Welcome, everybody. Quick logistical note, there's a charging station in the back if you need to charge your devices. If you look on the floors in front of you, you'll see a bunch of Hubbell floor boxes, so you're guaranteed to get very high-quality power management as you charge those devices. So again, thanks for taking the time to spend your morning with us. Obviously, a lot of interest in the electrical space, and more specifically, I think, Hubbell's role at the intersection of grid modernization and electrification. You're gonna hear us talk a lot about those trends today, but I think more importantly, about the strength of our business model and our strategy, and how we feel like that uniquely positions us to continue outperforming over the next few years, as well as over the long term.
So before we get into that, just a couple of quick disclaimers. We're gonna make forward-looking statements today. Those statements are inherently uncertain in nature, so there's a bunch of risks outlined on page 3, so please take a minute to read through those. We're also gonna be making comments around non-GAAP financial measures. Those are reconciled to the GAAP measures that are in the appendix slides. So with that, let me turn it over to Gerben.
Great. Thank you, Dan, and good morning, everyone. I'm Gerben Bakker, and I have the privilege to serve as Hubbell's CEO since 2020. I joined Hubbell 35 years ago, the year that Hubbell celebrated a 100-year of existence. So, you know, clearly a company with long and deep roots in the industries we serve. Before I get started on highlighting our ambitions and our targets for the future, you know, I want to take a step back on the last few years. And we do these events about every two years. And as I think back to 2020, when we did this, literally, it was days after that our world changed.
You know, we're all asked to hunker down and to lock ourselves up, but we quickly realized that Hubbell was an essential manufacturer for the critical needs of our customers. So while everybody did that, we had to figure out ways to continue to operate and serve our customers' critical needs. You know, as I look back on that and I, you know, listen to our customers still today, we executed to that really well in first and foremost making sure that our employees had a safe environment to work with, serving our customers' needs, and then managing the cost of our business when it was very, very hard to operate to still achieve acceptable results. Then in 2022, we're back with you, and this is when the supply chain crunch was happening.
All, you know, businesses, including ourselves, were looking for ways as the supply chain was still very constrained to ramp our factories back up. We saw a tremendous inflation in our business alongside with those challenging supply chain dynamics. And as a result, we again took very aggressive action, this time with our pricing, to make sure that we were able to manage through this period very well. So now we sit here in 2024 and, you know, I tell you that while the period was very disruptive to Hubbell, our results through these periods have improved considerably.
And as we now look forward, we look at the tailwinds that we're seeing from the mega trends of electrification and grid modernization on top of a base of business that's fundamentally at a you know much better position, we're really excited to share with you today what that future can hold. So the first thing is that while the environment has changed over the last five years, our strategy hasn't. And what you hear from us today is that we're raising our long-term targets for growth with good visibility to our end markets.
We're raising our targets for our margin, and that's to build profitably on the strong base that we have created, and we're allocating our capital effectively and intentionally to drive good return on investments that we're making. So we're confident that with a durable foundation that we have, a strong strategy that we have, that we continue to deliver for our customers innovation and value for our products and solutions, and for you, our shareholders, double-digit earnings per share growth over the next three years through 2027. I want to take a quick snapshot of the company. As I stated, we've been in existence for over 135 years, a market capital of $20 billion.
That's about double when we were together in 2022, and about three times what that was when we were together in 2020. We have sales of $5.5 billion, operating profits of over $1 billion, margin in the low 20%, and free cash flow over $700 million. What you hear from us this morning and from the team is how we're gonna be driving growth in each one of these key levers over the next few years. But aside from the statistic, I wanted to provide you a little bit of insight about who Hubbell is, and I'll start with our mission is to electrify economies and energize communities. We do this in front and behind the meter with critical utility infrastructure solutions that help enable the transmission and distribution of energy.
and critical electrical infrastructure solution that help the efficient and reliable use of that energy to the different industrial applications. Our Hubbell products and solutions are the backbone of the electrical infrastructure, of the energy infrastructure, I should say, and our vision is to make that infrastructure more reliable, more resilient, and more renewable. And underpinning all of this are our four strategic verticals. This is: serve the customer, grow the enterprise, operating with discipline, and developing our people. And this is the framework by which we run our company. You're going to hear all of the team talk about the different priorities through the lens of these strategic pillars, and this is really the framework of how we manage and lead our company, both short term and longer term.
And then all of this is built on our core values, and our core value of an ethical company, an inclusive company, and a sustainable company. And what we deliver through that to our customers, a quality product, and for our employees, a safe work environment, and for you, our shareholders, performance. And if you look at our position, we have a leading position across this entire energy infrastructure, and this allows us to solve the critical need of our utility and electrical customers. Hubbell products are necessary across this entire journey from, you know, where power is generated, transmitted, distributed, and then used. And our unique position lies in the depth and breadth of the product offering and the strength of our brands, oftentimes specified.
What's unique about them is that generally, we represent a small percent of the total cost of the system that's being implemented, but the products are critical to the function, so the cost of failure for our products is really, really high. So this unique position manifests itself in a couple of ways. For our customers, is that comprehensive portfolio of critical components with a reputation of quality, service, and reliability. And then for our investors, it's an attractive investment and about as close as a pure play that you can find in electrical and utility business in public markets. We've done over the last few years, as I talked about this challenging environment, a lot of work on our portfolio, and we've acquired businesses in attractive businesses of utility, data centers, renewables, and industrial sectors.
At the same time, that we've divested some of our businesses that were lower growth, lower margin, and didn't fit our portfolio as well, most prominently, our C&I and residential lighting businesses. As you can see, not only have we grown this company over that period, but we've posed now to higher growth verticals and higher margin verticals. So you look back to where we kind of GDP-ish growth and mid-teens margin, today, we're sitting at a low twenties margin and clearly GDP plus growth exposure. So we think this in portfolio in total entitles us to growth of 2 times GDP. And if you look at the two pieces, on the left-hand side, you see our utility business.
We believe that that is above that 2x GDP with our, you know, strong position in the secular mega trends of grid automation and modernization. Within that, you see our grid infrastructure business with a leading position of electrical transmission, distribution, and substation, and attractive niches of gas distribution and telecom. And then you see our grid automation business, which are strong positions at the edge with our meter business and AMI offering, as well as a growing presence in the grid automation, protection, and controls. Then on the right-hand side, you see our Electrical segment. This is the side of the portfolio that we've done a lot of work in more recently in divesting from those lighting businesses that traditionally would have had a much larger exposure to a residential and non-residential.
Now, you see over 25% of that exposed to attractive segments of renewables, data centers, electrical T&D, as well as the industrial businesses that we believe with the reshoring and the mega pre- projects that are happening, are very well positioned. Translating that pie chart now to our strategic verticals, this is how we look at our business and how we drive the focus on our business. You can see that over 80% of our revenues are now exposed to these verticals that are GDP plus in growth nature. This is where we're spending our focus on investing, both organically and inorganically. And what's nice about it, not only do they represent the higher growth, but this is where our higher margin of products tend to exist.
So as we grow in this, on these verticals, what you can expect for us to continue to see the margin profile of our company, scale up... And we talked a lot about some of the mega trends and the mega projects, and we thought it would be constructive to outline a little bit of how we're exposed to industrial mega projects, right? We see a lot of these business, and oftentimes we're asked, you know, how does Hubbell benefit through it? And I would say, start by saying we're very well positioned to benefit from these products, and we see it more to benefit from these incrementally over time. And if you see a typical project that gets announced, whether it's a battery plant or a data center, these are generally projects that from inception to completion, you know, are measured in years.
