Okay, I think we're ready to get started here. Welcome, everybody. I'm Roger Read, Wells Fargo Senior Analyst, covering a lot of the energy sector, and I say a lot because other than pipes, that's pretty much me. So, Energy Services, which is one of the areas we have, Chart Industries, and Jill Evanko, President and CEO of Chart Industries, here with us this morning. I'm not going to go into a whole lot more on my introductions, but I will turn it over to you, Jill, and I think you wanted to start us off with a presentation, a brief presentation of the company and the recent Investor Day, and then we'll do a few Q&A pieces.
Awesome. Good morning, everybody, and thanks, Roger, for having us this morning. We thought we'd spend just a few minutes giving a quick overview of the company, and then we'll go into Q&A with Roger. So, moving on to the presentation that is also located on our intranet, if you want to look at that. I'm starting on the slide that says, "Powering the Nexus of Clean." In summary, when you talk about our company, there are a few things that are the key takeaways and differentiators for Chart. The first being that we design, engineer, and manufacture all the mission-critical equipment that go into the molecule-agnostic nature of our company. So, what that means is we're able to serve a variety of different end markets without having to change our engineering capabilities or our manufacturing capabilities. And I'll talk about that in a few slides here.
In addition to that, the variety of different end markets that we are able to serve range from industrial gas to traditional oil and gas to LNG, hydrogen, helium, carbon capture, water treatment, so you can get the breadth of those end markets while not having, again, to change our manufacturing capabilities. We have four segments, which are shown in the upper left-hand side of slide five, and I'd point out the fact that we have over 30% of our revenue in Repair, Service, and Leasing , or RSL, which is aftermarket, so that allows us to have profitable growth throughout a cycle, and we've increased that over the course of the last eight years from 0% of our revenue to where we sit today, as you can see on this slide. We operate in multiple different regions and countries.
We have 64 new-build manufacturing facilities and over 50 service centers, which allow us to be close to our customers and also serve their needs in the respective regions where we see larger projects beginning to occur. We serve these needs with over 1,500 engineers, and over 35% of our workforce, of our 11,700 team members around the world, have an engineering background. So, that's really important when you talk about getting early with customers and early on projects, because multiple times and multiple cases we get specced in for the engineering nature of these types of projects. And then finally, what I'd point out on this slide is that we do have multiple patents and trademarks. Over 85% of our portfolio has intellectual property associated with it. I talked a little bit already about the evolution in the last 10 years.
You can see on slide six the evolution from 2015 to our current state. And there's a few things to point out here, the first being the aftermarket component of the business, which is now over 30% and has gross margins as a percent of sales at 43%, 44% consistently across the board, so above the company average gross margin. In addition to that, we've been able to increase our earnings margin, our EBITDA margin, over that period of time, not only as a result of the aftermarket component of the business, but moving to full solution offering, meaning that we have process technologies as well as the equipment, so we're able to sell the full solution, or our customers can choose to treat our product portfolio as an à la carte menu.
Through that process, we have been able to also implement Chart Business Excellence, which is something that we implement with Kaizen, with Six Sigma, and multiple different what we call self-help activities. And we continue to see the opportunity for additional margin expansion ahead as a result of the CBE activities that we have underway. And we've pruned and added to the portfolio over the last 10 years, and you can really see that delta at the bottom of slide six. So, we have a lot of activities that are specific to Chart that give us the differentiators that I've already described. We also are the beneficiaries of multiple macro and secular tailwinds. You can see that on slide seven. The number one thing I would point to is the increasing need for energy. So, you have energy intensity, energy security, energy access.
All of these themes are consistent over the last few years and growing. When I say growing for energy intensity, I'd point to something like artificial intelligence and the increasing drive for hyperscalers in data centers. As that continues to grow, that continues to drive the need for more access to energy, and we're very well positioned to serve multiple different facets of the energy current state as well as the energy transition ahead. In addition to that, the bottom row on slide seven is showing the aftermarket or the aging infrastructure, and we also are able to serve that through not only our service capabilities, but also our aftermarket spares and new build coming into the aging infrastructure, so when we think about ourselves on slide eight, you can see multiple different competitive advantages that we have. I'll point out a few here.
