All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started. Really appreciate everybody joining us here, both in the room and virtually, and welcome to Solstice inaugural Investor Day. I'm Mike Leithead, Head of Investor Relations for Solstice. We're excited to host you here at the Nasdaq Market Site in New York City. It's great to see so many familiar faces here in the room, and welcome to those of you who joined on the webcast. Today, you'll get a deep dive into our company, what differentiates us, and our growth prospects moving forward. You'll also have the opportunity to ask questions and spend time with our leadership team during the reception.
Those of you here in person will have already noticed that we have several exhibits showcasing our technology and key applications, and we have subject matter experts available to discuss and walk you through them as we go through the day. Some of the leadership you will hear from today: David Sewell, our President and CEO; Tina Pierce, our Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Dormo, our SVP of Refrigerants and Applied Solutions; Simon Mawson, SVP of Electronics and Specialty Materials; and Wiley Clark, our Chief Development Officer. Now the fun part of my job. Today's webcast and presentation materials, including non-GAAP reconciliations, will be available on Honeywell's Investor Relations website after today's session.
Our discussion today will include forward-looking statements that are based on our best view of the world and our businesses as we see them today, and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the ones described in our SEC filings. Just a few housekeeping items. Please silence your phone and save your questions for the moderated Q&A session that we'll have at the end. For safety, exits are here in front of you, and the security team's on the floor to help us in case of any emergencies. With that, we'll start with a short video to introduce everybody to Solstice.
Solstice Advanced Materials is born from a unifying purpose: to propel our customers forward, to set the pace of progress. Building on over a century of breakthroughs and the collective wisdom of Honeywell and AlliedSignal, we rise together with precision and an unwavering drive to transform the essential into the exceptional. Our new identity marries the bold red of Honeywell and the intelligent blue of AlliedSignal to create a new signature color, Solstice Purple. Inspired by the dynamic relationship between the Earth and the Sun during the Solstice, our logo reflects our collaborative nature and dynamic ways of working. Every day, we work with our customers to develop scalable innovations that deliver real-world impact. From our refrigerants that keep food fresh and ballistic protection fibers that save lives, to healthcare packaging that ensures medication stays effective, and semiconductor materials that help the world stay connected.
Powered by the brightest minds in advanced materials, we are building a new company rooted in shared values and ambitious goals. No matter how complex the challenge, we move swiftly to seize new opportunities and bring the future into focus, helping you lead the way and create a more resilient world. Advancing science for smarter outcomes. Solstice Advanced Materials.
With that, it's my great pleasure to turn the stage over to our President and CEO, David Sewell.
Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here today and your interest in Solstice. We could not be more excited about the future of this company and everything that comes with it. Ironically, it was one year ago today that Honeywell announced the spin of Solstice, and it's so nice to see it all come to fruition here on this stage at Nasdaq. I'm confident that, as an independent company, this will be a leading specialty materials business in our sector. We are truly going to be a differentiated company. We have a unique value proposition with a clear right to win. We have a 130-year history with solving complex challenges that our customers face every day.
What's even more exciting is the industries in which we are associated and sell into are undergoing a very strong secular growth movement. We have innovations in advanced computing, in AI, thermal management, advanced nuclear energy, and innovative healthcare solutions. All of these solutions are exciting for us to go to market with totally differentiated technologies and a strong intellectual property platform. We also recognize, with the history of what we have wi th Honeywell, we want to embrace everything that comes with it, but recognize, as a standalone company, we want to have the nimbleness of a startup that's needed for an innovation company. We are building an operating model to do just that, to ensure that we have the rigor and discipline to be that growth and innovation company that we want to be moving forward. We also go to market with a very strong balance sheet.
With leverage of 1.5 x, great cash flow, and strong financial rigor, we know we are positioned to be flexible and to invest in the growth areas that we want to grow in as a standalone company. Perhaps what underpins all of that is our people. This is the secret sauce to our business. We have a depth of personnel that understands technologies, markets, and most importantly, deep customer relationships. This team has been with our customers for many times , decades, to help them solve the biggest challenges that they're facing so they can innovate, and we partner with them in their success. A brief overview of Solstice as a standalone company: we bring substantial scale with close to $4 billion in sales and 4,000 employees worldwide.
We will go to market in two reportable segments: our refrigerants and applied solutions business, which will be our largest, as well as our electronics and specialty materials business. It's a very global business. We sell into over 120 countries and territories around the world, and we serve a very diverse end-market base, which gives us a great diversity and resiliency in many types of macroeconomic environments. To strengthen the position of our relationships, we align with blue-chip customers that are leaders in their space. We work on, in many x, multi-year development projects, understanding where that market needs to be in the future and that we can support them with game-changing technologies. Because when our customers win, we will win with them. If you look at the history of our company, it's been around for 130 years.
In an interesting twist of history, Allied Chemicals, which is a foundation of Solstice, was headquartered right across the street here at One Times Square. It's nice to see it come full circle from where we started to where we now are going to unleash this growth potential as a standalone company. Something else I'd note is Advanced Materials, which is now Solstice, was a company in a division within Honeywell that was a standalone since 2016. This has been a very clean split. It wasn't some smaller businesses being thrown together at the end. This company has been operating as a standalone unit. We have the depth of experience, the crossover of people, and a very clean split as we span into our new company. We just couldn't be more excited for the future and what this is going to bring with our portfolio brands.
You can see the growth that we've had since being a standalone company. If you look at our financial background, it's a very strong financial profile. With a 4.4% CAGR from that time in 2016, which has basically been all organic growth through some very interesting macroeconmic times , such as COVID, it's been resilient. Not only with that resilience of growth, it's had market-leading margins, and it's had market-leading returns on the capital in which they invest. This is a company that knows where to invest capital to get the best returns to ensure they're investing in the right programs. With that growth profile, that margin profile, and that return on invested capital, we believe this is a profile of a company that can now go on its own and really accelerate the success of which they've achieved. As I mentioned, it's a diverse product mix.
It's also a very diverse customer base. What's so interesting about this business, as I've continued to talk to customers and employees in our manufacturing sites, is the relationships they have to develop these technologies to solve these problems. It opens up tremendous market opportunities in other sectors. When we solve this problem with a new, innovative, IP-protected technology, we can take it to another industry to help them solve that problem. That's where continued growth will continue to come from with these adjacencies there. As I mentioned, it's very diverse from a global standpoint in the markets in which we serve. Obviously, the largest market being the United States, but still very prevalent around the world. It's a diverse customer base. Our largest customer is less than 3% of our sales, and then you can see the diversity with over 3,000 customers around the world.
Part of that strategy for us is ensuring we're manufacturing where our customers need us to be. They need that assurance of supply. We need to innovate locally where our customers are, where the trends are happening. We have 24 manufacturing sites around the world. We also want to make sure that we are well protected should there be any sort of geopolitical environment with tariffs. In the United States, 90% of our sales are manufactured in the United States. Internationally, 60% of our sales are manufactured in the countries in which we operate. What's also really important about that is assurance of supply. Our customers are making critical materials, and our ability to service them every time with the highest quality is crucial. That 96% customer satisfaction score is so important to us, and we want to continue to get better and better and better.
We need to partner with our customers so they rely on us as a top-tier supplier for their innovation needs. With that is also the importance of safety. That is at the cornerstone of everything we do. We obviously deal with some very dangerous materials, and that safety for our employees and the environments in which we work is always top of mind. That top quartile performance is always going to be something we want to achieve. I mentioned our people, and I'm really excited to have several of our leadership team here today to speak to you and tell you about their businesses and the opportunities in front of us. The entire leadership team is here today, and I'm really excited to have them because of that depth of experience.
They know the markets, they know our customers, they know the industries, and they know the expertise in which they bring, whether it be manufacturing, supply chain, commercial marketing, or R&D. What's even more exciting, in addition to this, is the depth of the entire workforce. Hopefully, you've had a chance to go through some of our product displays. We have many 30-year employees there. They are so excited about the opportunity in front of us. They've been working with our customers for so long. They've been developing these innovations, and they can't wait to get started as a new company as Solstice. As we become a new company, how do we unleash this value? How do we create this growth mentality? We see this in several manners. The first is we believe we're at the inflection point of several attractive markets with these secular growth trends.
These are markets that are growing in and around the world. Not only are they growing, we have an amazing amount of experience within these markets, and we have leadership positions in these markets, and we have leading brands in these markets. This enables us to develop a strategy as an independent company with an operating model that ensures we have the rigor and discipline to ensure we are investing in the right areas, we are growing at the speed that we want to grow in, developing the next generation in innovations is going to be critical for us to continue to differentiate in the marketplace. As that standalone company, ensuring that capital deployment in the best possible manner for our customers, for our shareholders, and for our growth initiatives is going to be vital.
That operating model that we are developing is going to ensure we have the discipline to continue that strong financial trend. I just want to go a little bit deeper in some of these secular growth trends that I've talked about. We really look at it in four pillars, so to speak. The first is advanced computing. You've all heard about the advancements of AI, the growth of data centers, and we're going to talk a little bit more in depth today about how we play as a great solution provider in these markets. They are growing, and they're growing rapidly, and we need to get everything from innovation in the chip to the heat off the chip to the thermal management in the data center to everything that's associated with that. We believe we're very well positioned to do that. You have the environmental and energy evolution that's happening.
There is a global trend to continue to reduce and have a more sustainable solution for the environment. We have great technologies like our new hydrofluoroolefins that are doing just that. There is also a very challenging energy environment with all of the growth that we talked about. We have the only nuclear converting site for uranium in the U.S., and we see this as a tremendous opportunity to continue to help generate energy for the world. Our healthcare business provides really innovative and unique solutions to improve healthcare outcomes, which is another important industry that we're growing in. We have some exciting technologies to share with you there. Personal safety and defense are also important.
The world is becoming a place where we're investing around the world in improved energy and law enforcement, and having that protection is crucial, and we have great technologies to do just that, to continue to be a part of that growth sector. If you look at what third-party folks are saying about these growth trends, it gets us really excited. In our electronics business, as Simon comes up and talks to you about the things we're doing with leading-edge nodes, you'll see a 12% CAGR projection through 2030. Chips are going to get smaller, they're going to get faster, and 7 nm will come down to 3 nm and 2 nm and below. This team is working on those next-generation solutions so our customers can do just that. In refrigerants, there's an 8% CAGR projection through 2030 for new HFO technology that continues to position us very well in refrigerants.
New healthcare technology in inhalers, which reduces the carbon footprint 99% from the old technology, is projected to grow faster than GDP. As I mentioned, nuclear has become embraced around the world as a potential safe and sustainable solution to the energy demands that are needed through 2050, and that is projected to be a 300% growth rate through that timeframe. These are exciting trends where we have great technologies to capitalize on. As we look at growing on our position, it's again that compelling profile of growth and margins, but ensuring that we continue to drive that commercial excellence, that pricing excellence that we have to capture not only the organic growth that we have, but adjacent markets that are there. One of the things that's quite exciting for us is the percentage of sales of new products.
As you can see, 45% of our sales are from new products. This is an innovative specialty materials business. We are constantly coming up with the next molecule, the next material that's going to solve the problems that our customers have, and many times with IP. This is going to be part of our growth story as we move forward and why we're so excited to be a part of an independent company. I mentioned our footprint. With 5,700 patents around the world, we have over 300 R&D scientists, and this is an area where we're going to continue to invest. We are increasing our spend in R&D just because we know this team knows how to deliver solutions that are needed. It fuels and drives our growth, and it allows us to be a leading innovative company in our space.
We have four R&D centers around the world in addition to our manufacturing footprint. Being a total global company and being able to service and supply our customers in that manner is crucial to our success. You can see how we allocate our spend with R&D. We are not only working on today's solutions, but to use a phrase from Wayne Gretzky, we're trying to skate where the puck is going to be in the future and what technology solutions are going to be needed as these industries continue to evolve. That's a focus of what we're working on and has been a big part of our historical success. The operating model in which I referred to really comes down to five pillars. As we evolve, we cannot lose our focus on being an innovation company.