And what we see is initially the electrical systems, the transformer, the gear, the breakers, are materials that are secured early on. These are materials that generally have, you know, lead times that are measured in years. I think right now, that's even further up for that, where developers are wanting to secure that supply. Where the electrical business for us comes in, is in the critical components that serve them. These are products that are typically in the weeks of lead time. They're sold through electrical distribution, so we see those coming through much later in the construction cycle. And then when you look at our utility business, it's much more spread out. And if you think about substations, they're more like the transformer and the gears that get ordered early.
We're seeing those in these projects through our utility business with utility customers. And then, as you think about transmission, this is where our customers don't necessarily plan to any one project, but over the whole of all those projects. And they look at the electrical loads that generated by this, and they do their load planning. And in that load planning, there's, of course, a big need for transmission, for more interconnected grid that we benefit from. So, again, while we see, you know, a lot of our product later in the cycle on the electrical side, and more spread throughout, it's clear that Hubbell is extremely well positioned with our portfolio and with our positions in the market to benefit from these projects.
You know, I talked a little bit about the mega trends and how they affect us, and really two areas of electrification and grid modernization that affect our portfolio. And if you think about that, the grid is continued to be asked to do more. There's more load coming onto the grid, and whether that's from reshoring, from data centers, from electrification of industrial and commercial application, it's taken on more load. At the same time that the grid is taking on renewable generation, and that's increasing the complexity on this grid with the intermittent power and the two-way flow of power. All this on top of a grid that continues to age.
So the need to invest and the need to increase that investment over years and multi-years is very clear to us. Both our electrical and our utility businesses and segments stand to benefit from these two mega trends. You know, taking a step back a little bit and not only looking at how these mega trends affect our business and financial performance, but how these trends and our business drive the impact in our communities. We do this in several ways. First is with the products that we serve, and both electrical as well as utility product help with the integration and the build-out of renewable resources, whether it's wind or solar.
And you'll hear, you know, Mark and Greg talk about later examples of how we serve those needs. But also, within our own four walls, we've increased our capital investments over the last few years, and over the last 3 years, over $20 million has gone back into our own factories to reduce the footprint and the environmental impact that we have with our own manufacturing. That together with more recently that we've made revised and increased commitments to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and waste generation. And, you know, I'd say this is not only for us, the right thing to do, but it's good for our employees, it's good for our community, and it's really good for our business.
Speaking about sustainability, I come back, you know, a little bit where I started, a company that, you know, has a proud 135 years history of performance. Certainly we've made strong progress over the last few years in our journey to move from more from a decentralized holding company to a integrated operating company. That, together with our portfolio that we have today and our focus strategy, really is what enables us to drive our performance to the next level. Even as we evolve in that journey, what doesn't change is our foundation, which is, you know, the mission-critical products that we make for our customers with best-in-class reputation of quality, service, and reliability. The capital that we deploy intentionally to our growth verticals and drive attractive long-term returns.
And then to our, you know, most importantly, perhaps, the, our people that are the competitive advantage for our business, not only in the strong customer relationships that we have, but in the deep, understanding and intimacy with our industry. You know, we have 18,000 people at Hubbell that, at the end, are responsible for our performance. But, yeah, the leadership team, my leadership team, is really responsible for making sure that our organization is motivated and prepared to drive that performance. This team is all here with us. Today, you're going to hear from most of them. We also have with us our key operational people and the VPGMs of our businesses.
I could tell you, you know, I'm really proud of, you know, what these people and what this team does to drive the performance of our company. And what's unique about them is the diversity of their tenure, their background, their experiences, and their perspectives. You know, a couple of examples that I may use, and you're going to hear from them, Mark Mikes. He's the segment leader of our electrical segment. Like me, he's a, you know, 35-year veteran of Hubbell. For many decades, we ran the utility business together, and we grew that, you know, into the business that it is today.
And last year, we asked Mark to help us in the electrical segment and really apply a lot of that playbook that we applied in the utility business, and he's off to a really good start. And then Greg Gumbs, who's sitting next to Mark, joined us last year. Extensive experience in utility, electrical, and industrial businesses before joining Hubbell. You know, I'd say he's integrated into Hubbell, into Hubbell cultures really quickly, hit the ground running very fast, and he's got a clear objective of continuing to drive profitable growth for us. But you can see they sit next to each other, and it's not just staged here.
These two gentlemen work extremely close with each other, even though they run different segments, as well as with the other functional leaders that we have in our business. I want to end with our strategic pillars. This is why I started the presentation with what I said is the key framework for everything that we do. And it's the four pillars that we drive our business. Each one of those has priorities and objectives. And what it does is a few things. First of all, it drives alignment and accountability across the business so that everybody understands what are the priorities, what are the goals that we're after. Then the second one, it drives focus.
It's one of the things that I concern myself with, as we continue to grow, how do we stay focused on what matters? This is the way for us to stay focused on. Each of these metrics have specific multiyear and annual goals, actions, and targets that we drive to. Our organization, certainly all the people in this room and well into the organization, their performance is measured on these, and their incentives are based on this. Then finally, I would say that this framework is a proven framework. We've used this over the last several years, not only our higher performance, but I would say the consistency of our performance, a big part is driven by this.
I'll close by saying that all the targets that we're setting for us over the next few years are reflected in these four pillars. So with that, Bill, if I may, turn it over to you.
Great. Thanks, Gerben. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to join us. It's awesome to see so many of you here today. And I think for me, particularly fun, those of you who've joined us in some of our past sessions, Gerben referred to the past couple, we did them in Midtown, and it's fun for me to be down here at the Exchange. And when I've had the privilege of ringing an opening bell on behalf of Hubbell, they give us a little pin that's called the Century Club. And Gerben was speaking of the long, proud legacy, so we've been traded here as a public company for over 100 years.
When you walk around the halls and down on the floor, everybody stops and say, "Wow, Century Club, we, we don't see a lot of them." So it's fun, fun for us to have you guys here. As just a personal introduction for me, 16 years at Hubbell, and in my 13th year as CFO. No jokes about that, please. And it's been a real privilege, and Gerben talked about some of the market cap moves during that time and how much the company's evolved. And it's been a special place for me to be. So it's great to have you here.
I'm going to come back at the end of the morning and lay out our construct for our revenue growth targets, our margin expansion, and our earnings growth. And at the end of this, I'm going to share with you a page that attempts to estimate and quantify our cash implications of that. And without ruining the story, there's a lot of cash we think we're going to generate over the next 3.5 years... And so I wanted to start this morning on the topic of portfolio management and capital allocation. We think if we do this well, it's gonna really help differentiate our performance. And so I'd like to talk that through with you guys.
So key message-wise, you know, as we think about what capital allocation means to us, you know, the levers, the four levers of acquisitions, share repurchase, dividends, and CapEx.
No, Dan's got it. Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, mic in the back.
Oh.
Hi, Alyssa. We can hear you.
Oh.
And so, I'm gonna spend the most time talking about acquisitions, second most about CapEx, and, share repo and dividend will, will be just, you know, at the end. And the reason we spend more time on acquisitions is, we really think the industrial organization is set up with very large market, fragmented position, and so it's, it's set up quite nicely, set up quite nicely for consolidation. I think secondly, I wanna take a little bit of time to talk about our track record of where we've sold companies, where we've bought them, and where we think that's left us. And third, we do have the means of a strong balance sheet and cash to be able to spend quite a bit of time on this effort.
