportunities, and we keep driving those opportunities. Frankly, there is no other competitor other than unconventional competitor being an industrial chain. That's unique. I think that's unique for an industrial company where we can cross that schism of, hey, look, technology that offers better performance in a nontraditional market that we have historically not been able to participate.
We're very excited about it, and we think that, you know, we have set a reasonably good growth rate that we can deliver on. We've got to complete our development of technology and complete scaling up the manufacturing capabilities on those. Electrification, I'm hoping that we have delivered a compelling story of why Gates has a massive opportunity with electrification. As Tom highlighted, we're gonna be very disciplined in automotive to continue to capitalize on where we believe we can play offense, and that's in the replacement side of our business. That's the 75% of the revenue that we generate from that market. That is a little bit further out there because we need to get that electrified propulsion devices out into the marketplace, and then they need to age.
We got a little bit of a time. Great, exciting opportunity. We will continue to grow our presence in that market segment through traditional applications, but the big, large opportunity for us to execute on is maybe 10, 15 years out, right? You know, that kind of normalizes your growth rates. I think that we are well-positioned. We're also pragmatic about the fact that, you know, there's something that's gonna happen that we are not foreseeing today.
You know, frankly, we don't wanna be in a situation that I stand here or I have the opportunity to stand here three years from now and it says, "Yeah, this is the litany of reasons why we didn't deliver on our targets." Look, I'm very proud of the targets that we have delivered on our 2019 set of objectives, and we believe that we have demonstrated that we can deliver, and we can continue to deliver that level of performance or slightly greater level of performance than we did in the last three years. We had a really tough market environment if you think about that. I hope that that answered your question.
Thank you. Hi, Jerry Revich, Goldman Sachs. Nice to see you. First, I'm wondering if you could talk about the free cash flow targets that you laid out, and just bridge us from the company's historical free cash conversion to the outlook, because, you know, in the past, the cost structure and margin profile that you've enjoyed has been higher level of inventories and receivables, which has driven the volatility. Can you just talk about how you're managing those aspects? Ivo, a question from an off-highway standpoint, what's the opportunity to leverage the electrification products that you've laid out here in those applications where you can actually get, you know, higher than automotive margins? Thanks.
Yeah. First on the cash flow conversion and on the free cash flow margins, you know, kind of three things, right? One is, you know, we've come off, you know, two or three years of, you know, cash taxes versus GAAP taxes that have been kind of
You know, we've improved the profitability of the company pretty dramatically, and that's you know caused us to do something with valuation allowances, which have helped our GAAP taxes, and we think that's gonna normalize over time, and that's not gonna be you know a headwind in terms of your cash conversion number. I think secondly, you know, as we look at the opportunity set on the complexity reduction and what we're gonna do with supply chain and inventory management, you know, we think we have a great opportunity to improve our working capital significantly you know over the midterm. That's clearly gonna help drive some improved cash flow numbers.
Then lastly, you know, we're gonna continue to pay down some of our higher cost debt and reduce our cash interest over time. That's certainly gonna help us de-lever the business toward our target of being below 1.5 times. That's gonna help our free cash flow margins. I think those are the three things that we're really, you know, looking at to bridge us. I mean, the profitability is obviously, you know, gonna improve over time, and that's gonna drop through as well. When you look at the three things more from a capital deployment balance sheet perspective, those are the three things that are gonna help us continue to improve over the midterm. Okay. I'll let you do the other one.
I would be remiss if I didn't say that we have a tremendous opportunity with working capital, and I think that we have highlighted our objectives and our work streams that are now targeting the working capital reductions as well, you know, particularly associated with both below and above the skin reduction of complexity. We feel pretty good about that too. Look, you know, electrification on heavy-duty applications, whether or not it is on-highway and off-highway. Let me kind of maybe highlight on-highway. I know you ask off-highway application, but on-highway applications, I believe that we are the market leader today in battery cooling technology in the on-highway applications. Those are companies that are out there today that are actually developing platforms, and we are present on those platforms. We have that business. We have ramped that business.
What I can tell you is that when we talk about a content on a passenger vehicle in battery cooling to be kind of in the $300 range, that content on on-highway is 2X. You know, it is yet even different level of opportunity to drive our presence, leadership, and revenue growth well into the future. We're quite excited about that opportunity as well. Again, you know, one of the things that we wanna impart on everybody is that those things will take time to ramp up. These electrified platforms are reasonably small in numbers, but we are present there. We are helping our customers to ramp those up.
We do have a question on the webcast here. Brooks, this looks like this would be for you. Have you included any capital allocation impact, M&A or share repurchases, in your $2 EPS target?
Yep. For M&A, we have not. For share purchases, we have. You know, we looked at some different bands and ways of looking at capital allocation, but we definitely believe that share repurchases is gonna be part of our capital allocation strategy as we move forward. Well, as well as M&A, but we looked at it on more of an organic basis, I think, to say, "This is where we can get to, you know, purely on an organic basis and what we can do, I think, within the four walls of Gates.
Okay. Looks like we're good. Well, thanks again, everyone, for coming here in person and for those of you who committed the time to watch online. We appreciate your interest, and we have cocktails ready to go right outside these doors.
This is important. Good job.