We will continue to ensure we have a process of rigor and discipline to add more products to the market that are needed and that can be commercialized and have a commercial team that recognizes the importance of being able to take those technologies, understand our customers, but also bringing it into new markets as well. How we deploy our capital is going to be crucial to ensure that we are getting the best returns for where we invest our money. Supply chain logistics and manufacturing have to be core to what we do. We need to be world-class in our manufacturing and supply chain. We need to have the lowest cost, the best service, and the quality that's needed in the applications we're in have to be there every single time.
These are the pillars and the operating model that we're going to develop and are developing to ensure that we can do this consistently every day and get better and better in what we do. Diving a little bit deeper into our capital allocation, we look at it in four buckets. The first and most important, where we see the capital best return, is in investing in ourselves. Investing in organic growth, because this team has the pulse of where the markets are going, what the needs of our customers are, the historical results we've had with our return on invested capital, we know this is a great investment and that will be a priority for us. The balance sheet that we have and keeping that strong balance sheet is going to be a priority as well.
We want to maintain that flexibility, but also recognize we have investment opportunities at the same time. We will keep a nice balance to ensure that we don't get massively over-leveraged, and we want to prove ourselves early and often as we become a new company. As I mentioned, since we've been a new company within Honeywell since 2016, we have not really invested in M&A. This opportunity as a standalone gives us the opportunity, with some bolt-on acquisitions in adjacency markets and technologies that add to our portfolio, to really unleash other opportunities for growth that maybe we haven't capitalized in our past. Fourth, should there be excess capital, we'll always want to make sure we return a dividend to our shareholders, and then we'll look at opportunistic share buybacks should that capital be available.
I just want to highlight some of the investments of capital that this company has made to highlight some of the growth that's happened. You can see multiple Solstice molecules that have been developed in our refrigerants business that have been unquestionably successful, leaders in the industry. In fact, it's been so well regarded, we decided to name the company after this molecule. Solstice is an investment that has gone a long way for us, both in automotive and stationary and in building products, and now in healthcare, and continues to be a leading product for us with a great return on that capital. We talked about semiconductors.
We've invested quite a bit of money in our Spokane, Washington plant to continue to expand our ability to make copper manganese sputtering targets, and we are making even more investments to expand capacity as we move forward because of the growth in this industry. This capital and the strong track record we have will continue to be a focus of the new company. As we become our own spin and our own company as Solstice, it's important to really articulate why we think this is a compelling investment opportunity. It starts with the markets that we're attached with. We are aligned with markets that are growing faster than GDP. With that, we have technologies and a leadership position within those markets. We are already working on next-generation solutions to make sure we are always staying ahead and growing faster than even this market is growing.
Ensuring we have rigor and discipline in our operating mechanism and our operating process is crucial, and we will follow that discipline throughout as a new company to ensure we don't lose anything in the strong financial results we have, but also as a standalone, we unleash that growth in a very methodical way, also ensuring innovation, creativity, and speed. With that capital allocation that I referenced and in making sure that we always are providing returns for both our customers, our company, and our shareholders, and that is underpinned by this incredible leadership team that's here today and the 4,000 employees around the world. We just cannot wait to get started as our own company. We feel we have a very compelling leadership position in very attractive markets and are really excited for the future as we move forward.
With that, it is my pleasure to welcome a President of our Refrigerants and Applied Solutions business, Jeff Dormo.
All right, thank you, David. Let me just tell you, starting off, how excited I am to be here today. A little bit about myself, I've been at Honeywell now for the last eight years. Six of those, I've been running P&Ls across the Advanced Materials business, so it is a real privilege today to get to come up here and actually talk to you about some of what we do, since we didn't get an opportunity to do that very often before. We really think we have a great business and a phenomenal team, so very excited about that. Before I joined Honeywell, I was at Dow Chemical in the polyurethane space, and prior to that, I started my career in the Navy, running power plants on nuclear-powered submarines. We'll talk about nuclear power a little bit later today.
I feel a little bit like a full circle, and I'm coming home, getting to do this a little bit more. With that, let's jump into the business and talk a little bit about the Refrigerants and Applied Solutions. $2.7 billion business with very attractive margins. A scaled business that has a demonstrated track record of growth. We go to market, as we think about this, really in four different reportable segments. We'll go into each of these, and we'll talk about them, and I want to give a little bit of color. I know you probably had the chance to look at some of the displays, so hopefully that gives you a little bit of background of what we did, and we'll try and talk a little bit more about this during the day today.
As we think about these businesses, right, so Refrigerants, Building Solutions and Intermediates, our Alternative Energy Solutions, that is where our nuclear business resides, and then Healthcare Packaging. Before going into them, I thought it'd be helpful just to kind of give some overlying thoughts about what underpins these businesses and some core themes that we can think about. First one is robust and strong IP portfolio, and that really goes across our molecules, our positions that we have there, and with something that we do think is a differentiator for our company. Second, attractive and growing end markets, and we'll talk about each of these as we go through them, but I think really it comes down to segmentation, selecting the right markets, and making sure that we can go deep there. Third, really around world-scale manufacturing.
That is something that we have invested a lot in, and we do think that is a core capability and something that is unique to what we do and our ability to serve the globe, not just different regions, but really serve the globe with our products very effectively and efficiently and make sure we're addressing customer needs. With that, we'll go into, we'll start with the Refrigerants business. This is the largest business that we have, as you can see here, $1.3 billion in sales. Talk a little bit about the markets. First one, automotive, certainly involved in the cooling there, and we'll go into that as we get into things. Stationary business, and as we think about this business, we really think about it in two sub-segments: automotive and stationary, stationary being anything that sits still, doesn't move.
Not the most creative, but we'll go into the segments there. This is really residential and commercial buildings, commercial refrigeration, as we think about it. You get into data centers, which we think is a strong growth vertical, and we'll talk about this in the panel and what's happening there. There are always new and emerging different technologies and ways that we're addressing what's happening in the market. From the platform and our technology leadership, this really is where we go to market with the Solstice brand. Core hydrofluoroolefins that David mentioned, three core molecules really form the backbone of this business. Our R-1234yf, R-1234ze, and R-1233zd are kind of that underlying backbone of core molecules that we have for this market. Our Genetron brand is really around HFCs that we do continue to make.
Diving into some of the markets here, diving into a couple of the markets here as we go, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about each business and what makes them unique. Starting with our automotive business, the automotive business has really been one about the transitions from HFCs to HFOs. This has really built up as we think about when this transition started. It's around 2017 as that started to begin in the U.S. and Europe, and it's still ongoing. We see a long runway as we continue to do these transitions, and we think that's an underlying growth trend that we'll continue to see within this market. As that continues, I think something that's really exciting with that is that there is now starting to be a growing aftermarket business.
As you think about the transition that started in the 2017 timeframe, everybody in here has cars. As you think about your car, you probably know when you get to a point that your AC isn't working as well, and it starts seven, eight years, starts happening. We're really just getting into that point in this business where you're building a larger install base that gives you that aftermarket. This provides resiliency. Tina will talk about this as something later today, but we really like that part of the business as we think about the aftermarket that we get to serve. Auto is also interesting in the fact that it's not only a B2B business, but we do have B2C as well.
We go direct to retail, and we are out in stores, in do-it-yourself applications and things like that, and we think that is a great place to play that we continue to be successful and really focus on and making sure we're doing well there. The last thing that I would hit on within automotive is really electrification. Battery electric vehicles are continuing to grow. They're growing faster than your traditional combustion engines, and we see this as an added accelerant to the opportunities within our automotive business. In an internal combustion engine, obviously, heat is generated, so heating can come from that. You're really just focused then on the cooling applications within an automobile. When you start talking about a battery electric vehicle, now you start to get into heat pumps.
Still using the same refrigerants and the same applications, but now we have heating and cooling that needs to happen that actually requires a slightly larger charge. You have a compounding effect as you talk about growing EVs and a larger charge, which really underpins and gives an opportunity for growth there. Transitioning a little bit to our stationary business, tremendous end markets that we plan here, residential and commercial AC. We just went through the transitions. We're going through some of these to HFOs here in the U.S. This continues to be an innovation engine for us, and we think this will continue for quite some time. Commercial refrigeration, I think some of you probably saw the products out there, really about food security, minimizing food waste, really enables supermarkets to control costs and do things efficiently. We have great solutions that we're doing there. Then data centers.
Data centers really generate a tremendous amount of energy, heat, thermal requirements, and that is an area where we play today. We are seeing it grow, and we think long-term this will be an area where it continues to really need our solutions to address the challenges that they have. As we think broadly about the refrigerants business, strong IP portfolio, deep customer relationships, like what David talked about, going back decades, many x, growing aftermarket sales and a strong install base. The install base in the stationary business is already established, very strong there with a great aftermarket. As we can see at the bottom, really strong HFO growth. As you think about the market, as the overall market is growing, HFO is growing faster, and we think that really plays very well to our capabilities.
I think it's important when we talk about refrigerants, and we talk about, you know, this will apply more than just to refrigerants, also to our building solutions business. The regulations underpinning this, I do think, are important, at least to understand and discuss. There are three core sets of regulations that are really driving this. You have the EU F-gas regulation, the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, and then Kigali. Those three together are really helping to drive some of the policy underlying the shift to low global warming potential refrigerants. Many of these EU and U.S. are well underway. EU is actually quite far down the path. A lot of the transition to HFOs has happened, and that's really kind of the leading edge of where things are there.
Within the U.S., we've now gone through the second step down, and that has been also what an accelerant was to some of the transitions that happened this year to HFOs. This will continue to go on as we go forward. This is part of what's driving that underlying growth within HFOs, as you have to step away from the higher global warming potential HFCs and replace that with HFOs. Regarding the growth in terms of what's happening here, and this chart really underlies and kind of demonstrates what I talked about on some of these prior pages. 2022, you can see the mix that we had from HFCs and HFOs, about 30% HFOs, and the majority in HFCs has really transitioned as we've gone forward now to 2025. Much higher concentration, more than 60% now in HFOs, less than 40% HFCs.
During this time, overall, we have continued to grow. You can kind of see the dynamics that are happening as you look at the right side here. As some of the quotas, some of the requirements from the different regulations are requiring fewer and lower amounts of HFCs, you have that offsetting with HFOs. Again, as we think about our portfolio, our innovation, our focus is really on developing the HFOs, those next-generation refrigerants and applications. This has been something that has really helped us to establish and continue and accelerate our growth. Wrapping up on the refrigerant side, I would say, hey, just a few things to kind of mentally note here. I think we're very well positioned in some very attractive markets.
IP underpinning a lot of what we do here, and certainly a growing aftermarket business across both the automotive and stationary applications that really give us a strong resiliency. Moving to the second business, our building solutions and intermediates. This is a business that is $738 million as leading technology platforms that build off our Solstice molecules. You can see the liquid blowing agent, that is our R-1233zd, and then the gaseous blowing agent, GBA, that's the R-1234ze molecules. Really a game changer in insulation performance. As we think about growing energy needs, requirements, and things like this, having efficient and effective buildings becomes more and more important. That's where this business really plays and has really focused over the last number of years. If you think very broadly about this business, we really are in every application that requires some sort of insulation.
Farm to table, getting food safely from the farm all the way to your table, making sure that it can span the globe, all the transportation. We provide that high-performance insulation that really is critical to what's happening there. Within this business, I think a few things that are differentiating and separate us. First one is technical service. A lot of this business is around formulations, and it's unique formulations that are used in these different applications. We have the deepest bench of technical experts within this business, and we think that is really something that provides us a unique opportunity to really continue to be a leading player within this market. Second is scale. In a way, you could say that we really were the ones who shepherded in this HFO transition within building solutions, and we have global scale manufacturing really across the globe.
David pointed out many of the manufacturing sites as we're thinking about. That is a differentiator. We can serve global customers wherever they are, and we have world scale to make sure that we can meet all of those needs across the globe. Exciting business with exciting opportunities as we're thinking about what is happening in this business. Moving on to the third business, our healthcare packaging business. This business is really a combination of two different LOBs. This is our Aclar portfolio and also medical propellants. Medical propellants is a bit newer, and I'll spend some time really talking about this because it really speaks to our focus on customer co-innovation and how do we innovate and solve customer problems together. Starting first with our Aclar business. This is a very unique application that we have.