We think we can add quite a bit of value, so that's what I wanna get to. So the story starts with the pyramid, and those of you who followed us a while, we've used this over the years, and we find this simple image to be quite informative. Our focus is on the middle of the pyramid, and we choose not to compete up at the top. We believe things like global scale, global presence, cost of capital are key competitive factors, and we choose to not compete up there. Down below in the blue, there's a bunch of products that are in our space that either have not a lot of growth, not a lot of margin. They tend to be commodity in nature, and we try to stay away from those.
So you've seen us focus on the yellow in the middle. The electrical components in our view lend themselves to branding, lend themselves to a company with a manufacturer-owned sales force and differentiated sales, and lend themself to a sales pitch where initial cost of ownership is not the issue, but quality and total cost of ownership. And Terry Watson's gonna talk to you a little bit about how we compete and how our distribution channel is structured. We've added this systems and solutions section, so that'll be new to everybody. And we think there's really some interesting ways in which turnkey solutions and grid protection and controls, those kinds of products, can start to really help differentiate ourselves.
So I think the pyramid starts by showing, you know, the answers to the question of where we compete, but it also does a good job at the $50 billion on the right of pointing out the fact that there's a high degree of fragmentation, and that implies that that's a lot of companies out on the second half of the distribution curve that ultimately end up being acquisition opportunities for us. So, part of how we go about acquisitions is we believe with a very intentional, disciplined process. Asit Gupta is in the back. Hopefully, Asit will raise his hand if you guys run into him, coffee hour or lunch. He runs our business development team and efforts, and it really starts with being specific and targeted and intentional.
We try to identify markets that we think are large and have high growth opportunities. We're looking for places where brands matter that will really add to our franchise. We try to be very purposeful about targeting those, and I contrast that to just being opportunistic, and when the phone rings from a broker that you answer the phone and scramble to evaluate, you know, some company that might be for sale. Financial consideration's important for us, that it's additive to our growth profile, that it's additive ultimately in the long term to our margin profile, and that the returns on invested capital are very strong. As we approach that, we try to establish a good reputation with relationships, both with potential sellers, but also relationships with advisors who might be representing sellers.
You know, unique culture is important. Brad is here kinda halfway down the left. If Brad, you'd raise your hand. So Brad ran Systems Control, which is our most recent billion-dollar acquisition we made in December. And maybe you grab Brad over a coffee to find out if our culture was attractive to him as he was evaluating various bids and was trying to find a home for his company and where it could thrive, and who would support the business with capital, who had maybe other lines of business that would be additive. And so, of course, price matters in the M&A world, but we think culture can really help. So we try to go about it in a very intentional way.
You know, I wanted to show you the last five years of effort to give you a sense of where that intention, you know, shows up. It starts maybe with businesses that we own that don't meet the criteria that we're looking for in terms of growth and margin potential. So, over this timeframe, we've sold four different businesses: C&I Lighting, Residential Lighting, High Voltage business, and a consumer engagement business that came with Aclara, raising $500 million in proceeds from those sales. The point is, we're looking to take that, reinvest it in companies that have better margin profile, better growth profile, give us a chance to perform in a higher way.
And so to us, we remain committed to the idea of tending to our portfolio and divesting things if they don't fit, and hopefully, these 4 give you back up that statement. But net, we're gonna be a net acquirer, and you see putting that $500 million into $1.7 billion of investments. And, you know, we've laid across the top of the grid, different verticals, and this is what I mean by being intentional. So we've been looking for things in the T&D grid infrastructure. We've been looking for opportunities in automation, renewables and data centers and the industrial infrastructure. So you can see each of these that we've acquired, you know, being in those intended areas. On the left are the logos and names of the companies we've bought.
There's a good mix between electrical and utility there. So CPI, AccelTex, PCX, being examples on the electrical side, and the balance being on the utility side. People ask, are there different themes rather than just the industries, and does capacity ever come into it? And we were asked this question recently, and so I just point out Balestro, maybe second from the bottom, if you see there. It's a company that makes MOV blocks that go into arresters that are part of the T&D grid. And there's a bit of a special sauce inside of those semiconductors.
To be able to buy a business that had that capacity, and that's down in Brazil, and they've passed all the testing that we need, and we're importing that product to put into our North American solution. So it's an interesting piece. We didn't buy it for its business in Brazil, right? We bought it for the capacity to be able to support the business in North America. PCX and Systems Control represent an interesting theme, because... And I was talking to Jeff a little bit before about this, but the idea of taking labor out of the field, where it can be pricey and not always available, bring it into a factory setting, be able to control that a little bit better, we think, is a really powerful investment theme.
The fact that PCX serves data centers and Systems Control serves substations, you hype that model with picking great verticals, and we think those are awesome investments. So this is a 5-year period. I wanna pull the lens back and maybe look at the last 10 years with a different objective, not so much to show the intention, which was the last page, but here, it's to show the scalability. And when I get to my last page, showing you how much cash there is, I think you'll understand why I'm going here. So I'd maybe point out the third line, where the average purchase price from 10 years ago, 5 years ago, the last 2 years. You'll see we've increased the average size of the target.
I think that becomes important as we get more cash, that typical $100 million deal, it, it's hard to put all the cash to work if that's your, if that's your average size. I think interesting to note, on the second to last line, the EBITDA multiples have, have, inclined themselves upward, over the last period of time, and so I think that's where our intention comes in. We need to make sure there's growth and margin potential in order to, afford the higher multiples. And as we, evaluate every deal we do every year against an ROIC, test. I'm getting a little background. But, being able to earn teens' returns starts to, to become really important, and every $100 million deal is not gonna move the needle for you all.
So part of what I wanted to show is the programmatic nature of this, right? Doing 30 deals and putting $3.5 billion to work over a decade, and continuing to compound those returns, I think, is a place where we can add a lot of value and frankly, get access to companies that, that most of you on the buy side probably don't have a chance to invest in. Not only do we invest in them, we have a bunch of synergies that we can add to them, and make them much more valuable, I think, on our platform than they are standalone. So in addition to acquisition, there is CapEx is the next largest lever, and you'll see in the last three years, we've gone from around 2% of sales to about 3%. That's caused about a doubling of CapEx.
And we're really supporting two flavors with this CapEx. The first is productivity, and a lot of that's automation. And a lot of it is restructuring, and Akshay is gonna be talking, and a couple speakers. Akshay leads our operations function, and he's gonna explain a little bit more about where the CapEx is going. But besides the productivity flavor, the capacity flavor is starting to become more important in places like transmission and the like. So, we're quite aware that CapEx creates future depreciation, and so we're being quite mindful that we're only deploying the capital where future sales support it. And again, good to have the cash flow here to support this kind of investing.
So I wanted to get to this rough quantification of cash application. So over four years, we think we're talking in the ballpark of $4.5 billion of operating cash flow. That CapEx that I just showed you, you can see here, it's in the ballpark of $1 billion over those four years. It won't be that high. That's a conservative estimate. The divestiture was of Resi, which was in early 2024, so that's $130 million of some proceeds. Dividends and cumulative share repo, you see, adds or subtracts about $1.5 billion from $3.5 billion down to $2 billion. And those are also conservative assumptions.
And, and the point is to be left over with $2 billion of cash, you know, we think you can add quite comfortably, 2 or 3 points of sales growth with that, using the scalable, intentional model, that we have. So, we think it's gonna be, has been a big driver of value for us in the past, and I think, I think it will continue to be, in the future. So Gerben shared with you our, our, pillars, and, obviously here we're trying to grow the enterprise, and important for us to operate with discipline and, and choose the right, the right acquisitions, choose the right divestitures, and integrate, integrate well. That takes all that takes discipline. So thanks.