The first I would point out is around our R&D and the activities that 35% of our workforce works on a regular basis with over 100 new product development projects in play at any given point in time, and that allows us to be first to market in multiple different aspects for primarily technology and first of a kind. You'll hear us talk about that on a regular basis. Customers come to us for that. They come to us with an idea, and then we work with them through the design phase, and in that design phase is where they make the decision for the mission-critical equipment that goes into their solution. We're able to serve them all in one place, so the full solution capabilities are in-house at Chart, and in conjunction with that, the certifications and regulations for handling molecules are very intense.
We are a leader in certifications. We're a leader in safety, safety being our number one priority. We ended the third quarter with our lowest quarterly total recordable incident rate in the company in our history, and we're very proud of that. We're also proud to be an industry leader in setting safety and certifications for molecule handling. Then finally, I'd point out our flexible manufacturing strategy. I commented on our 64 new build facilities that we have around the world. In those facilities, nearly all of our products we make in more than one location. That allows our customers to have flexibility. It allows us proximity to their projects. It allows us to make strategic decisions on where we make what and also be very conscious of continuing to drive profitable growth in the cost choices that we make.
When we talk about this flexibility and the flexible manufacturing and my opening comments around the fact that we do not have to change our manufacturing capabilities to serve this variety of end markets that we hit, this slide is a great example of such. So, if you look at some of our core products that are shown on the left-hand side of the slide, you can take a heat exchanger. So, if we take a brazed aluminum heat exchanger as an example, we are one of five companies in the world that can manufacture brazed aluminum heat exchangers. We are the only one in North America that manufactures brazed.
That's really important when you talk about things like made in America, talk about onshoring or reshoring, and activities when you have large projects such as LNG liquefaction projects where customers in the U.S. Gulf Coast are very interested not only in having made in America, but they're very interested in having something that's able to get to them very easily without additional cost to bring into the country. So, that's a great example of a product that originally was, in essence, only used in the oil field. Now that product is used in applications like hydrogen liquefaction, helium liquefaction. It's used in carbon capture. At certain times, it's used in applications all the way through to the water treatment side of the house. So, that's a great example where we did not have to do anything different in our manufacturing in order to serve a much broader set of end markets and a much wider addressable market or total addressable market size. The same goes on air coolers.
I remember back in 2019 when we acquired a company that manufactured air-cooled heat exchangers, and they primarily served the oil field. Now that is the same manufacturing facility that serves hyperscalers for data center applications for heat rejection with the exact same product and the exact same manufacturing. So, that's one of the key benefits of the company that we have around the fact that we're able to serve these end markets without having to go do something different from our core competencies, and you can see an example of that on this page here. This is our La Crosse, Wisconsin facility, which is the facility I was referring to, the only North American brazed aluminum heat exchanger manufacturing facility in the world. This facility also owns the world's two largest brazing furnaces.
So, that allows us also to serve larger projects as companies look to scale and put more and more capabilities at a site. And we're able to do that at our La Crosse, Wisconsin facility. We also manufacture brazed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we're seeing much opportunity for that Chart Business Excellence to be deployed in these facilities. We've already had friction stir welding, which is an automation of one of the steps in the process for brazing. We've had that deployed in the facility that you see up on the screen here. And starting in the first half of 2025, friction stir welding will be deployed in our Tulsa, Oklahoma facility as well. So, that's another great example of the self-help and our productivity actions that are underway for us to continue to expand margin not only in 2025, but also in the years ahead.
The aftermarket piece of the business is something we're very proud of, and we want to continue to grow. We believe we're in early innings of aftermarket growth with the combination of Chart and the Howden business that came together in the first quarter of 2023. You can see a few examples of aftermarket up on the screen here. From left to right, these are actually synergy stories between the two businesses that came together a couple of years ago. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see LNG fueling station service. So, as Chart, we provide new equipment to LNG fueling stations, and the customers really want us to be the company that monitors and services those fueling stations. Yet, as you can imagine, in a fueling station, if it goes down, the response time is super important.