It is a very clear ultra-high moisture barrier polymer that is used in healthcare packaging. It is unique in its applications, how it's used. It solves many problems in terms of its clarity and what it's able to do that alternatives just are not able to match. Also, we have decades of experience with it. We have longstanding customer relationships that go back many, many years in terms of solving the problems, working with the pharma customers to make sure that this is specced in in their packaging needs as they go forward. The medical propellants business, this is a really neat opportunity, and we'll talk a little bit more about how we think about growth and going into new verticals. This is an area where a customer, in this case, AstraZeneca, really identified that they have a problem, a challenge that they needed to solve.
I think Andrew may have pointed out some of these things to you before, some of the inhalers and meter-dosed inhalers before. These all use a legacy high global warming potential HFC. As AstraZeneca looked at their footprint, their carbon footprint, as they want to go out and address it, they really needed a partner who could bring a solution to them that was innovative and would meet those needs. Based on our technical skill set, our deep technical knowledge, and the fact that, as mentioned before, a global scale, we were really able to be the ones who could come and step up and help them address these needs. Going from converting from a legacy HFC to an HFO in this application allows them to reduce the footprint in their medical inhalers by over 99%.
A real impact to them, a challenge that they had that they were really looking to work with. We're excited to have partners like that that we can go deep with in solving these problems. It went beyond us just needing to have a product available. We also had to figure out how we would manufacture it. I think this goes back to a little bit of our core capabilities of being able to address a customer problem and then convert it into how do you actually go about the process of scaling and manufacturing something that's going to meet their need. This was really a process of us bringing CGMP capabilities to our portfolio, something that we did not have before. This is a unique opportunity and differentiating position for us to really go after and make sure that we can address this market going forward.
We're excited about how we were able to partner with customers, work to solve their problems, and then in the balance, open up an opportunity for us as well. We really think this is a great example of a win-win between our two companies. Lastly, going on to the fourth business that we'll talk about here, our alternative energy services business. This is our nuclear business, and as David mentioned, a lot of focus right now on energy needs within the U.S., within the globe. We think this is uniquely positioned to really help address some of those needs going forward. A little bit about the background. We own 100% of the Metropolis site, which then serves conversion services to a 50/50 JV, which is ConverDyn. That 50/50 JV is been Solstice and General Atomics. One thing on this page that probably jumps out, the $2 billion number.
I'm excited to say that we have a backlog, or if you look at it, a frontlog, but we have orders out through the remainder of the decade. I'd say these are firm orders. These are out there. This gives us the confidence to do the things that we need to do to really focus, run our site, debottleneck, and make sure that we're bringing more capacity into the market. I think this is a great opportunity for us to help address some of these critical challenges going forward. We're talking about nuclear energy as an alternative. I know there's probably not a lot of history or background necessarily in where this fits. Just a little bit on this to give some context as to how we think about this business and where it sits. You can see Metropolis ConverDyn here in the conversion, really making UF6.
The raw material, the uranium that's mined, we get it as that raw material, and our process is really converting it into a value-added intermediate that is then brought downstream and really goes into the fuel fabrication cycle. Metropolis is the only domestic conversion facility within the United States. This is a unique position on energy security, and we think one that is very helpful for what we're trying to do here in terms of growing. A couple of things on the right-hand side here, just to give some context to what we're talking about. The capital expenditure, as we're looking over the next few decades, is $4 trillion. This is going to be a growing area to invest in. Three x nuclear growth by 2050, and you can see overall nuclear energy, roughly estimated at a $10 trillion market.
A lot of opportunity here for growth and for us to participate as we're going forward. As I wrap up, and I'll turn over to my colleague here in a second, really excited to tell you about our business and what we're doing. We think this is a unique business that has wonderful growth potential, great verticals and industries that we have a chance to play in, and look forward to the rest of the day to answer any questions as we go forward. With that, I ask Simon to come up, and he can tell you a little bit about our electronics and specialty materials business.
Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here. It's always hard to go after the RES business. It's such a terrific business, but I happen to think that the ESM business is even better. Let me tell you about that. First, a bit about myself. I'm approaching 30 years in the chemical industry, 25 years of that in the specialty chemical space. I've been running P&Ls for the last 15 years, three years here with Honeywell. Prior to that, I spent eight years at Henkel's Adhesive Technologies business, running various adhesive businesses. I spent four years, close to four years, at essentially what's ScienceCo's NovaCare Coatings division today. Earlier in my career, I spent about 10 years in various sales, marketing, strategy roles, primarily with Rohm and Haas. Towards the end there, a few years with Dow Chemical.
Earlier in my career, I started out as a process R&D engineer doing pilot scale-up work for Union Carbide in the JV they had with Exxon Chemical called Innovation Technologies. I've had a lot of different roles in the industry. I've seen a lot of different end markets and super thrilled to be here today. Let me talk to you about electronics and specialty materials. We're about $1 billion in sales, 19% EBITDA margins, but we have some terrific businesses. I don't know how many people have had a chance to see the exhibits yet, but we have the sputtering targets business. You can see the target out there. We have the ballistics business where we get to shoot armor and provide safety solutions to the military and law enforcement. We have a thermal interface materials business, so we have thermal management businesses as well.
We have fantastic businesses in the specialty chemicals side. It's just a terrific collection of businesses. We organize this into three segments. We have our electronic materials segment, we have our safety and defense solutions segment, and then we have our research and performance chemicals segment. While these platforms are different and this business is different than what Jeff referenced, where you sort of have a big asset running, serving, supporting multiple businesses, we have discrete businesses with discrete manufacturing assets. What's unique about all these businesses, similar to Jeff's business, is they're very much built upon a legacy of innovation over many, many years. We have a right to win in these markets because of that legacy of innovation and because of those deep customer relationships that we've nurtured over many, many decades in these businesses.
I will go through each of these segments in more detail, starting first with electronic materials. Electronic materials for us is approaching $400 million in sales. Obviously, this business, there's a lot of excitement about the electronic materials space. I mean, just this morning, there was a very famous CEO in the neighborhood talking about the exponential, exponential, exponential growth that's happening in AI. You've got increasing demand of AI, and then you've got increasing compute requirements on top of the increasing demand of AI. There's just unbelievable tailwinds in this business driving growth. There are other parts of the industry as well that are driving growth. I mean, there's a lot of electronic applications in the electric vehicle area as well, which also our portfolio supports. We have a great position here in this market.
I'm going to go into some detail to explain that to everybody in a minute. We've historically sold into the front end and the back end. We sell our sputtering targets, our etchants and wash solvents, and our dielectric materials. Essentially, we call them electronic polymers. These are dielectrics, planarization materials, dopants into the front end of the process. On the back end, we sell our thermal interface materials and our integrated heat spreaders. We participate in both parts of the value chain. We've been in this industry for a long time, so we're not a new entrant to the electronic space. We've been in this business for a really long time.
As a result of that, we have very deep relationships with all the leading IDMs, foundries, and a lot of brand OEMs as well that we work with on the spec inside, especially on the thermal management part of our portfolio. We're deeply, deeply embedded in this industry. This is not something we've just walked into recently. This is something that we've been in for many, many years. You know, because of that, we're able to do a tremendous amount of co-development with our customers. I'll talk some more about that as well. What I want to do in the next slide is just walk in more detail on the value chain. I want to talk then a little bit more about how we do co-development with our customers.
I'm also going to talk about what we're doing or why we think these trends are going to continue and why we're positioned to win. I want to just wrap up, at least on the electronic side, with an update on what David mentioned, which is the additional investment we're making in our Spokane, Washington facility to support the growth in this market. Here's a very simplified diagram that speaks to the value chain for the electronics industry. You can see here on the left-hand side the front-end process for chip fabrication. As I mentioned, we participate with etchants and wash solvents, with anti-reflective coatings, gap fillers, planarization materials, and then we have our PVD targets business. On the back end, we have a thermal management offering with integrated heat spreaders, and we supply TIMS II materials. Specifically, this is our phase change materials portfolio.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the back end and our phase change technology and our TIMS position and thermal management because Jeff, Wiley, and I will come up after the break and during the panel discussion. We're going to have a more detailed discussion about thermal management and looking at that business from a growth perspective. That'll be a key part of the panel discussion a little bit later on. What I do want to do, though, is focus a bit of time talking about the PVD targets business. This is a business for us. We've participated in it for many years. We supply a lot of different targets technologies: titanium, aluminum, copper, tantalum, tungsten. We make various alloys: aluminum, copper, and more recently, we make copper manganese.
In 2019, there was a major pivot that happened in the electronics industry, which was the introduction of EUV technology with the first 7 nm fab that went into production. When you make node sizes at 7 nm and below, 7 nm, 5 nm, 3 nm, now 2 nm is about to start up, and in the future, we're working on 1.4 nm and 1 nm. Essentially, you need to use copper manganese on many of those layers because copper manganese inherently provides excellent diffusion barrier properties, and it helps you with reducing electroresistivity. It just improves the overall performance of the chips. If you look at the industry roadmaps, logic roadmaps, for example, and you look out and you look at the layers, you see that there's a lot of copper manganese that's been used and there'll be more copper manganese used in the future.
We have a very unique position in this space. We're the largest or really the only producer in the United States that has copper manganese at scale, and we're only one of maybe two or three in the world that can actually do this. We tend to be in a very, very strong supply situation, supplying these copper manganese sputtering targets to leading IDMs and foundries. When you're out looking at the exhibit, we actually have a copper manganese target sitting out there. It's beautiful. It's beautiful copper. It's the highest purity copper in the world. It's 6-9's purity copper. It's just a beautiful target. Those are what go into the PVD chamber, and those are what deposit the copper layers onto the chip as they build up the layers. Very exciting. Let me talk about the demand and what's happening in the marketplace.
I don't think it's any surprise to everybody about the growth of AI and the reshoring in the United States. These are two transformational changes that are impacting the semiconductor industry, the electronics industry. Those are well-known, well-understood, and we feel confident based on all the announcements we're seeing and all the discussions that are happening that we're still very early in this build-out. I often compare it to, I think it's an infrastructure play the same way we built out the railroads and the highway system and the internet. I think we're now building out the backbone for the AI economy going into the future, and I think this is going to play out for quite a while. We feel very good about the amount of infrastructure spend over the next several years to get all this in place.
The other thing that's happening that's also a benefit for us is there's new applications emerging because of the continuing requirements around increasing chip speeds. You need faster chips in order to make all of this work. You need to go to smaller and smaller node sizes, and you need to go to new architectures with advanced packaging. All of that is creating new demands for materials. If you look at a lot of the industry roadmaps for logic, if you go to, I think if you go back to a 7 nm chip, it had about 10 layers. If you look at what's planned for the next generation, 1.4 nm chips, it's up to 16 layers. The number of interconnect layers is increasing. Those are all copper manganese. The interconnect density is increasing.
The amount and volume of copper manganese that will be required on the logic side is increasing as we go down in node size. Similarly, in memory, which never used to be a market for us, with the introduction of high-bandwidth memory, we're now finding a significant amount of demand for copper manganese. As high-bandwidth memory starts to go down in node size, we're at 13 nm today. As you start to go down to 10 and 9 and look at the roadmap for that business, you start to see more and more copper manganese used as well. There is high demand for copper manganese in the memory space. Advanced packaging applications are also creating opportunity for copper manganese because when you have backside power delivery to advanced packaging design, you have to put the through silica vias, and those through silica vias are made with copper manganese.
When you look across the industry, whether it's logic, memory, or even on the packaging side, there's increasing demand for copper manganese. When you combine that with the U.S. reshoring efforts and what the U.S. is trying to do and the fact that we're the only major producer of this in the U.S. and one of two or three maybe in the world, we feel like we're in a very strong position to continue to win. These product lines have very, very long spec-in cycles too. What's already in motion today started many years ago, and we're working on 1.4 nm and 1 nm going into the future. We're already well down the road on those development projects. We feel like the demand is going to be there and be very robust for this business.