I'm gonna pass it on to Terry to talk about the customer experience and how we win.
Thanks, Bill. Good morning. Thanks, Bill. Again, my name is Terry Watson, VP of Customer Experience. I've been with the company for 18 years, all in customer-facing roles, from leading our channel, to pricing, to regional sales, to marketing and advertising to my current role today. There have been a few things that have been very consistent over those 18 years, and that is reputation matters. This is an industry based on long-term relationships, where living up to your commitments is what counts. Quality matters. Our products play a critical role in forming the backbone of energy infrastructure. They're highly engineered and specified, and customers rely on them. Service matters. Being easy to do business with and solving customer problems drives differentiation and competitive advantage. At the same time, the environment is becoming more dynamic. Growth is accelerating in our markets.
Projects are becoming more complex and larger. Customers are increasingly looking for scale and solutions at scale. Hubbell's focus on maintaining our service excellence to drive differentiation with our end users and channel partners, while fully leveraging the strength of our portfolio and our commercial organization to compete and win in high growth verticals. So how do we serve that market? Let us set the stage here a little bit, just talking about how we go to market through our sales force and channel.... We do that with leading brands and a direct sales force that's deeply knowledgeable and highly focused on Hubbell. Rather than having to rely on reps or agents to push our product, we have over 650 people in the field that wake up day in and day out to sell and represent Hubbell.
The sales force has a long-term relationships with end users and our channel partners, and about two-thirds of our sales ultimately go through distribution. The distribution channel is critical for us in effectively reaching a fragmented electrical contractor base and efficiently serving our utility customers. The channel itself is also very fragmented. The top 10 players make up almost half of our sales, but there's also a quarter of the market that goes through over 5,000 smaller players. This means that competing effectively in the channel requires both scale to partner with the larger players and agility to compete with the smaller ones. Playing in the middle of the pyramid, that Bill described earlier, with strong brands and leading products, positions us well to accomplish this. But you ask, how do we differentiate with our customer?
Whether a product goes direct or through distribution, where we drive value and command a premium for our products, is through end customers demanding it. The person making the ultimate purchasing decision for our products is often the utility engineer, the specifier, plant manager, the developer, or the electrical contractor, and I've had the opportunity to sit down and negotiate with all of them. Our products typically represent a small fraction of that customer's cost, but have a significant cost of failure associated with them. This means that our customers value quality, service, and reliability. It means that they are typically willing to pay a premium for leading brands. It also means that they stick with what works and generally replace installed base like for like.
So the way we make sure we're delivering on that value is by relentlessly focusing on what customers care about and executing against that in a best-in-class manner. You're going to hear Akshay talk a little bit later about how we drive this across our operations, and you're gonna hear from Alyssa talk about how this is embedded in our culture. But beyond the foundational elements, we're also driving intimacy with our customers through service excellence. We got a couple of examples that I'm gonna share with you on how this comes to life. So when you really think about our utility business, we have long-term partnerships that we've created with over 20 IOUs that has been around for about 20 years.
We provide these customers with unique value, prioritize lead times, dedicated inventory management, capacity planning, and training, and as recently as last week and this weekend, storm response support, where we shipped over 100,000 pounds into Dallas to restore electricity. In return, we get loyal customers dedicated to long-term partnerships with Hubbell. Along with visibility into budgets and project planning, creating steady, predictable revenue streams and enabling us to strategically plan our capacity and new product development efforts. Most importantly, this service is unique in the industry, and that only Hubbell can provide this with our industry-leading scale. It's an example of how our commercial organization, our engineers, our operators, have strong relationships and drive unique value to our end utility customers through service. Then moving to the electrical side.
You're gonna hear Mark talk a little bit later about our vertical market strategy and how we've organized our sales force with dedicated teams providing full end-to-end solutions in high-growth verticals. Renewables is a prime example of how that strategy has been successful, and is also a model we are replicating across other verticals. The value proposition we offer in the market is comprehensive bundle of electrical components. Utility-scale renewable projects are typically led by EPCs, and their value drivers are speed and ease of installation. Hubbell's leading depth and breadth of product enables us to offer bundled solutions. Our products represent well below 5% of the project cost, but they are critical to the functioning of the infrastructure, and our customers need to be sure that high-quality products are delivered on time to avoid project delays. Our channel partners are critical in facilitating this.
This model has been highly successful for Hubbell, our channel partners, and our end customers. It drives repeating business and specified positions, while also feeding our acquisition pipeline and innovation, which Mark will touch on further later this morning. As I stated earlier, a central aspect of our strategy is to drive differentiation with both end users and our channel partners, and the distribution channel is a key value driver for Hubbell. Hubbell is typically a top three or four supplier to our largest channel partners, and we play in a highly profitable segment of that market for both us and our partners. While the agility to serve the fragmented segment of our channel is important, we continue to see our biggest opportunities for growth with our largest partners. We're capitalizing on that opportunity with a more coordinated go-to-market approach across our brands, businesses, and product categories.
Our streamlined portfolio and organizational structure are driving increased mind share, making it easier to do business with us, and enabling growth for us and our channel partners in high-growth verticals. If you look at the chart on the right, you'll see Hubbell sales mix to our top five distributor partners, and then the sales mix of the top five distributor partners to their end customers. Hubbell is clearly very strong in utility, a reflection of our leading positions in the market. In the electrical markets, we see significant opportunities for cross-selling and channel conversions within a unified electrical segment. We've already been very successful in our early efforts here, but the key takeaway is that we see plenty of runway to drive outsized growth with our existing customers and in our existing markets.
This page, we've really covered already over the last few minutes, but I stated upfront that Hubbell is well-positioned in an evolving landscape. Hopefully, you can see that as market growth accelerates and projects become larger and more complex, Hubbell has a strong position and an effective strategy to be a full solutions provider. And then, just before I get off stage, I wanted to end where I left off. Quality, reliability, and service excellence are the foundation of what we do and how we compete. Maintaining that clear focus is what's going to enable us to grow with our core customers in existing markets and new growth verticals, and it is what will enable us to maintain our position as the partner of choice. Now, Alexis will share how innovation plays a critical role in differentiating Hubbell. Thank you.
Testing. All right, we had a technical issue with Alexis' microphone.
All right. Thank you. I'm gonna put this here.
No, not at all.
All right. Thank you. Thank you, Terry, for an introduction. Good to be here together. My name is Alexis Bernard. I serve as the Chief Technology Officer for Hubbell for 4 years now, joined in 2020 as well. 2 years ago, we talked about the role of this new CTO function at Hubbell, and it was twofold. Number one was reconnect the company with the innovative roots of our founder, Harvey Hubbell, 135 years ago. Actually, fun fact, the first product plant was actually 2 blocks away from here in the U.S., in Pearl Street, also in 1888, when Hubbell was founded, clearly at the dawn of electricity. The second goal, goal was to harness an innovation mindset and augment Bill's effort of inorganic growth with organic growth, reenergize that muscle of creating new product, new innovation to serve the customer and grow the enterprise.
Alyssa is gonna talk a bit about the mindset shift we've been able to achieve the last couple of years around more organic, you know, entrepreneurial innovation. I wanted to provide an example, basically copying Bill's playbook of inorganic growth with organic growth. We're more intentional, and we're more programmatic with the way we do innovation. Oop! Thank you. So to best recap the journey, we wanted to kinda use another type of pyramid with four levels, specifically for innovation. At the bottom, you can see sustaining engineering. It's critical to who we are and what we do, how we deliver value to the customer. Terry, you just mentioned proven, reliable, sustainable solution with high performance and quality is what our customer expects from us. Often it comes with customized specification, performance, or availability.