Having the field service capability and technicians that we now have in Europe and in the U.K., we're able to take on those long-term service agreements with our LNG fueling station customers. In the middle of the page, you can see Opus One Winery. It's a customer for our Earthly Labs small-scale carbon capture technology. They recently added our digital Uptime offering to monitor their CO2 capture and the CO2 levels in that CCUS application. And then on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see another conference participant here, Cheniere, which is our LNG liquefaction customer on the new build side that has utilized our Tuf-Lite for new fan offering this past year to upgrade and optimize their Sabine Pass facility. We were able to meet their very quick timeframe as a result of having wind tunnel capabilities.
I do want to spend just a moment on some of our aftermarket or RSL segment statistics year-to-date through September 30th, 2023, compared to year-to-date 2023, September 30. So, 2024 versus 2023, pro forma for the combined company. If you look at orders, they're up 38% in the RSL segment year-to-date. Sales up 13%, and we've expanded gross margin by over 800 basis points in this particular segment. And as I said, this is early innings for the repair side of the business or the aftermarket side of the business. So, if you could see the slide up on the screen, you would see an install base of 450,000 units approximately, which we expect to have a CAGR of approximately 5%. We cover about 40% of our install base right now.
We anticipate that we can double that coverage, and there's multiple ways we can do that in the coming five to seven years. We have expanded our Africa region for service capabilities. You can see that on slide 13, and this hits multiple different opportunities in a region that is highly focused on service capabilities and aftermarket and spares. And I'll end my prepared comments on slide 14 around our capital structure. So, we are focused on our financial outcomes here in the coming year. At the end of 2025, we expect to be at approximately $3 billion of debt, which gets us into our target net leverage ratio range of two to two and a half times.
We're nearing the three mark right now, and we expect to exit 2025 with an optimized capital structure, which is the result of, in November, this past November 2024, we settled our seven-year convertible note at maturity. Then in December of 2025, we anticipate our 1% convertible, excuse me, our mandatory convertible preferred to settle on December 15th, 2025, into common equity. We do want to reiterate our financial policy that we will not do any material cash acquisitions or any share repurchases until we are in that target net leverage ratio range of two to two and a half, two to two and a half. In addition to that, this morning, we did release a share repurchase authorization that was approved by our board of directors as we had signaled at our Capital Markets Day on November 12th, 2024.
That is part of our capital allocation future look, and we look forward to achieving our sub two and a half net leverage ratio by the end of 2025 and looking ahead to further capital allocation on high ROIC activities. So, with that, let's move to Q&A, Roger.
All right. Well, thanks, Jill. And yeah, for the Investor Day, about a month ago, was really well done. Thought it helped quite a bit. A lot of different directions to go. We're all, I think, now calling it Trump 2.0. But when I think about Chart, you straddle both sides of this, right? There was a lot of benefits from the IRA, and then you're also one of the biggest suppliers of LNG equipment. So, we come into it, Trump's going to allegedly kill the IRA, probably not. And he's clearly going to lift the moratorium on the LNG export.
So, it's a broad area to talk about, but maybe just initially to start with kind of how you see the impacts first off on LNG, secondarily on the IRA, and then is there any part of the IRA more or less at risk relative to what it means to Chart?
Yeah. So, if you step back, one of the questions we had gotten pre-election was, what do the two outcomes mean to the company? And we were in a very and continue to be in a great position that we didn't see a material impact either direction on the business because of the nature of the fact that we are molecule agnostic and all of the things I just commented on about our capabilities to serve multiple end markets with that same manufacturing capacity that we have.
So, with that said, having Trump 2.0 on the LNG side of the house is a very strong positive for the company. We continue to be very bullish on LNG. We play in LNG in multiple different ways, ranging from what we call big LNG, so that's LNG liquefaction export facilities, to small-scale and floaters, to LNG infrastructure, meaning fueling stations, ISO containers, storage, things like that, all the way through to the aftermarket side, like I just described for our fans for Cheniere. So, with that said, we anticipate that having the LNG moratorium or pause lifted accelerates some of the activities that perhaps weren't happening in the last 11, 10, 11 months. But what I would also comment on is that LNG did not pause in 2024.