The other comment I'll make as well on this is that, especially with advanced packaging, there's new opportunities emerging there as well for new materials in other parts of our portfolio. We're also seeing some of our dielectric spin-on materials finding new applications in the packaging side for planarization or gap fill or even hybrid bonding. We're also exploring a lot of other adjacency opportunities that we haven't historically participated in in the past. Here's a customer case study just to talk about. Anonymous. I wasn't allowed to put the name on here. Enough to say, leading fab producer in the world that we partner with very closely. We have a very broad and deep relationship with this customer. This is a good proxy for really how we interact with a lot of our customers in this space.
It starts with us having a local team on the ground supporting the customer, making sure that our products are performing the way they should be performing when they arrive and in their manufacturing facility. We then have higher-level discussions with the R&D team, the technical team, the fab engineers to look at unmet needs and where we need to continue to innovate. We have those regular dialogues as well. We have top-to-top discussions with them to talk about strategic partnership and how we can work together and how we can support each other with investment and key decisions like what we're doing with Spokane. We also establish relationships across the QC organization, the ISC, manufacturing organization, and we bring those resources together when they're required.
As a result of that, we're highly responsive, we're highly trusted, and as a result of that, we get a front seat to future innovation R&D development. We're sitting right there at the table with our customers on their next generation development. Quickly on Spokane. Spokane, we're putting another $200 million roughly investment into Spokane to continue to expand capacity to keep up with the forecasted demand growth of copper manganese. As part of this project, we're also implementing a series of process improvement projects that the R&D organization has worked on for the past couple of years that's going to drive significant efficiency and productivity into our production process. At the same time, we're also automating large parts of our production process as well. This will become a world-class facility supporting this industry going forward when all of the new assets come online.
We'll start to see some of the productivity projects and capacity coming online in 2026, and we'll see productivity roll in over the coming years after that until the full expansion project is online in a few years. This is actually flying out there in a few weeks for the groundbreaking ceremony. Very excited to do that, and thank you, David, for approving the project. Moving on to the second business, safety and defense solutions. This is our high molecular weight polyethylene fiber business. This is where we take the fiber and we essentially make ballistic materials out of this that are sold into U.S. military, law enforcement type applications. There are some terrific samples outside that you can see. We have a ballistic vest out there that's actually been shot, so you can see where the bullets have gone into the vest. You're not allowed to shoot anybody.
We don't have any samples to test. What you'll also see is we have our next generation fiber, a plate made from our next generation fiber as well. We're in the process of scaling up and commercializing this technology, but this will be the next generation material that will be supplied to the U.S. military to the warfighter. You'll see the difference in weight and how it feels, and that's part of the U.S. military's requirement to lower the amount of weight that's on the warfighter because the next generation gun that they're carrying is heavier. They need to take off weight somewhere, and one of the areas they can take it off is with the ballistic material.
This really speaks to our strategic differentiator in that we have historically been the market leader in this space, and we have led with the next generation of innovation to keep in the forefront for U.S. military performance on the ballistic side. As a result of that, it all gets pulled into law enforcement and other applications. We have also taken this business into the medical market as well, so we're also supplying into some medical applications for sutures, so we also have a medical business in this space as well. You can imagine with all of the geopolitical tension in the world, the increase in defense spending.
U.S. budget that's been proposed, as well as NATO increasing spend, that there's a significant demand for these materials going forward. Two quick case study examples here. I want to talk about Safariland. Safariland is a customer here in the U.S., we've had a long-time partnership with Safariland, going back 20+ years, exclusive supplier to them for many years, where we supply them our Spectra Shield and Gold Shield products. You'll see Safariland vests in many of the police departments, the famous TV show police departments that you see in LAPD, NYPD. These are the guys making vests for them. A lot of those vests are made with our Spectra Shield.
Every year they have an event called Save Club, where they invite law enforcement or frontline responders who have been shot in the line of duty to come to the Save Club event and tell their story about how the products made by Safariland with our Spectra Shield material in it saved their lives. The families of those folks also attend, so you also hear from the families and how the families have managed this and what this has all meant to them. It's really, it's an unbelievable event. If you look, there's been 55 first responders saved already this year. Over the life of the program, over 2,200 people have been saved with material that we've manufactured in our business. It's really a very special event, and I think it's a great example that shows the importance of the products that we make in the marketplace.
Our business is not just U.S. based, it's very global. We supply into, I think it's over 100 different military and law enforcement programs around the world. Just in the last two years, we've sold enough Spectra fiber to make upwards of a million articles, so helmets, plates, vests, to EU military and Asian military customers around the world. This is a global business for us. I'll just quickly finish and wrap up here on research and performance chemicals. This is the third segment that we are organized by within the electronics and specialty materials business. There's a lot of different businesses in this segment, but they primarily have some common themes in that they sell into the construction markets, they sell into the pharma markets. We have quite a bit of business here in some of the automotive space as well. There's a lot of brands in this business.
If you look at our research chemicals business, we sell into a lot of research labs around the world. There are some very, very well-known brands in this space, like Hydronol. When you're out at the exhibits, you'll see an exhibit with the Hydronol brand, and we can talk about, explain to you what Hydronol does as a key reagent that's used in laboratories around the world to measure residual water. It's a very important product line. It's the most well-known brand in the world in this space. In fact, people actually refer to the category under the brand name. It's that well-known. This is also the business where we do a lot of our fluorine derivatives chemistry. We also have fluorine derivatives in our business. Like, you know, Jeff has fluorine chemistry all over his business. This is where we have a lot of fluorine derivatives business here.
We do a lot of salts, fluorine-based salts. Probably you've all used a fluorine-based salt that we make and you've never realized it. If you are a user of the major branded toothpaste that's out there, the tin fluoride, if you look on the back of the label and it says stannous fluoride, it's highly likely that the stannous fluoride in your toothpaste came from this business. We're a leading producer of CGMP salts. This is a tin fluoride salt that goes into that type of application. There are a lot of great businesses in this segment. There is a lot of opportunity for growth, especially sustainability solutions. We have a number of innovation projects in this space that are really driving sustainable solutions, using less material at our customers or looking for ways to reduce waste streams in their processes.
We have a lot of opportunities for innovation and growth in this space. With that, I see I'm out of time. I will wrap up, and I believe we are now going to take a 15-minute break. Please enjoy some refreshments and come back after the break, and we'll start our panel discus sion. Thank you.
Our program will begin in 10 minutes. Please take your you.
All right, appreciate everybody joining us for the second half of the session. Now, the next 30 minutes or so, we're going to host a little bit of a panel discussion here on business synergies and growth strategy. When I left the sell side, they told me I'd be done hosting fireside chats, but they pull you back in. Glad to have here Simon Mawson, as well as Jeff Dormo, who you just heard from. Also joining us on the stage is Wiley Clark.
Wiley's our Chief Development Officer, has spent a number of years in the business working on strategy and a number of other areas. I would just say on a personal note, having joined Solstice two and a half months ago, what has been a tremendous resource and encyclopedia of knowledge as I've tried to learn about all these businesses that Jeff and Simon just talked eloquently about. Maybe we'll start with Wiley. Wiley, I want to meet you. Just give yourself a little bit of an introduction and your background before we dive in here.
Sure. Wiley Clark, Chief Development Officer for Solstice. I've been with Honeywell for about 13 years now, a little over 13 years in various strategy and...
Let's start over.
I don't think this is working either.
Yes.
All right, I'll start at the top.
Wiley Clark, Chief Development Officer.
I don't think this is working.
Oof.
To nine.
I can keep riffing about my days on the sell side.
Can you hear me now?
Here we go.
Now you can hear me. All right. I'll start. Third time's the charm here. Wiley Clark, Chief Development Officer for Solstice. I've been with Honeywell for over 13 years now in various strategy and M&A roles. The majority of that time, I've been aligned to the Solstice business. I'm super excited and privileged to be part of this executive team going forward. My team here, our job is to do all things strategy, both organic and inorganic. That means running the strategic planning process, running M&A, being a partner, an advisor to David and to Jeff and to Simon, and coming up with our growth plans and our long-term strategic priorities.
When you look at Simon and Jeff's businesses, both of their businesses have very deep benches of experts in R&D, innovation, strategic marketing, commercial sales, all of which are very well positioned to find those, execute on current opportunities for growth, and find the new areas for growth. What we're focused on at the corporate level is really two things. One is prioritization. Where do we put that incremental dollar to maximize the growth for the business? Two, how do we leverage cross-platform capabilities that we see across both businesses and at the corporate level? That's foundational stuff like synthetic chemistry, which we're excellent at across the board, or foundational chemistries like fluorination, which both businesses excel at, or just this culture of customer co-innovation. You hear a lot about our ability to get close to the customer and co-innovate with them. That's not always just the customer.
It could be the end user. In many cases, we're partnering with an end user, educating them on the capabilities of our materials, helping them understand how they can innovate, which then sets the specification and draws through our products to the value chain. We're great at that. We're also looking for the growth initiatives across the business as well, which cover both Jeff and Simon's businesses. As a corporate entity, we're focusing the whole business on one of which is battery chemicals and materials, which both Jeff and Simon have emerging strategies there, as well as thermal management, where we have a great position in data centers.
Maybe we'll start there on data centers. Obviously, as Simon and Jeff talked about in their prepared comments earlier, the pace of AI, high-performance computing, data center growth continues to seem to accelerate and sort of hit this inflection point here over the next year or so. A lot of companies obviously talk about data centers and claim a piece of this growing pie. Maybe we'll start with Simon and then go to Jeff. Just talk about how Solstice attacks this opportunity and why we think we're unique in attacking the data center.
For us, the data center starts on the chip manufacturing side, right? As I had mentioned in my presentation, we're supplying copper manganese into all the leading fabs around the world, and we'll be supplying into all the new fabs coming online in the next coming years, making leading-edge chips, right? Those chips are instrumental to making GPU processors. Those GPU processors then go into an assembly process. In the assembly process, that's where we start to get into the backend part of our business with our integrated heat spreaders and our thermal management solutions there.
We have a core business doing heat spreaders, and we're well set up on the heat spreader side to make the larger scale, what we call extra large form factor heat spreaders that are used in the larger chip formats now as you look at putting chip sets together and creating these sort of AI packaged solutions. We're well positioned there. We have a really, really awesome portfolio with our thermal interface materials. We make a type of product called a phase change material. When you have the spreader on top of the chip to remove the heat, and then you need to put the heat sink or a cold plate or whatever it is on top of that, you need to have a perfect bond line between the two substrates. What you don't want to have is air trapped between those two substrates.
Typically, they've used greases to do that in the past. The greases aren't very good. They tend to flow out. They tend to make a mess. Our material that we make, this phase change material, is fantastic because it doesn't pump out, and it makes extremely thin bond lines to give you very good heat transfer performance. What we're finding is that it's becoming the preferred go-to solution for really thin bond line applications like on GPUs. We're working with a number of the major OEMs out there, branded companies that are developing GPU chips, and we're working on essentially speccing in our phase change material. Similar to what I said on the copper side, right? These are long qualification cycles. We're working on programs for many years, getting specced in, new programs come along, and we're working on that.
We're an established player both on the chip side with our copper manganese and the fabrication of the chips for the data center, and also on the thermal management side with our heat spreaders and with our phase change material. We get the heat off the chip and then hand it over to Jeff, who then takes the heat transfer from there.
Yeah, so it's really a tremendous opportunity to talk about the handoff between where Simon gets the heat to the top of the chip. At that point, you really have to think about how do you get the heat that's generated from these chips out of the building. That's certainly where we specialize in, obviously, with our refrigerants. We develop that working fluid, right? The working fluid that really does the thermodynamics of getting that heat out of the building. As you think about a data center, you think about AI and what's happening. The compute power that Simon's spoken a lot about, it's getting denser and generating more heat. On top of that, when you talk about these supercomputers, you're putting many of these chips now together. The thermal load in a space, in a rack, is continuing to grow.