It requires a lot of engineering to order, made-to-order type performance, that we are dedicated to provide to our customer. More than half of our engineering time is spent on sustaining engineering. We're committed to sustaining engineering; we just do it more efficiently now. With centralized engineering, shared services, offshoring, better tools, metrics, and processes, we freed up about 10% of our time in sustaining engineering that we can redeploy towards new product development. New product development is now subdivided into two categories: the traditional new product development that we had in the past, and the NPX portfolio, where we discussed two years ago with higher octane, high profile, high potential, 10X type, bigger opportunities that we need to drive organic growth. Bill, you mentioned it's hard to grow with a lot of $100 million acquisitions.
It's hard to grow organically with a lot of 100,000-type organic growth, so we also aim to have bigger projects and fewer big projects. We're gonna talk about how we're more intentional with the innovation management, and now half as many product launch per year drive twice as much organic growth collectively. We do fewer projects, but bigger projects and better projects on average. We then again, repurpose that engineering time towards those few carefully selected NPX projects. Those require specific management attention, resourcing, staffing, cross-BU collaboration, cross-functional cooperation. We cannot take on too many of those such projects per year. On average, we do 10 projects on average per year. Today, after 2-3 years of NPX program, we've got 25 projects in the portfolio, alive and well, that will also contribute to organic growth.
Then again, we repurpose some engineering time towards the strategic growth verticals that we've all highlighted in the past. We aim not just to serve better the customer in those growth verticals, but to create new products that really help solve pain points around ease of installation and performance in those markets. So let's talk a little bit about the funnel innovation management process. There's nothing revolutionary behind funnel management. All companies use that. We wanted to highlight the funnel to show how fundamentally we've changed the way we apply innovation in the funnel at Hubbell. If you look on the left-hand side, it starts with ideation, and that's critical to the success of innovation. We have moved ideation very much from a bottom-up, product-centric, deep into the organization, often siloed ideation, to a much more top-down ideation.
We have developed playbook, specific thematic playbook, to be programmatic with the ideation. Sometimes market ideation, we look at the overall market and see what type of product would make sense for Hubbell. End-user ideation, or day in the life of the end user, if you will, whether it be the lineman or the electrician, how can we make their life better, easier, and provide product that solve pain points that make sense to us? Or sometimes solution ideation with a large breadth of portfolio, and how we combine our products across business units to have more of a solution-centric approach to distributors or, end users, utilities. We now have a front end of the funnel, the opening of the funnel, that is seven times bigger than it used to be.
That doesn't mean that we have 7 times more projects knocking on the door, but we have overall projects that are much bigger. That allows us to be much more selective into which project to fund and staff. That is the second piece of the funnel, if you will. We have revamped the NPD and NPX governance process. At each of the strategic business unit level, led by the VP GM here in the room, we've also staffed specific dedicated leadership around innovation, product road mapping, engineering, and innovation. The GMs themselves are involved into the ideation and selection process, and sometimes we elevate the decision-making all the way to the segment and the enterprise level when the investments are large. Being more specific which bridge project to take on, allows us then to also be more intentional.
As we do that and staff the project, we keep on verifying the value proposition of the project with the customer. We have now revamped how we acquire customer input into the programs, and we do not hesitate to accelerate, pivot, shift, or even kill projects based on the updated voice of the customer. That allows us to have a higher hit rate when our product launch, and again, be more effective with our new product development process. So net-net, if you see overall from the left to the right, we now have a more balanced investment input into the funnel, a good mix of sustaining engineering, NPD and NPX.
At the output of the funnel, you can see that NPD and NPX combine to more than double the rate of organic growth we expect from the product in the funnel, while having half, half as many projects as we used to have. They tend to be bigger with a higher hit rate. So I wanted to talk a bit about some of the projects that we have in the funnel. You're gonna see Mark and Greg present some specific initiatives that really pertain to the segment strategy. As Bill mentioned in his presentation, there are themes into inorganic growth. There are also themes in terms of innovation. The themes come from the type of ideation that we follow, the type of market intentionality that we have.
In terms of the ideation, you can clearly see this market ideation, often strategic growth verticals like the EV array that we have or the data center pin and sleeve, or even the ease of the electrician, screwless termination. You can also see the type of user-centric ideation. For instance, the life of the lineman is much easier with a shear bolt connector that Kevin and his team have developed inside light industrial. You can also see easing the life of the EPC on the solar panel array with the insulation piercing compression connector. It makes the life of connecting lots of these wires together much easier, much faster, reusing some of existing product. You can also see the type of market intentionality we discussed. Sometimes we want to reinvent the markets that we've been serving for over a hundred years.
For instance, again, the screwless termination is reinventing how we use, you know, receptacles and plugs for the last 100 years, and by removing the screws and making the life of the electrician much easier. You can also see markets that we intentionally enter with new technology-enabled functionality. The composite cross arm and utility solution, much lighter, more robust, and much better. Composite cross arm is clearly a market we can enter and augment the breadth of the portfolio we have in utilities. The compact recloser is another good example, where we again kinda come with a new form factor, much better, much easier for better grid functionality. We also aim to create new markets. There's 2 examples.
The first one is utility scale EV charger we introduced 2 years ago to enable utilities to throttle up and down EV charging in the distribution grid, or the AI-enabled meter, which Greg is gonna talk about in a few minutes, to enable grid edge in analytics. You can see a wide array of products across utility and electrical components and solution. However, they all have 3 main core solutions that we aim to provide. Number 1, they solve customer pain point. They are not just trying to guess a solution looking for a problem. There's a clear established pain point. Number 2, they are core to who we are, our capabilities, our value proposition to customers. And then Number 3, they broaden the basket, effectively leveraging the go-to-market access and customer success that Terry highlighted.
Two years ago, the NPX concept was an idea on a page. It was just a bet. Now it's alive and well, and we expect $50 million contribution from NPX already in 2024. In closing, we feel good about the momentum we've created across organic innovation. We see a line of sight towards 1% contribution from new product and new innovation into the market. It's still early in the ballgame. The real test will be whether we can sustain this new constant stream of innovation that are self-funding while we commercialize the current projects in the portfolio. However, with the team in place, with the GM leadership and the mindset that we're able to achieve, we do feel confident that Hubbell will be able to deliver on the organic growth potential.
Now I will let Akshay talk about operations. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. Good morning. My name is Akshay Mittal, and I lead our global operations at Hubbell. Prior to joining Hubbell, I have led operations in various industrial companies for over 20 years. I've been at Hubbell now for slightly less than 2 years and see a very strong foundation to build off. If I were to extend Gerben's assessment from early on, where we are in our evolution from a holding company, specifically to our operations, I would say, first, our operating culture is very customer-focused. Our people in our factories care about our customers, and that has been our foundation of our success over the decades. As I think about the progress we have made over the last several years, we have increased our operating intensity with heightened focus on consistent execution versus commitments.
As I think about where we are going over the next few years, our primary focus is on accelerating productivity to sustainably higher levels. Clearly, we have been able to price effectively over the last several years, but we know that productivity will need to carry more of the burden of delivering consistent margin expansion from here on, and we have clear plans in place to drive cost savings through lean manufacturing, sourcing and product procurement, and footprint and optimization. Let's start with the foundation of what we focus on in our operations. Safety is the most important focus for us as a manufacturing company. The reason being, of the 18,000 employees we have across Hubbell, 12,000 or so spend bulk of their time on the shop floor.