So, even with the pause in the United States, multiple different things continue to happen globally in the LNG market for all the reasons that we all know around LNG being a critical part of the energy story. On the other side of the molecule house, meaning things like the hydrogen applications, things like CCUS, what the IRA meant for that was a catalyst to more activity in the United States. But what I would point out on that is the IRA was announced in August of 2022. We're sitting here today in December of 2024, so two and a half years later, and there's still clarifications waiting to come out from the administration. So, this concept of something going away is really the concept of something that hadn't been distilled or clarified to date.
And so, we hadn't really seen this bullishness on some of the new energy end markets that people had anticipated from the IRA. I'm with Roger. I don't think it's going to be in full change. We'll see. We shall see. But with that said, we have this beautiful portfolio that allows us to pivot to the different end markets that are currently in vogue and that allows us to not have to do something different with the business because we serve all of these different molecules. But we do continue to see applications such as hydrogen happening outside of the U.S. So, the IRA being a very U.S. specific discussion, the hydrogen activity this year to date through September 30th, 2024, has been the strongest we've ever seen in Europe as an example. Canada is very strong. Asia-Pac is very strong.
So, we continue to see kind of the outcome being very similar to what we've seen the last couple of years on the front of clean energy globally, but also with this now further bullishness around the LNG end markets that we so critically serve.
Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, it kind of feels like instead of the hype now dealing with the actual brick and mortar of it, and it's not as much fun. It doesn't go as fast. Let's maybe a little more of the Trump 2.0. So, you mentioned the only and the largest brazed aluminum manufacturer here. Threat of tariffs. How, when you look at your business and you've got a global footprint, do you look at it and say, not a problem to work around it? There'll be some advantages. There'll be some disadvantages. What's the thought process there?
Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, I said in my last answer, right, to be determined. I think there's a lot of speculation around what that looks like. But ultimately, we have, over the course of the last six, seven years, spent a lot of time kind of trying to be prepared for pivoting. And some of that came as a result of the supply chain extremes that happened in 2021 and early 2022. So, what we would say is slight benefit as a whole in terms of us being very U.S. capable in terms of manufacturing. And to Roger's comment around the brazing side of the house being the only U.S. manufacturer has already served us very well, but we expect to continue to serve us well in this coming administration.
With that said, obviously, we are very conscious of the fact that we are a global manufacturer in our supply chain. We have put in place multiple different supply chains and supply sources, and that's something that we think is extremely important in terms of being able to pivot and be able to navigate things like potential tariffs and what that can look like. So, we feel very well positioned to be able to navigate what is ahead on the tariff side with the opportunity to take advantage of our flexible manufacturing that I commented on earlier of making almost everything that we make in more than one location around the world and also having multiple suppliers for everything that we supply.
A lot of our supply base is very regional as well, which I think is important to not only the tariff situation, but also to supply to lead times, which are mission-critical right now as we talk about things like more bullishness on LNG. So, lead times matter when you have a permit that extends to 2029, as an example in the case of Woodside Louisiana LNG, where there's a timeframe that mission-critical equipment has to be on the ground. So, all of that kind of rolls together around flexible manufacturing, the supply base being extremely navigable for us and also our U.S. manufacturing capabilities.
Thanks for that. Maybe pivot a little bit, the aftermarket business and show my own age a little bit, but when Chart IPOed about 20 years ago, I was involved in it, and the nature of the business was fire and forget, right?
Build a great piece of equipment, guy's going to use it forever, and you'll never see it again. So, you came in, that was one of the first things you changed, the Howden acquisition, obviously stepped that up quite a bit. How should we think about it from an investor standpoint? Why aftermarket matters? Like, what does it do other than provide some revenue growth and a consistent margin, right? How do you think about it strategically within the company and why do you want to double it over the next five to seven years?
Yeah. By the way, I think that's the best description I've ever heard of the 2020. You've been around long enough to eventually come up with something. Yeah, that was fantastic and extremely spot on, right? So, the business looks very different today than it did even 10 years ago.