As we take a step back and think about where do we play today, most data center cooling is air-cooled today. That is kind of the core, the bread and the butter of what we do today, really having HFO solutions, blends, and so forth that are being used by our customers and being used to do the air cooling that is happening. We see this continuing to evolve as we go forward. You see here, kind of next on here is direct-to-chip. As that heat capacity, as that thermal intensity goes up, new solutions will be needed just because air can't get enough heat off the chip at a fast enough rate.
The next one to come, direct-to-chip, two-phase cooling, this is really where you're taking some sort of cold plate and you're going directly onto the top of the chip, either from a heat spreader or a TIM 1.5, depending on what it is. Now you can run a refrigerant directly through that cold plate, which generates a much better thermal interface to get the heat off and use that in order to maintain those temperatures. This is an area where, in our portfolio today, we have solutions that work tremendously well in things like two-phase direct-to-chip cooling in an area that we think is probably the next leg in this growth as data centers continue to grow and the thermal intensity goes forward.
As you look longer out, you look further into the future, that's where you begin to think about, all right, hey, where is that next place where thermal management will need to happen? In a way, all of this comes down to physics. What's the heat flux and what's the best way to get heat out? That's where you get into solutions like immersion cooling and active programs that are well underway and progressing very well in terms of the immersion cooling and how that'll fit into the overall ecosystem. I think it is important as we think about a data center of the future, likely all three of these are still needed. It's not one or the other, one of these will happen. There are going to be areas in the future where there will be immersion, there will be areas where there's two-phase, air-cooled.
In all of these, at the end of the day, you still will need some sort of working fluids. It's really managing getting the heat out of the building because there's going to be that generated flux coming up. As we think broader, that's what's happening in the data center. You start to layer on top of some of the other things that are going on that it will require. The first one that I'd bring up is the idea of waste heat. I didn't talk about it before, but when you think about all the heat that's coming out, now there's opportunities to reuse. That really lends itself to heat pumps. These are refrigerant solutions where you're taking that heat that's generated. This is happening right now, real examples in Europe where people are mandating that waste heat is recovered and used.
That is a new market as we go into and really apply some of our verticals there to make sure that we can help solve those solutions. I think Simon talked about it. Just when you think about the amount of energy that's needed to run these data centers, as we think about our nuclear position, we do think that'll be a solution to address some of the energy needs in the future.
Yeah. Just to add on that, I think what's super unique about this for us is that five years ago, even a few years ago, this was sort of a two customer, two different customer problems because there's two different customers. There was a chip customer, whether it's the chip designer or a packager or an assembly that's trying to figure out how to get the heat to the top of the chip. There was a data center that was trying to figure out how to keep the place cool. Now that customer problem is coalescing around a common design issue in a common ecosystem of trying to solve that problem. We're uniquely positioned because we're in the chip and on the chip, bringing the heat up to the top of the chip, and we're in the data center innovating around the working fluid.
We have a great position to attack the current generation and the next generation of technologies here. One good example of this is we've stood up a thermal management design center within our Buffalo R&D facility where we're doing active design and development and innovation within the chip, looking at next generation TIMs, as well as innovating around the next working fluids to support future generations of thermal management technologies that will be needed for the data center.
Great. Maybe if we broaden the discussion out a little bit and just sort of talk about growth. David, in his earlier presentation, talked about our ambitions as a growth company and the inflection point and some of these secular trends over the next few years. Jeff and Simon just laid out a litany of different growth areas that they want to invest in or want to find as attractive. Maybe we can start, Jeff, just how you think about growth and where do you see Solstice driving that growth over the future?
Yeah, and we talked a lot about things along growth before, but just to talk a little bit about how we think about growth. I think within our businesses, the first area that we really talk about and think about is, okay, what is application replication? How do you innovate within the current applications that you have and really then bring that across to other areas? This is really about core innovation and driving growth within those. Maybe a good example to kind of demonstrate what we're talking about there is when you look at a place like Europe. Europe has a fairly low penetration of air conditioning in homes, but it has a very, very high penetration of gas boilers. As Europe has looked at energy independence and what it needs to do, there's really been a push to electrification. This feeds right into heat pumps.
You think about, all right, now we're taking something that we're really good at, right? This is a core capability that we have in terms of designing the right refrigerants for that. You suddenly now open up a whole vertical, a whole market that wasn't there before. As we think about growth, we think about it really starts there. How are we innovating within our core to open up new verticals and areas to grow in? Beyond that, for us, it's really about what are the long-term innovations. We have decades of experience as we really think about how do you go from, we demonstrate, went from HCFCs to HFCs to HFOs, and we continue to look and innovate around what are the next generation of molecules. Long-term, what are those innovative materials? What do they need to look like? How do they continue to push the boundaries of performance?
This is an area with our R&D team, particularly our discovery team. We were continually looking at how do you invent and develop that next molecule that continues to improve the performance that is needed. Maybe the last thing that I would kind of add on there is as you really begin to look at those areas that are closer to our knitting in terms of where we play, it then becomes, hey, what are the adjacencies that give you an opportunity to use some of the capabilities that we're really good at and we can have a right to win?
An example there is you think about fluorine chemistry kind of runs through a lot of our DNA here, and areas like battery chemicals that Wiley mentioned in terms of, hey, there's a lot of fluorine that is used there, additives that are needed, different problems that need to be addressed in terms of charge time, fast charging, voltages, and so forth that lend themselves to some of the additives that we have the capability to make. That's an example of as we're thinking about our core and innovating longer term in our core and then beginning to open up adjacencies to make sure that we have opportunities to grow in the future.
Yep.
Yeah, and for us, it's very similar, right? I mean, the starting point for us is making sure in ESM that we have a very strong core that we can grow off of. We are putting a lot of investment into making sure that our core manufacturing processes are efficient, that we can drive productivity into those processes, and that we can serve our customers with quality, reliability, and be cost-competitive where we need to be as well in the marketplace. Spectra Shield is a great example of where we're incrementally innovating on an existing platform to bring that next technology to the market to make sure that we're keeping that business in a strong place. A lot of innovation is tied to that, and a lot of work is going on in fiber innovation and process innovation with that particular project.
That is going to basically give us a platform to incrementally grow off of for many more years as we continually improve that product line and increase that performance to keep up with U.S. military standards. A big part for us is around the process and having the assets in a good place. The other thing we look at, we also look at a lot of customer-partnered innovation. Where can we work with customers to address unmet needs? We have some interesting projects we're working on in the pharma space where we're looking at how we can address some of the waste issues around acetonitrile. Acetonitrile is a big issue for the pharma industry in the oligonucleotide space. When they do a lot of oligonucleotide synthesis, there are a lot of wash steps.
There's a lot of acetonitrile that's used, so there's a lot of waste generated as a result of those manufacturing processes. A lot of our customers are asking, what can you do to help us with that? We've got some projects that we're working on that's looking at waste stream reduction and how to create circular solutions for some of these businesses. Again, customer unmet need where we are looking at new solutions that we can put in place for our customers. That's a great example of, I would say, some customer-partnered innovation. We're also looking at adjacent markets. I had mentioned in the electronics presentation that it's interesting how technology that you think is old all of a sudden becomes interesting and new again. We've seen that happen with the emergence of advanced packaging.
With the requirements that are now happening on the advanced packaging side, there's a lot of requirements for planarization chemistries and for gap-fill chemistries. Hybrid bonding is a big unmet need in the industry. We are looking at ways that we can create solutions in these adjacent markets that are emerging with technology that we've had for, you know, we've got many decades of experience on. It's interesting to see how that is also happening as well, where we're getting to take some of the stuff that we've typically used in the front end and we're now able to move it into backend applications because there are all these emerging unmet needs that need to be addressed. We have active innovation programs working on these adjacency plays as well. The other one I'll mention is just on our phase change materials.
We're constantly looking at what we can do to increase that portfolio. We actually just did a launch of a product there, a new product called 6880, which actually has better bleed out. We got a lot of feedback from our customers that the performance was good and they liked it, but there was too much pump out on it. We fixed that and improved it. There is, again, an incremental innovation on an existing product that is addressing one of our key customers' unmet needs. We have a lot of different approaches to innovation. I would say at the end of the day, what's really key is getting close to our customers and making sure we understand what the customer unmet needs are and then how we can innovate towards solving those problems. That's really the starting point for us for a lot of this.
For Wiley, now obviously Jeff and Simon have a lot of different areas that they're interested in growing. I think one of the areas that you talked about from a corporate level is prioritization within strategy. How do you think about tying it together and prioritizing where we should grow and invest?
David, in his opening remarks, talked about the strategic pillars, which are really tied to secular growth trends, which we are very well positioned to continue to attack. What we would like to prioritize and continue to prioritize is not only that secular trend, we want to do more than that. I think secular trends are great, but we want to grow faster than that. We look for opportunities where we can differentiate across the value chain within those secular trends, where we can make an outsized contribution to solving that customer problem. A good example is the metered-dose inhaler project that Jeff alluded to. Metered-dose inhalers and inhalation therapy in general is a great market, good growth. What we are doing is coming up with a new technology platform that is being adopted by the market, which will allow us to grow much faster than that market in general.
That is what we look for. We will look for ways to improve adoption of our technologies across good, strong markets. From a prioritization perspective, that is what we are looking for. We are also looking to optimize our manufacturing footprint. As a materials company, generally speaking, to sell things, we have to make them first. We spend a lot of time focusing on the optimized manufacturing footprint. We have a great base, excellent base. As we move forward, we continue to look at what is the most optimal solution. Do we reinvest and expand our base? Do we partner to co-manufacture? Do we look for a preferred supplier and develop a very close relationship with them? All three options we have used in the past, we will continue to look at going forward to make sure we are making that right capital allocation decision in the future.
When we think about growth a step further, obviously David highlighted earlier some of the organic investments that we've historically made, as well as planning to going forward. There are a lot of areas where we already have strong footholds. The natural question is always around inorganic growth and sort of that balance between organic versus inorganic. As Chief Development Officer and looking at that from a strategy perspective, how do you think about balancing organic versus inorganic growth?
I get the question a lot, what's your M&A strategy and what are your M&A priorities? I don't like to start there. My firm belief is everything starts with our strategy. Even zooming out farther, it's what is our customer strategy? What is their technology roadmap? Where are they going three, five years down the road? Where's the puck going? How do we help our customer get there? What is the problem they have? We then work our way backwards and say, how do we best get to the preferred solution to support our customer? It's a build-partner-buy equation that we always look at when we look at our technology platforms and our growth strategies. We have all options available to us.
If it means going out and doing it ourselves, reinvesting in our R&D program, which, as David alluded to, we are doing, or if it means going out and acquiring somebody, that's a tool we have in our tool belt. That opportunistic bolt-on to help support a technology platform that will solve that customer's problem today and tomorrow and three years down the road is definitely something available to us. It's one tool in a big tool belt here. I do think we can't invent everything internally, though. There will be opportunities to bolt on things to help support our growth plan. Those will likely be aligned to our strategic pillars. The rationale will likely be aligned to moving faster, moving higher probability of success, and being better suited to solve that customer problem.
Great. Maybe the last area I want to touch on in the time we have here is the operating system. David talked a lot in his early remarks around a refined operating system that's fit for Solstice. Maybe we'll start with Wiley and then Jeff and Simon, you can talk about your business experience. Wiley, can you talk more about what we're trying to drive at with the Solstice operating model, sort of built on the Honeywell legacy here.
We're inheriting Honeywell Accelerator, which is a best-in-class operating model. It's got the rigor, it's got the processes, it's got the say-do culture that's embedded within Solstice. Not only that, it's a foundation that's been heavily invested in by Honeywell. Data is currency these days. What we're getting is a tool that's full of digitization, enterprise data warehouse, AI tools. It's a training and technology platform that we're starting with. As a $4 billion company, that's not something we could have, or would have been difficult for us to develop ourselves. That's our starting point, which is we couldn't be in a better position starting out with that. What we're looking to do, though, is to refine that and say, okay, this is great. We've got the great foundation.