We also find that safe factories are productive and engaged factories, so focusing on safety creates a virtuous cycle in all areas of our business. You heard Terry talk about how our customers value quality and on-time delivery. We keep this front and center as service levels are a key to our competitive advantage. And then cost and inventory metrics are critical to driving productivity. There is obviously a healthy tension between the two, as we want to drive fixed cost absorption while maintaining inventory discipline, and this is a trade-off we make continuously. And finally, people are a key to everything that we do. You're gonna hear from Alyssa next, and we make sure that we are attracting, engaging, and retaining our people.
One of the consistent themes you're gonna hear across today's presentation is the importance of benchmarking, to know what good looks like, both externally with our peer companies and also internally to know what works well and why. You will see here, that our target, it should be top quartile as a company in these SQDCIP metrics. We have clearly defined metrics and targets within each of these categories and review them in depth at every level of our organization. This ensures that problems surface quickly, root causes are identified and implemented, and best practices are shared across the company. When we talk about operating intensity, this is a big part of what we mean in practice. Gerben and Bill talked about some of the longer-term investments we have made in our business for growth and productivity over the last few years.
Alexis just talked about some of the growth investments. On productivity, we have three key areas that we have invested to drive cost savings: sourcing and procurement, lean manufacturing, and footprint optimization. So starting with procurement, materials represent about half of our cost base, and we see significant opportunity to drive productivity through a more standardized approach, utilizing the latest digital tools and leveraging Hubbell's scale. We have had areas of the company doing this well, and now we have invested in dedicated resources to scale our efforts. Not only does it enhance our toolkit in the areas of should-cost modeling, design to value, but it also drives ownership and accountability to specific targets and enables us to develop a more resilient supply chain. We think that these efforts can deliver an annual run rate savings of about 50 basis points through 2027.
The second lever on how we are driving productivity is through lean manufacturing. Again, this is something Hubbell has been doing in pockets for a long time, but as we have benchmarked ourselves across the enterprise, we have become much more proactive in driving consistency across all our sites. We have codified these pockets of lean best practices into a unified operating system for our factories. We have invested in dedicated lean resources to drive this standardization at a plant level, and we are targeting sustainably higher productivity through our efforts. The Hubbell Manufacturing System defines an annual, quarterly, daily cadence that connects the strategy deployment of the Hoshin process of setting breakthrough objectives for the plants aligned with the business imperatives.
The value stream mapping process provides a structured framework for our plants to make improvements, and then these improvements are sustained on a daily basis, where the entire plant uses visual management and problem-solving to address deviations to SQDCIP targets. This will be an ongoing process of continuous improvement and will go hand in hand with our third initiative to simplify our manufacturing and distribution footprint. Footprint optimization has been a multi-year journey for Hubbell, one where we have made strong progress and still see plenty of runway still ahead. As we look across our operating footprint, particularly in our HES segment, we still see significant opportunity, significant improvement by consolidating subscale facilities into fewer, larger factories.
You will see our restructuring investment step up in 2024, and we plan to continue to invest through 2027 in projects that are going to deliver attractive 2-3-year payback and drive about a 20% improvement in our sales per square foot over the next several years. Most of these opportunities is centered in our electrical segment, and Mark is going to give you more context on that later in the morning. At the same time that we are consolidating subscale facilities, we are also expanding capacity with targeted investment in our existing facilities. Bill highlighted doubling of our CapEx over the last several years, and these projects highlighted here are a good representation of the type of investments we are making. The themes are the same across all three. We have identified high growth areas with tight capacity and extended lead times.
We have invested in new manufacturing equipment and our casting foundries to increase output and capacity. We are very disciplined in reinvesting for growth with attractive returns and are positioning ourselves well to meet the growth needs of our customers over the next several years. To summarize, the financial impact of our operational efforts over the next several years. Our goal is to deliver sustainably higher productivity levels through 2027. Executing on that objective will enable Hubbell to effectively manage the price-cost productivity to neutral or better over the cycle and drive continued and consistent margin expansion. With that, let me turn over to Alyssa to talk about our people strategies.
Thank you, Akshay, and good morning, everyone. My name is Alyssa Flynn, and I am-- this past February, I celebrated 10 years with the organization, and for the last 2, I've had the honor and the privilege to lead the HR function for the company. Really happy to be here today to talk with all of you about our Develop Our People pillar and build on the comments that my colleagues made this morning. You heard it through their talks, that what we do in the Develop Our People pillar really underscores our ability to deliver on all of the strategies that we have as a company, because our strategies require the right people to execute.... I'm gonna focus on 3 things today. First, how our people investments are aligned to support our business strategy.
Second, how our culture is unique and enables us to drive out performance, and how we align and incent our organization to perform. On the far side of the page, you can see our overarching Develop Our People strategy, and there's a lot we do within that to support the entire organization, all 18,000 employees at Hubbell. But what I wanna focus on is some specific examples of how we take that and tailor it to the business strategies that you've heard about today. Earlier, Alexis talked about our increased focus on NPX and driving our engineering organization, expanding our engineering organization, to focus on this drive for innovation. That timeline of when we were doing that actually coincided with the most challenging labor market we've seen, you know, in the past many, many years.
So we knew within a recruiting organization, we had to really focus on that in order to drive success there. So we created a dedicated resource and process to clearly track and enable the filling of these important positions. We focused on internal and external marketing of these exciting new projects that Alexis talked about. And through that, we were able to achieve the investments to expand our resources through a balance of internal promotions and external hiring of folks with new skill sets coming into the Hubbell organization. A second example in the engagement space is, Akshay talked about the evolution of our procurement organization to focus on specialization, process excellence, and clear roles and responsibilities, whether someone's at the segment, at the enterprise level, or at the site level.
We knew it was really important to focus on change management and communication with the team as we went along through this journey, to really maximize their effectiveness, ensure everyone knew what their new role and responsibility will be, and that'll enable us to deliver on our accelerated productivity levels that Akshay talked about. There's lots of examples I could do here. You're gonna hear Mark talk later about our training focus as we drive cross-selling across the entire Electrical Solutions segment. But those are just a few examples of how we align our people investments to our strategic business priorities. So in this area, we're confident that we have the right people, the right teams, and the right organizational structure to deliver on all the priorities that you've heard talked about and will hear talked about later today.
The second thing I wanna talk about is our culture. And you heard Bill talk earlier about when we focus on M&A, that evaluating culture, assessing culture is, is a really important part of that strategy. And I think culture is, is really difficult to describe. People always say, "We have a culture of this, we have a culture of that." But culture is something you experience. It's what it feels like to be a member of the team here at Hubbell, and I wanna try to give you a sense for what does it feel like to be a part of this Hubbell culture. And I wanna focus on three elements of our culture that are, that are unique. First, we're mission-driven.
We electrify economies and energize communities, and our people care about what we do as a company and the role that they play in making critical infrastructure more reliable, more resilient, and more renewable. You might say, "Well, how do you know that that's what your employees think and that that's their perspective?" We do an all-employee engagement survey each year for the past three years, and we get over 85% of our employees to participate in that with us. What we found is that the top drivers of engagement in that survey are the connection to the organization's mission and vision, and their sense of belonging as a part of that. Over three years of data in the survey, we found that that's very consistent year on year after year.