We had that slide, I think it was slide six, that shows that evolution. I think it is extremely important around the fact that if you look at 2015, what you would see is us in a period where we had one large LNG project, which was Wheatstone and industrial gas, oil, and field. 2016 happens, oil and gas is on a down cycle, industrial gas is essentially stagnant, and Wheatstone project comes to an end. So, you have these really high peaks and really low troughs in the business. When we don't operate in that way, it is very difficult to do. What we looked to do was take advantage of the core portfolio that was extremely critical to these larger projects, but also extremely critical to multiple different end markets. How do we deploy that? Aftermarket is really the gem of this strategy.
Being at this 33% of our sales approximately in 2024 has given us not only visibility to the future, but also the opportunity to think through how are we going to double that coverage from 40%-80%. What does it mean when I say early innings on the aftermarket? Well, what it means is we have the opportunity to cover our install base that we don't even touch today on Chart Legacy products in Asia-Pacific, as an example. We touch very little of it in Europe. So, just being able to cover that gives us opportunity for further growth. There's multiple different tools that customers are looking for right now on the digital side of the house that ranges from e-commerce. I don't want to actually have to talk to a human.
I want to be able to go online, get my spare, and know where it's going to show up. Our salespeople are now equipped with an internal Chart tool that they're able to see if I'm going to customer A, customer A has this install base of Chart and Howden Legacy products, and that salesperson then has the capability to sell the aftermarket side of the house. So, those are just a few examples. But I want to really hit on Roger's question of what does that mean besides the opportunity to cover more, the opportunity to grow the aftermarket? It actually has a very strong kind of what I would call link to the new build side. Things like where a customer, actually the start, going from zero to 13% was what we did from 2018 to 2022, for example.
The start of that was customer saying, "Jill, we buy X millions of dollars of new build product from you, but we have to service it with 20 mom-and-pop shops. Why can't you service your own equipment?" And that's a great example where customers are pulling on that. They really want that. And so, the ability for us to say to a customer upfront that we can actually serve the life cycle of the product brings much more stickiness with that customer and also more order content at the outset of a project. Where we see further opportunity in this exact vein of discussion is around these larger LNG projects. So, historically, that wasn't something that we had a lot of service content or preventive maintenance content on.
But as our process technology for LNG, which is Integrated Pre-cooled Single Mixed Refrigerant or IPSMR, as our IPSMR has gained traction around the world, including our recently announced ExxonMobil Mozambique Rovuma acceptance and award, not yet in backlog, for their upcoming project, things like that have allowed our customers and Chart to say, "Hey, it's your technology, it's your equipment. So once the EPC is gone, then we really need you guys to be around this facility, this export terminal, and so on." So that gives us the capability to build upon the LTSA concept, the digital uptime, the monitoring. So all of these capabilities that we've added to the portfolio over the last few years now are coming together and coalescing with these larger projects.
In particular, I'm very excited about our service capability for these upcoming LNG liquefaction projects, essentially because of the scale and the length of time that comes with those types of LTSAs.
Maybe just a small follow-up on that. Doubling the business, does that require any major acquisitions? I mean, you can build some of it, I imagine, organically, but if you enter a new market, maybe it's a small kind of acquisition. What's the thought process around that?
Yeah. When we talk about doubling, we're talking about doubling our coverage base from the 40% of our current install base to our goal being the 80% coverage. It does not require any meaningful acquisitions. What we've lined out is actually an entire organic playbook, which I give to Roger. What that is, is really around many of the things that I just talked about.
So the capabilities that we have, it's coverage, it's getting there, it's having the stickiness with these customers. It's also covering competitors' equipment on spares and on service, which we're starting to see happen. This year is really the first time we're starting to see that happen. Certainly, certain geographies where we don't currently either have a footprint or have enough people on the ground, those are things that we can supplement over the coming years. But we can do that organically. The main opportunity here is not around footprint. It is around the e-commerce, the digital, the LTSAs, the ability to get sticky with the customers that we currently have, and just hitting the install base that we currently don't hit.
Great. I'm going to open it up if there are any questions, and we just ask that you wait for the microphone since this is a webcast.
You talked aftermarket's typically always better margins than, and you talked about that in your initial comments. But as you try to grow a coverage on the installed base, are you going to be able to maintain that aftermarket advantage versus the overall corporate?