What are the four or five things that we need to focus on to be truly successful and continue to be successful as a materials company, advanced materials company? It's the five pillars here, which is we need an innovation engine that's never idle. It's continually moving. We need a commercial strategy that brings that innovation to market. We need a supply chain that delivers quality and on time and supports our customer and has the right suppliers in the supply chain. A manufacturing base that's first focused on safety and then second delivers efficiency and optimization. All of that, as we continue to move forward and reinvest in our growth platforms, we're placing the incremental dollar in the right place. Each of those pillars has an executive sponsor within Solstice. Simon's the sponsor for innovation and Jeff is the sponsor for commercial excellence.
Maybe, Simon, you can maybe double-click on what you're doing in that space.
Yeah, a lot of good activity in the commercial side. I'll reiterate what Wiley said. We're at a really strong starting point with a very rigorous, like, MPI development process as an example. We're just looking at ways that we can refine that for our operations. For example, we have sort of a one-size-fits-all stage gate process. We recognize that there's a need to probably have some simpler version of that for more simple projects that we need to execute in our business to drive more agility. We're looking at what we can do there to look at maybe having some different versions of the process, again, to better fit with what we do as a business. That would be one example. We are in the process of rolling out some new tools. We're changing our software that we use for managing our process.
We're in the process of rolling that out. We also are looking to make sure that, you know, you think about the R&D organization. We just went to become now a smaller company. We're also looking at what we can do to make sure that that organization is well taken care of. We're relaunching the Fellows program for our business specific to Honeywell. We're looking at sort of the whole career ladder and what we want to do for the innovation organization so people can progress in their career the right way and be, you know, happy working here for long term. We have a number of activities there. We're also looking at building on the AI work that's already been done.
We're also in the process of looking to roll out an AI operating, I'd say, a new software platform that allows us to have an AI backbone, sort of digital operating model for Solstice going forward. That ties into our overall AI strategy and how we sort of feed data into our data warehouse. We're also in the process of doing that as well. The other part that sort of connects with the commercial side, and Wiley is also involved with this as well, is we're also going through and looking at sort of our strategic marketing organization and how we're set up in the new company to make sure we have the right capabilities in all the domains and segments that we want to focus on because we all view that that's a very critical skill set in the organization.
That's a critical part of the organization where new ideas come from, you know, voice of the customer studies, customer interactions, and really understanding the market and where we need to take our long-term innovation projects so we know where to skate to in the future. There is a lot happening there, but again, it's all building on a very strong foundation and just adding to that the things that we think we need to do in order to have the right setup for us going forward.
Yeah, so Simon talked a little bit about strategy and where we're going there. I think that's foundational. As we talk about commercial excellence and growth, it's really, as we think about it, segmentation and making sure that we have the right segmentation. What are the verticals? Where are the areas that we're going to play? Being very thoughtful and specific and directional in terms of how we go after what we're doing. That's an area, like Simon said, where we're continuing to build, starting from a phenomenal space and looking to really build on top of that. From there, as we think about this, you go from market segmentation and vertical segmentation, then you really get into the customer. Customer segmentation and thinking about what does the customer need. How do we serve the customer to really make sure that we're addressing their issues, their problems?
That then allows us to go ahead and really solve for growth as we're thinking about it. As an example, as we segment the customers, it really leads you to a go-to-market strategy. You're going to go to direct, or are you going to go through a channel? This is a great example of where Honeywell, as Wiley was talking about, really built out some phenomenal resources and tools in terms of a channel program, really solved for some other businesses that are heavy, heavy channel users. We get to inherit that. We've gone through the process. We've built out the channel program. We think that really gives us an opportunity to be differentiated in some of the ways that we go to market. We talked a lot about linkages between our two businesses.
As we look at overall growth, I think an area where we really want to continue to grow in is how do we take the really good things that are happening across both of our businesses and get them out across the business to all the salespeople in a very efficient and effective way. As we think about really instilling that growth culture, that hunting mentality, account planning, building that within our entire sales organization, something that we really are looking to build on and grow and develop further. Those are areas that we're really thinking about and leaning into as what will make us an even better company as we're coming out and getting going here.
This slide, the five pillars, really sort of captures what we're focused on. What it doesn't capture is the interconnection points between the pillars. What we're very intentional about is these are not independent pillars that operate on their own. There are multiple connection points between each of them. For example, innovation and commercial, we are intentional about making sure that the commercial team works day to day with the innovation team. We're pulling that customer intimacy back into the R&D facility, back into the lab to make sure we're innovating to solve that customer problem. Maybe the vice versa is we're forceful, we're purposeful about making sure our commercial teams, our sales teams are spending the right amount of time with our R&D teams so they understand where the technology is going, so they have the right tools to go and have the right conversation with the customer.
In each of these domains, there are all of those multiple interaction points to make sure this entire system operates as one cohesive unit.
Great. Maybe lastly, I think we have a couple of minutes here, but a little bit on a lighter note. All three of you gentlemen have been Honeywell employees for a lot longer than I have. What are you most excited about here now being able to spin out and stand on our own two feet and operate as our own company? Maybe we'll start with Wiley and pass it back to you.
I've been with Honeywell for 13 years now, and it's an exceptional company to be a part of. You're one of many, and you're competing for capital, you're competing for resources. What's most exciting for me is as an independent company, we're one of one, and we get this charter on path here, and we're sort of masters of our own destiny. We're super excited to really focus on everything that we're meant to be focusing on to continue to be successful as an advanced materials company.
Yeah, I think that really resonates with me as we think about the ability to really own our destiny on where we're going, right? Thinking about where do we need to go to really be successful, what are the capital, what are all the levers that we have within our disposal, right? In terms of M&A, organic investments, and so forth, I think that really allows us to grow and reach the full potential that we have. As you look, you'll see the team out doing the product demonstrations and so forth. I know the team's very excited about that opportunity, and you'll probably sense it in their excitement as they're talking about what they're doing on their products.
Yeah, and just building on that, for me, it's all about the team and the people, right? I'm just thrilled. There's a lot of excitement in the organization, as you can imagine. I'm just excited to see the lift in this business and this company and everybody in the organization realizing their full potential. We've also brought on quite a few people as part of the separation process because we had to build back a lot of corporate functions that Honeywell was doing. There are several hundred new folks that have joined, really impressive backgrounds, a lot of talented people that have come in the organization. Just seeing that existing organization and the new organization gelling and seeing that whole organization just sort of lift itself up, I can't wait to see all of that. I'm super excited for that. Can't wait.
I guess I'd add, as one of those people who joined the organization recently, only two and a half months, I think getting to learn and understand the growth opportunity here at Honeywell, the asset quality that we have, really made an easy decision for me to leave my seat on the sales side and jump all in here on the Honeywell story. I'll let these gentlemen go. I could ask them questions all day, but I know everybody wants to hear from our CFO and financial guidance and have you guys ask questions. We'll stop there. Thank you very much.
Okay, thanks, Mike. It's really great to be here this afternoon. Let me share a little bit about myself. My name is Tina Pierce, and I'm the CFO for Solstice Advanced Materials. I've had the privilege to work for Honeywell for over 25 years. The last eight years, I've served in a number of operational roles as CFO for three of the reported segments, three out of four of the reported segments within Honeywell. During that time, I served as the CFO for Performance Materials and Technologies. This business was one of four businesses in that portfolio. That's where I learned that it was really a hidden gem. When Vimal announced that he was going to do the spin of this business, I quickly raised my hand and jumped all in. Very excited to be here.
Let's start with, you know, we're starting with an extremely strong foundation in this business. First is the resilient sales growth that you heard about. Even during COVID, even during the pandemic, our sales were only down 5%. On the next slide, we'll talk a little bit more about how we're doing that. This business over the last seven years has been extremely resilient. Secondly, the best-in-class margin profile at 26.4%. A lot of that's driven by the innovation. I think you could sense the passion that you just heard from our panel and all the different growth ideas and the areas that we're going to be focusing on that have very strong secular demand trends. Third, we're starting with a very strong balance sheet, only 1.5 x net leverage. This is going to give us a lot of optionality as we move forward, a very clean balance sheet.
Strong cash conversion. I have to say, from the time that I've been CFO for three out of four segments in Honeywell, cash generation is a real passion of mine. In fact, we've already started looking for new ideas, a fresh perspective, looking at every element of working capital on what we can do to be even better and sharper. Finally, David mentioned a little bit about the compelling ROIC at 21.5%. That is really ingrained in this business in terms of that very disciplined way that we look at the business. Jeff mentioned the AstraZeneca deal. This is one where we signed a long-term contract and we built the asset. We've got that up and running now and we can bring it to scale. That's how we tend to approach these types of opportunities. Let's go a little bit deeper on the resilient sales growth.
4.4%, much stronger than our peers. David also mentioned that this is all organic. Over the last seven years, we have not done any acquisitions. Absolutely, all of this is organic. We have a very desirable footprint. 90% of the U.S. sales are actually manufactured in the U.S., and 60% for the rest of the world is manufactured in that respective region. When we got into tariffs earlier this year, there is a lot of resiliency in this business because of that very favorable footprint. Where we did have some minor tariff impact, we moved very quickly to price that through or change the supply chain to a more favorable footprint for us to mitigate those tariffs. We will talk a little bit more on the next page here in terms of the adjusted EBITDA performance, that's equally important.
would say if you look on the right-hand side, these are really what I call the secret sauce behind the how of how we deliver such strong financials. First is that customer tenure. I think you heard it from all of our speakers today in terms of the customer centricity. Always been part of this business, but even more so going forward. Secondly, in our refrigerants business, 50% of this business comes from the aftermarket. Jeff also mentioned that for YF, we're starting to see more of that business turn to the aftermarket. There is additional opportunity there. 45%. We're constantly innovating and working. You heard about some of the exciting applications from the previous panel. We're constantly innovating and reinventing ourselves. 45% for our ESM business is customer specified. That's obviously a great position to be in.
In Jeff's business, it's really driven by the strong patent portfolio that we have. Now, as we transition here from day one, from the time that this spin was announced, Honeywell provided the guidance that we would be at a 25% margin for this business in 2025. That's exactly where we're at. We'll talk about some of the areas where we have a few headwinds here in terms of the standalone cost. We're going to stand up a TSA. Most of the TSA is related to the IT function. There are some minor TSAs for the other functions, and those tend to be a shorter duration. IT is the longest. We're going to work to optimize that footprint. Right now, we're starting with 12 months.
Second, you may have seen this in the document, we did in 2024, largely in the first half of last year, some opportunistic sales for our Metropolis site. This is where we were linked or pegged to a very favorable spot rate for uranium back to 2019. We don't have access to those types of spot deals anymore. Over $100 million of revenue associated with that and $42 million of margin. That was truly a one-time item. We have that called out in the appendix. I believe it's page 66, where you can see what the pro forma adjustment is for that particular item. Finally, some really transitory items. In terms of this spin, the approach has been to Solstice up as a standalone company within Honeywell effective August 1st.
We've had the opportunity to run for a couple of months here to make sure that we're truly ready for the spin. As we were doing that and completing the balance sheet carve-out and all of that, there are some transitory items. Those obviously will not be repeating. Now, as we turn our attention to the long-term guidance, one is, as I mentioned, is really optimizing the TSA. We'll be on that for 12 months roughly. Given the scale of Honeywell, how can we come up with more of a fit-for-purpose, more cost-efficient model? Secondly, the panel discussed our new operating model. We're starting from a position of strength with everything that we've learned from Honeywell. Absolutely fabulous experience there. How do we hone that in for Honeywell?
A lot of focus on the innovation that we spoke about, the customer segmentation, so many different areas that we're going to focus to make the customer number one. Finally, and we did provide some examples on this, a lot of focus on where we can debottleneck. These tend to be lower-risk projects, high return, where we can do these projects very quickly to unleash some capacity. We provided some examples in the deck for you. Just to recap here, we're still at the 25% adjusted EBITDA for 2025. We're starting with a very strong balance sheet, 1.5 x net leverage. We just finished the debt raise a couple of weeks ago, and it went extremely well. We were oversubscribed. Pricing was very favorable. We have $1 billion on the term loan B, $1 billion on the bond or the senior notes.