It's very consistent, no matter where you sit in the organization. It's in our factories, in our knowledge workers, in our leadership, across employee tenure, and across generational groups. So we know that's something that's core to the DNA of Hubbell. And so we find a lot of value in explicitly connecting employees to our mission and vision and the role that they play in that. The second thing that you've heard a lot already today is about our customer focus, our focus on service. Akshay used the example of that being important, even on the factory floor, caring about the customers and what we deliver for the customers. Our service KPIs are a touchstone at Hubbell, and you'll hear that clearly come through when Mark and Greg talk later today.
Finally, Gerben talked about our journey from being a holding company to an operating company, and the way we're structured and the way we operate is a big part of how our culture comes to life in the organization. We have seven strategic business units that are based on our end markets that are each led by a leader, they're all here in the room with us today, who are responsible for delivering the P&L in those. They fully own that P&L and are supplemented by functional, lean functional teams who support to solve problems at the business unit level. You've heard from many of our functional experts here today, but we're charged to work with the businesses and to solve problems at the business.
We do have limited centralized teams where there are scale, so it really results in an organization that's not an overly matrixed organization. The final point here is that we have a regular cadence of interaction across those seven business units and with, with the leadership team, so that even though each leader is focused on delivering their P&L, there's a keen understanding of how that P&L plays for the entire organization, and as such, we're driving the performance of the entire company. So what does it feel like to work here? It feels like a mission-driven organization that's highly service and customer-focused, with strong accountability and ownership.... So if the culture is our, is the foundation of our performance, I want to talk about how we've driven that performance forward.
There's really three keys to success: alignment up and down the organization around a common strategy, our incentives that drive performance, and benchmarking to drive success. Gerben talked earlier about our four strategic pillars, our mission, vision, and values, and that those underpin everything that we do. You saw the one piece of paper with our long-term strategy on it. We have one with our long-term objectives and one with our annual objectives, and that's reinforced and communicated across the organization. This is something that I've really seen in my 10 years with the company, it evolve and strengthen that common thread across and connective tissue across the entire organization. Once we've set those goals, they're cascaded and communicated throughout the organization, then we focus on how do we incent the delivery of those objectives.
I want to spend just a minute double-clicking on our incentive programs. It's actually something we do a regular amount of shareholder outreach on, and our shareholders have provided us really helpful perspective over time on these programs. There are two parts to our program, short and long term, and they work together in concert. On the short-term side, we really focus on ensuring an eye on the longer-term strategy while making sure that we deliver on our annual operating plan. So 80% of that short-term incentive is based on our annual financial commitments to shareholders, while 20% is based on that individual's contribution to those four strategic pillars.
That 20% is regardless if you're Gerben leading the company or you're an entry-level manager in one of our factories, so that every employee is accountable to, connected to, and responsible for elements of that strategy. So it's really about an obligation to deliver our short-term commitments without sacrificing and while keeping an eye on the long term. From a long-term perspective, we reward profitable growth and total shareholder return. So our leaders are incentivized to drive relative sales outperformance, but only with an absolute margin target that ensures that growth comes at attractive profitability levels. So once we have an aligned strategy that's cascaded and communicated, and we've incented performance, then we measure how we're doing.
You're going to see a page later from Bill that talks about financial benchmarking and how we share that with our team and the transparency of how we're doing against the market. I'll note that those metrics are the same metrics I just described as a part of our compensation plans, and we really focus on driving for that top quartile performance in all of those areas. We do that also in our Develop Our People platform. We measure our people metrics, both internally and externally. In addition to the things Akshay mentioned before, like turnover, time to hire, we also measure our employee engagement, our development programs, headcount, and other key metrics to ensure we're focused on driving improvement. So these elements represent how we focus our organization to perform.
And so just to wrap, I want to leave you with the takeaway that our people and our culture drive the execution of our business strategy and also the performance of our company. And hopefully, what you'll see today is a leadership team that's very motivated to perform, to build on what's been great and unique about Hubbell over the last 135+ years, while also really positioning the company to perform for our bright future ahead. And with that, I want to turn it back over to Dan and Gerben to facilitate our Q&A.
Great. Thanks, Alyssa. Thanks, everybody. We got two mics set and they are in the back, so raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question. Got a few up here.
Thanks very much, Julian Mitchell at Barclays. Maybe just a first question around, you know, how you think about price versus volume in that organic sales construct. You know, the innovation stuff was very interesting. Also, we heard about the effort on price, cost, productivity. So maybe just help us understand kind of pricing the next few years, you know, what, what's embedded there first?
Maybe I'll start and help fill in. But you know, certainly, you've seen us over the last couple of years be very aggressive with our pricing actions, much more so than in the past, both in the magnitude and in the frequency of doing that. So as a general mindset of what we do today, that's how we view it, is to be more aggressive with pricing when we need it, rather than more traditionally, we would have waited perhaps for annual blankets or annual price increases to take effect. So the frequency and the magnitude, of course, depends on what the needs of that, what inflation in the market is, what are investments that are happening in the business, what opportunities there are in different parts of the portfolio.
We may have more opportunities in certain more constrained areas of the business. So we see it not as a single lever that we apply, but really something that we apply over time with the construct of what we talked about, that the net of price, cost, and productivity be managed at a minimum of neutral or better. What you've seen us manage it through over the last couple of years is actually better, but that, too, may fluctuate over time. But our view of this is that the net of that is a neutral or better.
... Certainly, and when we get to my section, the second one, we'll address your question very directly, and you'll see a clear pivot from a period of aggressive pricing to one where it's more measured. And you'll see, to your question on volume, volume and the drop through of incrementals on that is really what's driving the performance going forward.
Great. And then just a quick follow-up on sort of acquisitions. Maybe just trying to understand, you know, the average deal size, I think you said it was sort of $240 million the last couple of years. You're spending at least, or could spend at least $2 billion on acquisitions the next sort of three-ish years. How are we thinking about, and I realize it depends on what comes up and that type of thing, but, you know, I'm assuming it's not sort of 10 deals at $240 million each. I guess it could end up like that, but it seems like you're more interested in larger deals, like Systems Control. You know, is that the right way to think about kind?
I think you're right, first of all, to say a little hard to plan because you got to see actionable, and actionability. But I would say it's interesting in the pipeline that there are more frequent examples of larger situations. So, yeah.
Great. More questions?
Hi, thanks. It's Joseph O'Dea at Wells Fargo. Can you just talk about portfolio opportunities and potentially narrowing scope a little bit? When you talked about NPX and sort of doing more with fewer projects, you talk about over 80% of the portfolio in the strategic verticals. If we think about the other portion of that, are there opportunities, whether it's 80/20 oriented or you just look across the entire portfolio, are there opportunities to streamline that a little bit and margin opportunities that sit within it?
You'll hear when Mark—who's about to go, I think, second—he talks about when we use the nomenclature of SKU rationalization. So you got a lot of complexity of SKUs and the ability to find low volume, low margin SKUs and be able to manage that, either by elimination, reengineering, or frankly, finding the courage to price, and if the price doesn't stick, you know, you discontinue. So that's—Mark's gonna talk about that tool in his. So we think that's actually-
Mm-hmm.
Very significant, what you're describing.
Yeah, and I would say the episodic events of realigning that portfolio better was through those big actions that we took, and now the actions are much more refined and ongoing as part of running our business.
And then, Gerben, just one on sort of an integrated model versus decentralized model, and I think still staying nimble, maybe through as much decentralization as possible and running individual PNLs, but the advantages that you're gaining through integrated. Can you just expand on that a little bit in the evolution of Hubbell?