The short answer is yes, absolutely. So the last couple of quarters, we have actually been above what our run rate margin in that segment has been. That was really the result of a couple of specific activities in the respective quarters with our customers. But we anticipate that through things like our pricing tools and multiple different kind of LTA-style agreements and LTSA-style agreements, that we'll be able to maintain the margin at that kind of 43%-45% for that segment as we grow.
Who do you consider your major competitors and what differentiates yourself?
So at the Chart top level, as a total company, we don't have a direct set of competitors. When you kind of get into the respective end markets or products, that's the way to think about our competitive base. I commented, and I'll pull off a few different examples just to give you a sense of what that means. I commented on the brazed. So there's four competitors globally. In terms of differentiation on that is the size of the furnaces, the U.S. content, the opportunity for the install base that we currently have. So things like that are really the differentiators in certain heat exchanger end markets. When you get into what I would call standard products, so book and ship style products, which would be your standard tanks for cryogenic services, trailers, things like that, those are more regional competitive sets.
So you would see in China, as an example, CIMC. In the European region, you would see competitors that are local, such as Aritas in the United States, would be like a Taylor-Wharton. So as you drill into that, that's the way to think about our competitive base. Where there's very strong differentiation for us is around our process technology side. Very little competition in certain processing gas-to-liquid of molecules. Clearly, it depends on the molecules, it depends on the end markets. But if you take modular LNG liquefaction, there's less than a handful of competitors that do that. And we're certainly, we think of ourselves as a market leader on the modular mid-scale side with the IPSMR technology. And the differentiations in something like that are around the amount of LNG that you can process.
Optimizing output for your operator, plot size, what equipment is required where, the ability to have that manufacturing for mission-critical be in your own control, so delivery capabilities and lead times. Then not to be left out, and this was on one of my eight differentiator slides, is this concept of being a first in the market leader in certifications. That is extremely unique and in some cases very unique to our industry where you can't just go into, and I'll pick on Korea as an example. You cannot go into Korea and say, "Hey, a Korean customer, please buy my bulk storage tank for hydrogen without it being certified by KGS, the Korean Gas Standard." We were the first to have our liquid hydrogen trailer be certified, and that took us about a year and a half to get done.
So when you think about entering certain markets and the competition that comes into those markets, there's more to the story than just, "Hey, I'm going to come in and I'm going to undercut you on price." You first and foremost have to be certified to serve that market. And that process is in new energy molecules, very embryonic, very new, and very lengthy in many locations. So that's just a kind of a, I could spend all day answering that question because there are so many different ways to think about our differentiation. But at the top level of the entire company, we do not have a competitive set.
I think we have one right here. And just FYI, we're down to a minute, so the question better be quick.
Or the answer.
So it seems like you're on a journey from being just asset-heavy to being a blend of asset-heavy and asset-light, being digital. Usually, that entails having different buyers at the end points and also having different skill sets internally to pull this off. Can you just talk about what you're doing to fill those two points?
So the digital side of the house is something that we really see as a customer pull point, and the customers are asking for the capability to monitor. They want that to be done by the new build manufacturer as well. So the capability itself is already embedded in the majority of our products. There's still some activities that we have to do, and they're underway right now of bringing that capability to monitor certain things like a leak in a heat exchanger, as an example.
So those activities are actually very well embedded in the current engineering team. But what we've done on the other resource side is we have actually set up two things in the organization. So this is an org structure, but it also serves the back end and the bones of our digital offering. So we actually have a digital team. There's an engineering side of that, and then there's an actual IT side of that. That digital team works very closely with the sales team and the operational team so that they're getting real-time feedback and incorporating it into the offering. That's been set up in the last 18 months, so that's fairly new, that group. But they came through our Howden acquisition. And then the other piece of that answer is around our capabilities on engineering and linking and the actual monitoring and having that field service capability.
We need to further take that to the next step. So we have the service techs and we have the field service capability. But now what we need to do, and we're in the process of doing, and this is what I would say is a journey, is the cross-training element of those field service folks because some of this is very specialized on the weld side. And so that's the piece that we're working on right now. I am happy to talk offline, but Roger's given me the hook. So thank you, Roger, for having us today.
Yeah, thank you, Jill. Thank you, everyone.