Overall, we're starting with a great position from a liquidity standpoint. Now let's change gears here and discuss capital expenditures. If I could go back in time here, during the pandemic, like a lot of companies, there was a scale back on some of the capital spend. Over the last couple of years, you'll see on the lower part of that stacked bar, we have been spending extra money on the maintenance part of CapEx. The lower bar is maintenance. The upper part of that stacked bar is growth. By the end of this year, we're expecting to go more back to industry type of averages after we've done that catch-up post-pandemic. You can see in 2025, this year, that's where some of the CapEx programs, we talked about Spokane, what we're working to do in terms of the sputtering targets, AI, that $200 million investment.
We've already launched into that particular investment. As we mentioned, we're going to be having the groundbreaking ceremony here very, very soon. We expect in the near term that we will have, as we approach, we see all these growth opportunities, that we will have kind of the similar level of CapEx as what we've seen in 2025. By the end of the medium term, we're expecting that to normalize back to mid-single digit, which is what we had prior to 2025. Let's discuss cash conversion as it relates to our growth investment profile. Starting with, as I mentioned, we're spending a little bit more on growth where we tremendously. There is a slight, in the near term here, a slight impact on the cash. By the end of the cycle, you'll see that we start to return back to the normal levels of cash conversion.
David shared our capital allocation philosophy. I think if there's one takeaway from today, it's just really this organization is full of growth ideas. Our first priority is going to be unleashing all of that potential of the business and reinvesting in this business, both in terms of the CapEx as well as R&D and some of our manufacturing assets. Second, we want to maintain a strong balance sheet as a new standalone company and improve and have a great track record with our debt holders. Third, we're looking at selective M&A. Right now here in the near term, it's going to be focused on all these growth opportunities that you've just heard about. We are planning on a modest dividend. Of course, that will need to be approved by the new board. We may do selective buybacks depending on if there's the right opportunity.
What everyone's been waiting for now in terms of the financial guidance. Let's start with 2025. For sales, we're forecasting $3,750 million- $3,850 million. If you look at the midpoint of that, that would be essentially low single digit. I also mentioned that we did have in 2024 those $100 million of opportunistic AES sales. We have some information in the backup in the appendix that will give you more details associated with that. In terms of the adjusted standalone EBITDA, the 25%, as I mentioned, we did have some transitory items this year that we don't expect to reoccur next year in addition to the AES very favorable sale. Finally, on the CapEx, we're guiding to $365 million- $415 million on that. As we look medium term, what we see there for the sales is low to mid-single digit.
The way that we're thinking about this is we've just recently launched into a lot of these new growth vectors that you've heard about today. Spokane is a perfect example of that. That's why we're providing that range. By the end of the medium term, we're expecting that a lot of those programs are finished and we're starting to see the payback from them. Mid-single digits on the EBITDA CAGR, return back to the strong sales or the cash conversion that I spoke about. Here in the near term, it will be a little bit impacted because of these growth CapEx programs. Finally, maintaining this very disciplined capital deployment. I believe it was Wiley that mentioned the four end markets that we're really approaching and this business, you've seen the 21.5% tremendous track record and we don't want to sacrifice that in any way.
Let me just recap here in terms of that the future for Honeywell is really bright. We're starting with a really strong base in this company, really a leading position versus our peers, and we really want to unleash the potential of this business. You've heard a lot of those growth ideas. That's going to be the focus. We're just really getting started. Really thank you for coming today. Now we'd like to turn it over to Mike for the Q&A section of the agenda.
Give us a minute to get assembled here, and then we'll fire it up.
He's going to stand.
All right, now we'll do about 30 minutes of Q&A. There are two mic runners here in the room. The only thing I ask is please state your name and your firm to introduce yourself. Maybe we'll start with John here, and then again, please raise your hand and the mic runner will come find you.
It's John. John McNulty.
Give it a little. I think you're good now.
All right, there we go. . Maybe two questions. Of the 4.4% growth that you've seen historically, can you help us to color in how much of that's been price mix versus volume and how we should be thinking about that going forward? In terms of your growth targets going forward, can you speak to, it sounds like a number of your businesses are at least a little bit capacity constrained. Can you help us to think about how that growth trajectory may change through your three-year outlook as some of the new capacity comes on?
Sure, thanks John. I'll kick off and certainly have the team give some additional color. If you go back historically and look at it, it's been a combination of volume and price. If you were to average it out, you could probably, you know, some years 60-40, some years 40-60. It's a pretty even blend of volume and price. As we look forward, we see being at the inflection point of some of these growth trends. We do see volume in that medium term growing, maybe a little faster than historical. That capacity constraint that you mentioned is really important. That's why that investment in Spokane is so critical. We made some of the investments in Louisiana and Jeff's business as well and continue to look at the nuclear business with the backlog we have and continue to look at debottlenecking opportunities there. Tina, Jeff, Simon, I'm sure.
Yeah, the only thing I would add is a couple of things. One is we had a page on the CapEx programs, some four or five that we highlighted. A lot of that helped fuel some of the growth that you're seeing right now. This business has a very good track record of covering inflation through price overall. We're going to continue to look for those opportunities where there's the kind of the high return on the debottleneck projects. Of course, the large Spokane project that we spoke about.
I would add there's small debottleneck projects happening, especially in the ESM business as we go along. It's not like all of the capacity comes online in one big chunk later on. Like I mentioned, capacity coming online in 2026. We've had capacity come online this year in our Spectra Shield fiber business. More capacity comes online next year. We're incrementally bringing the capacity online in addition to some of the bigger projects that we're doing. We're able to keep up with the growth in the short term as well.
Thanks Jeff .
Maybe John back there, and then to David.
Thank you, John Roberts, Mizuho. The R&D slide on slide 17, you listed four major programs. You talked about three, but you didn't really talk about battery materials very much. It got a little lip service. It's listed there with the other three major areas. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing.
Yeah, John. That goes a little bit to the EV strategy we have. Wiley, I don't know if you want to maybe just talk a little bit about how we think about it and have Jeff.
I'll kick it off. That's one of our cross-platform strategies. There's a program within Simon's business. It's a merging program where we feel like we're well placed to serve that market. It's within the battery itself. It's a component within the battery. On Jeff's side, if you think about what a battery is, it's two electrodes, a separator, an electrolyte. Within the electrolyte, there's a lot of fluorine floating around. We feel like there's a tremendous innovation space, still unmet customer challenges there that we're very well positioned to attack. I don't know, Jeff, if you want to sort of take it from there in terms of where you think that innovation program will go.
Yeah, and John, over the last number of years, we stood up an internal battery lab in Buffalo that is actively working on different formulations for the industry. In particular, areas we're focusing on are additives for voltage, which allow to get to higher voltages, and also on rapid charging. When we think about the challenges that are out there, those are areas where with the current base of electrolytes that are used today, getting to a higher voltage and/or getting faster charge are areas that are ripe for innovation. Those are areas that we're investing in, filing IP, and doing things like that behind that. Early days in that, but I think it's an exciting opportunity for us to continue to invest and grow in. With Simon, I think there's more things there along battery as well.
Yeah, I mean, we have some projects looking at additive technologies into some of the cathode cells and different things like that to improve performance on some of the coatings technologies. We have a number of initiatives like that that we're also exploring and looking at.
Maybe David next, and then we'll go to, yeah.
Thank you, Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Two questions, Jeff, for you. How do margins vary across your businesses? For you, David, your returns on capital are very high. My question is, are they too high? Meaning, are you passing on business that has low return, but also would still be value creating? How do you think about that? Thank you.
Yeah, great. Jeff, I'll have you start.
Yeah.
I'll grab that kick.
In just starting off, we won't comment on the margin rates of subsegments, but I can point towards that our refrigerants business is the highest margin within the portfolio.
Thanks. You know, the return on invested capital, it's a wonderful number. We have always, as we've built it, said we need to be above 15% in these large growth projects. It just so happens we have a very rigorous product process. Volumes usually have been coming through at a higher level. We would not pass up if it was a 16%, 17%, 18% on an internal rigor metric if it's an industry that we know we want to grow and we know we can focus and we can get margin expansion. When you get below 15%, we'd probably shy away from it.
Maybe next to Arun back there. I saw Kevin and Josh.
Thanks, Arun Viswanathan, RBC Capital Markets. My first question is just on the growth. This year it looks like HFOs went from 45% to over 60% penetration. Yet if I look at the slide on your sales growth, you are kind of flattish from 2024- 2025 on an LTM basis. Am I reading that wrong or maybe you can just comment on, is there some catch-up growth that you expect in 2026? On that note, I think 2026 is a year where you won't see a step down in the quotas. Do you still expect to be at a similar growth rate or would it be on the lower end of that low to mid-single digit rate for 2026?
Go ahead, Jeff.
Sure. Yeah, just thinking a little bit about 2024- 2025. The transition there, as you're seeing that growth in HFOs, is largely driven by U.S. transition to R-454B. That really was the largest driver that we saw there. As you look at the year-over-year comps, right, remember it includes all the businesses, and Tina did talk about some of the one-timers that we saw in the prior year. As we're lapping those and we get back, we see ourselves getting back to kind of the more normalized growth rates.
I would just maybe add one other thing on just highlighted the aftermarket business. As these HFO stationary units get into the market, you'll start to continue to see growth in our aftermarket sales, which is actually a little bit higher sales price and margin.
Just to confirm, it sounds like you don't have the $100 million from the extra uranium sales, but was there also some other offset like lower freon pricing or something like that? Did refrigerants grow at a respectable clip for you guys this year? Yeah, overall, as you look at the refrigerants business, it has been an attractive grower year-over-year. We are seeing that come through with relatively stable pricing. The other question I had was just on immersion cooling. When do you expect some kind of commercial revenue or NEBA, if at all, or what's the kind of path in that business?
Go ahead.
Sure. I'll go ahead and start and then I can let Wiley. I think as we look at it, we really look at it as an ecosystem across the whole cooling needs. We see the next commercialized process being out there really being two-phase direct chip. I think that's the immediate one that becomes the next innovation. As we look at this industry, innovation continues to evolve and things move based on what's happening there. I think a few years ago, we would have thought that things would have been pulled in closer. As we've developed new cooling technologies, that's pushed out to make sure that we have the right solutions at the right time. That's really driven by the chip makers and the data center.
As we look at it, it's probably, we think it's probably several years away, but we really focus on the next one coming to market that we see as some form of direct to chip.
I think that's right. There's nothing really, I think when you think about the two technologies, the direct to chip two-phase, that's really to solve the chip power issue. As rack power, rack density starts to increase, that's where immersion cooling comes in. As Jeff noted, that seems to be a longer-term challenge. The more immediate problem to solve is the chip power issue.
Right. Maybe next to Ken, as I mentioned, then Josh, then Vincent.
Thank you, Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners. David, I'd be curious to hear your sort of medium to long-term thoughts on portfolio composition. You're inheriting, it seems to me, a portfolio with a river of fluorine running through it, right? World scale, world-class fluorine expertise, and that's a common thread chemistry-wise that runs through nearly all of your major products, it seems to me. One of the classic benefits of spinning companies off is more efficient capital allocation, right? Can you speak to that? To what extent do you see Solstice moving into maybe high growth, high return adjacencies that might be perceived as a little bit of a step out from history? How do you think the portfolio might be different in three years or five years?
Yeah, thanks for the question. As you've heard Jeff and Simon talk about the segment, there are really a lot of exciting segments, and there are some synergies within those segments. With the margin profile we have, with the resiliency of the sales growth, we really like the portfolio. Having said that, I've always had a process of ensuring you're going through a strategic process on the business as well as the portfolio. Are we the best owners for that? As we start off, we really like the portfolio, but we'll go through that strategy process every year and see where that portfolio evolves. As you think about the growth and the bolt-on acquisitions, when you look at those growth pillars that we talked about, those will really be the focus of where we want to grow.
Maybe next to Josh, and then to Vincent.
Thanks, Josh Spector with UBS. Two questions on EBITDA basis for this year. First, just one of your refrigerants competitors have talked about disruption and maybe that impacting you more than the industry around cylinder supply and manufacturing, maybe availability on the refrigerant side. Can you give your side of that story? Did it impact you materially in 2025? Is that a benefit for 2026 as some of that normalizes? In your appendix to get to your standalone EBITDA, there's bout $95 million- $100 million of standalone adjustments. It sounds like you're saying there's some other one-time costs that maybe are reoccurring this year. Can you size those so we have that number as well, please?
Yeah, sure. Jeff, I think it would be good to talk about a little bit of the spike we had in canisters and HFOs, and then Tina can talk about the one-timers.
Yeah, it certainly, as we look at this year with the rollout, as R-454B came out, there was a lot of demand. Demand did exceed supply across the industry. There was a lot of catch-up that happened there. You referenced cylinders, you know, really going towards, hey, there was a shortage. As we're now at the end of the season, right? We're sitting in October and looking forward. We're really pleased to say that I think we've worked through that, right? That capacity has come online as it's needed to come online. Looking forward, we feel like we're in a really good position going forward into 2026. I like, as we're looking through that and what needs to happen, maybe just a few differences that we've kind of seen as we're thinking about this transition.
It was a very rapid transition, meaning that R-454B effectively on January 1st, it was all new units had to be manufactured in that. There was a lot of need to stock into the channel and so forth. We see as we go through this winter into next spring, really being in a good position to serve customers and so forth. I don't think there will be an impact similar to what happened this year going forward.
Okay. In terms of the one-time items, there's a couple of things that I mentioned. One was the alternative energy sale, $100 million of revenue, roughly $41 million, $42 million of income associated with that. That was largely the first half of 2024. As we stood up the business in the second half of the year, there's roughly about $30 million of items that we don't expect to recur.
Maybe next to Vincent, and then over to Jeff.
Thank you. Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley. Some of the large HVAC customers last month were speaking about some inventory that's built from them, having been a sort of a pull forward in HVAC demand over the last year, perhaps ahead of the step down in all the pricing that they were taking. Is that something that's going to impact your volume in the next two, three, four quarters? Is that something that's sort of been smoothed out in your supply chain? I have a second question.
Okay. Jeff, maybe talk about from a stationary standpoint, and then the aftermarket that ties into that.
Yeah. We've seen continued strong demand within the stationary. As we think specifically about OEMs, what's happening is you look year-over-year, it hasn't been dramatically different for participation there. Next year as we're talking about things, I think it'll be relatively stable growth year-over-year as we look at that. For us, as we think about the aftermarket, that's where we see, hey, R-454B units are being installed. You also have the install base of legacy systems as well that we're still able to serve. We see that being a resilient part of our portfolio that allows us to have some stability through the peaks and troughs that are happening there.
Thank you. If I could just ask, can you give us some sense of what you think the dividend payout ratio is? Is it correct to sort of assume that your goal is to sort of plug the difference between free cash flow and dividend with bolt-ons?
Yeah, I'll start. I'll certainly turn it over to Tina. Yes, I think there's a conservative look at how we want to use a percentage of our free cash flow for the dividend, you know, and make sure we have that runway as we want to continue to grow that. With what's left over, with the balance sheet that we have, that will determine, you know, how we think about M&A and bolt-on M&As with that. I'll certainly have Tina.
The only thing I would add is we're thinking starting on the lower end of the kind of the peer set.
Maybe over to Jeff, and then to Jeff.
Jeff Zekauskas from JP Morgan. When you think about the R-1234yf industry over time, I think the composition of matter patents have expired, though in particular countries for mobile applications, there's still patent protection. I think R-1234yf is not used in China in their electric vehicles. I was wondering if you could comment on, right now Solstice and Chemours are the two largest players by far. What do you think the industry structure will look like in 2028 or 2030 or 2035? How do you think that will change? Do you think China will adopt this technology? Do you think it will go to a Chinese producer or will you capture the business? Can you talk about some of those dynamics longer term?
Sure. Do you want to take a stab and I'll just add on?
Sure. Yeah, happy to. First off, let's talk a little bit about the IP portfolio. As we think about it, we think of it as really an IP strategy, right? It's really thinking about, all right, how do you layer your IP and then how do you ladder your IP out? When you talk about composition of matter and things like this, we're very thoughtful of going after applications, composition of matter in a variety of different elements. We continue to do it even after something comes online. There is no single date where a patent portfolio will continually be irrelevant. It'll continue to go on forward. There are even certain parts of the R-1234yf that go even into the 2040s, right? There's a variety of different patents and so forth on different things that go there.
As we look at, you mentioned 2028, we feel very strong about the patent portfolio for R-1234yf and how it continues through that time period. As you begin to get beyond the 2020s, let me go ahead and stop there and talk a little bit about your question in terms of adoption in China and so forth. Of course, China is the largest market for automobiles, I think approximately 30 million autos each year. Within EVs, we're seeing strong adoption of YF in China today. There is an adoption that's happening and that is beginning to occur, especially in the export market, right? You have to think about a lot of the vehicles that are being exported. Certainly, we're seeing that adoption. In the long term, we are very close.
We're working with leading car makers in China and around the globe to make sure that we have a solution that is fit for purpose for what they're doing. Whether it's a neat product or a blend or things like that, we're really working closely with those automakers in region in China to have the right product for them. For us, innovating and being close to the customer is critical to it. I think we will see continued adoption where we'll participate within that region.
Yeah, maybe just to add, you know, China has been talking about adoption into the decade. Whether that happens, I don't know. To Jeff's point, the automotive opportunity in China, we are in it today and we actually have a very good position as we move forward.
Just to go back, in terms of the industry structure, do you see it as two sort of large players and then tiny players? Do you think the structure over a five or ten-year period might alter?
Yeah, it's a little bit hard to answer precisely. We're spending a lot of time thinking about that and what those actions need to take to end up in a really strong position going forward. This is something Wiley and I are partnering on and looking forward in terms of how do we make sure we're set up for success there.
Terrific, thank you. Duffy Fischer at Goldman Sachs. If I can go to your bar chart where you showed that 4.4% CAGR over time, it's pretty stark. You've got four years in the beginning that are basically dead flat. Then almost all the growth that happens in that eight-year period happens in two years right after COVID. You kind of come back to four flat bar charts after that. What drove so much of that growth in those two years? Obviously, there was some funky stuff coming out of COVID. Why isn't there more consistent growth in the four bar charts in the beginning and the four at the end?
I'll start and I'll certainly have the team add additional color. You're exactly right on COVID. If anybody tried to buy an HVAC unit right around that timeframe, it was incredibly difficult.
The demand was just so strong with everything coming out of that. I think when you look at that, and this is why I get excited about where we're at today, we're at an inflection point on a lot of these businesses. When you go back there, nuclear was not a growth opportunity. In fact, as you know, we referenced, we actually shuttered that plant. Semiconductors was actually going through, if you remember during COVID, a bit of a downturn before this advent of AI. We had businesses, and that's the resiliency of our portfolio, that were doing a nice bit of growing, but offsetting some of those businesses that weren't growing and maybe even had some negative growth. As we look at where we're at today, we see refrigerants continuing to grow with that nice pattern Jeff showed.
We see semiconductors now at a completely different trajectory, and we see nuclear at a place where we have never seen before. I think the resiliency with the portfolio that we have got us through a lot of that macroeconomic time. Now we're at this inflection point where all these businesses are now in a really good spot with the secular trends that are going on today.
I would just add also, we did some of those debottleneck projects. If you look at that CapEx chart that we had in there and the timeline, it's exactly the timeline that you're referencing. That was the other lever.
Thank you. Maybe I'd like to go back to Jeff's question on the HFO. When should investors expect, either in Europe or the U.S., where you've got HFO penetration today, for one of the non-duo today that have the HFO technology to be selling products? Not say Arkham that's licensed from you, but somebody who's come in kind of post-patent. When should investors, in the mobile market and the stationary market, expect to see in Cooling Post an article saying this or that company is coming into the market?
Yeah, as we look at it, we feel very good about the patent portfolio through the remainder of the decade. As we look at things, I think we have a great line of sight to there. We'll continue to enforce and fight and really protect our IP as far as we can. Like I said, it does go out. There are patents that underlie and go out even further than that, but we'll continue to make sure that we are enforcing those.
Maybe the other point I would just add while you hand the mic to Patrick, I would just add if you haven't heard us today talk at all about the industrial economy, the macro, and that's intentional. We're not banking on China getting better. We're not banking on the industrial world or auto or any of those inflecting. As you guys all know, it's been a very challenging environment the past couple of years, but that's not part of our forecast for really driving our own outcomes here, both top line and EBITDA.
I'm Patrick Cunningham with Citi. It seems like you have a pretty unique value proposition on the sputtering targets, specifically, you know, so much so that you have pretty high ROIC investment, IRR investment. It seems like a no-brainer. Could you help us understand your market position in the other process chemistries and some of the advanced packaging? You know, where do you have the right to win today? You know, what is maybe more reliant on the development of advanced nodes and you winning new business?
Yeah, great question. I think you're very clear on sputtering targets, and we do have a very strong case for growth there. I would say it's very similar as well on our thermal interface materials. If you look at our TIMs and our phase change materials, we have a very strong growth platform there to grow off of as well. When you look at some of these new spaces, some of the new adjacency spaces, we are moving into new spaces, working on new applications. There are qualification period x, right? There's more uncertainty about the opportunities in those spaces. Although we are getting some early indications on a couple of projects we're working on that there's favorable feedback in terms of what our product is bringing to the table.
What we have a good understanding about is the properties that we deliver in terms of planarization performance or gap-fill performance. We have platforms that are clearly meeting the needs of the market. We just need to work through the innovation development cycle because it's still early in that process. I can't say to you today that we have a new winning platform for advanced packaging. All I can say is we are working on it. We have a number of different projects. We're engaged with a number of different ideas and concepts. We're also looking at display. Display is another market where we have some, I think, some opportunities to do some stuff as well. I think really strong right to win with our copper manganese portfolio, really strong right to win with our thermal management portfolio.
Those are the two platforms we're really leveraging in the short term while we get these other adjacency plays up and running.
Any last, John? We'll go back to you.
Maybe just one follow-up on the M&A front. You don't have a lot of experience. You haven't made, in terms of acquisitions, dropped in under Honeywell. You haven't really had a whole lot of experience. I guess can you speak to the M&A pipeline and how you think about building up where there's an absence of muscle memory as you kind of look forward? How should we think about how this may phase through over the next 12 months- 18 months?
Yeah, John, it's a great question. It's exactly the work we're doing with Wiley right now. Wiley, maybe you can just talk about how we're thinking about building that pipeline and how we think about M&A. The other part of that too is making sure when you do them, you have a really solid integration process for success.
Sure. When we think about M&A, as I discussed in our panel, we think about it as a tool on how to deliver our growth across the strategic pillars. Our M&A, our growth aspirations are organized around those strategic pillars. Anything we see as an M&A enabler, an opportunistic bolt-on, will sit within those pillars. We have an active pipeline discussion across each of those strategic pillars that we're working on. In terms of muscle memory, we're a Honeywell company and a lot of us came from Honeywell and have actively participated in M&A. We have that skill set. We're bringing that to the table, not only in acquisitions, but also joint ventures and joint development agreements. The whole portfolio of inorganic tools are at our disposal to be successful here.
The only other maybe piece I'd add, because this team has such deep customer relationships and history, there's actually customers from our M&A pipeline standpoint saying, you know, we think this might be a good avenue for you to build upon. We know we have a confidence level that it's a good adjacent market for us.
Great. I think we'll stop there. Really appreciate everybody's time. The show does go on next door with our product exhibits and a bit of reception. I think Dave is just going to say a few words here.
I just really want to thank everybody for coming out this afternoon. Hopefully, you heard the excitement that we all have about this business and that opportunity to unleash that growth pipeline that's there. We just think we're in terrific markets with terrific technologies, a strong IP position, a passionate group of employees that are truly our secret sauce. As we like to say now that we've revealed our brand, we all bleed purple and are going to be excited to see what this company can do and looking forward to partnering with all of you on that journey. Thanks again for your time today.