Yeah, and it's a little bit what you described there, that it's that we still try to resource and run our businesses at the closest point to our customer. This is why we have the structures of the VPGMs. It's, you know, it's about just shy of 10 PNLs that make up the company. And to the extent we can put the resources directly in them, whether that's technical resources or factory resources or sales resources, we do that. Now, of course, when you look at a company like Hubbell and the markets that we go after, and take, for an example, our utility business, you know, it's very inefficient to go after our utility customers with 5 sales forces of each of those PNLs.
So what we do is we scale a sales force that had hundreds of people, that has reached very broadly into the U.S. utility market, that you can do much more effectively than you can do it at each of business. So we really look at where does that scale provide us a benefit? Where does it drive value for us? And then we scale it across the businesses, or where is it better suited right in the business, where the decisions can be made very quickly and very closely to the customer, and then that's where we'll put it right in the business. So we're very flexible in our approach to where it is. We don't have a preconceived notion, is that we need to build out at the top. I mean, it's quite the opposite.
We resist that urge always. You know, I came out of the field, so I can relate to having resources, managing the day-to-day, but at times it's just much more efficient than whether that's in innovation with what Alexis talked about, some of those resources, or Akshay, when you have procurement expertise, that's hard to replicate in every one of our factories, that you can much better replicate with some resources that work along with our factories to drive these improvements.
Gerben, I think I have it here. Jeff Sprague from Vertical Research. Just first one on M&A. Bill, I guess on the grid that you put up, you know, where kind of the various deals, kind of hit the verticals you're focused on. You did include data center for Systems Control, and, maybe Greg is gonna elaborate on this, but, obviously, any data center needs, you know, a grid-level substation connection. Is that what you're talking about?
Yes.
Or are you talking about something more on premise in the data center, with the Systems Control asset?
I would say the former now and the latter, you know, TBD, I would say.
Yeah. And then just on the, the M&A construct, I, I apologize, I didn't get a chance to, back test all your math, but it, it feels like you're lowballing us-
That's why we only released the document at...
Feels like you're lowballing us a little bit, like you're not really leveraging the EBITDA growth that comes along with it and the like. What kind of leverage ratio did you embed in that $2 billion?
We kind of assumed we only deployed about half of it, so it would be delevering from here. So, in order not to get too far ahead of ourselves, we were trying to put together kind of a modest level of contribution of the cash, but I think it comes back a little bit to Julian's point of, to really deploy all that, we're gonna have to be, you know, hunting in larger ponds.
Yeah. And then I would add to it, when you look at that pyramid and you look at the opportunity, and, you know, we certainly have a pipeline that we follow, there's still a lot of opportunity for us to continue to consolidate the model, both on the utility side as well as on the electrical side. And Mark has been very busy in the early days to really bring in that business together, bringing some of the consistency together. But they're starting to focus also now on how to grow that business, and inorganic growth is gonna be an important part of that as well. So I feel good about our ability over time to deploy that capital.
Tommy Moll from Stephens. Appreciate you taking the questions. Just to double click here on M&A and data center, to tie it all together. In an ideal world, how big a priority is that market for acquisitions? And why I ask is you've stood up a direct sales force there. Bill, you talked about a willingness to pay a higher multiple than you had historically, if the growth opportunity and the returns merit it. Your job is a little bit harder now, because two years ago, you had $1 billion to deploy.
Mm.
Now that number is $2 billion. So I just wonder how high a priority this end market is. It's your highest growth vertical.
Yep, we're approaching it as a balance of system, sort of, approach. And so as you kinda break down the different elements of the data center, you can see the components that we wanna sell. And, I would say succeeding in data center is a priority.
Right.
To the extent Mark's sales force or Alexis's new product introductions or acquisitions, I think what distinguishes the vertical approach is we could win using a combination of all three.
Mm-hmm.
I think succeeding in it is a priority, and whether M&A is needed or can turbocharge it, I think is-
Yeah
... is TBD, TBD.
Maybe one, one thing to add. As part of the early growth in that comes simply of being better organized around selling into it. So we, we have, in our existing portfolio, a lot of product that sell into data center, yet we're never organized well around it, right? So some people walk right by it, and some people may have gone into it, and now by having a focused sales force, they sell the entire solution of Hubbell that we have today and, and growing. So I would say from an organic perspective, it's important, and then you add on to it innovation that we're adding, with examples of products that we're launching for that, as well as a pipeline of deals that we would add, it's, it's absolutely a priority for us.
So follow-up question for Alexis on NPX. Two years ago, you were careful to calibrate our expectations because it was a new initiative, and there were some cultural changes connected. Now it feels like you've gathered momentum there. If, you know, just to put a number on it, I think two years ago, it was 0.5 point of outgrowth, and now it's a 1 point of outgrowth, but there's probably some context you could share underneath the numbers, just to give us a sense of how this has progressed.
I think... Microphone. There's a couple observations. The first one is the NPX concept of fewer but bigger projects kind of trickled down to NPD, and now we combine a lot of the NPX and NPD kind of incremental growth to achieve that 1%. It's also early in the ballgame. We opened the floodgate of big innovation. Can we sustain this long stream every year of new projects? It's still TBD.
Nice.
We do sense that the markets that we serve deserve new solutions and new products. So to the extent we can continue to innovate, ideate, and fund and staff, you know, we do believe that 1% is achievable. We want to also maintain focus on existing project and not have too many projects in the NPX portfolio. Two years ago, it should be around 25 projects. We achieved 25 projects now, so we need to graduate some projects from the portfolio to take on new ones. We want to take a balanced approach to growth and focus.
Maybe if I could just add to that, I talked about our engagement survey earlier, and when we looked at the items that increased the most, you know, over this survey timeline, a couple of them, a couple of them were questions about the company supporting innovation, and people really seeing that shift, organizationally around supporting the process.
Great. Other questions? Brett.
Yeah, Brett Linzey, Mizuho. Thanks. Just want to come back to channel conversion and the cross-selling opportunity, over $100 million, certainly not immaterial. What actions do you need to, to really affect and achieve that? Is it more boots on the ground? Is it part of NPX? How can, you know, you, you get to that 27 target?
It's a little bit all the things you just mentioned. It could be more boots on the ground, it could be more NPX. It really is a coordinated effort now. Gerbenbin just kinda mentioned just even talking about data centers and the fact that, you know, we sell into it in a lot of different places, and bringing that together as a team.
Mark's going to expand on it a little bit in terms of just the C&I sales organization on the electrical side, some of the things that Bob Prantl has done on the utility side, of really of this coordinated approach that we now have, where in the past, we were going as one brand and walking in a door and saying, "Hey, I'm representing XYZ," and now we're saying we're representing the full basket of products that Hubbell has to offer. And then you take that as an opportunity, and double down, and with ease of doing business, with, again, some of the things that we're doing from an omni-channel approach to be able to give them the product-
... where they want to have it would be the approach that we're taking.
Thanks. And, just a follow-up. So you know, you talk about the need for customers to invest, but also the complexity of the projects. How has the scope or the content of Hubbell's products per project changed over time? And, you know, when you talk about some of the larger T&D projects, what's your win rate today?
Yes, I would say our percentage of the total cost of the systems continues to be small. Even though we continue to grow as a company, we continue to add content to it, we generally represent single-digit % of what the total system... So if you think about a transmission line or utility, a distribution line, a small percentage of the total cost of that system, but these products are absolutely clear. If a connector doesn't function, if an arrester doesn't function, your grid can go down. So the cost of fail- that's what we call the cost of failure, is if those things don't work, then your system doesn't work.
So, you know, what our customers always tell us, they want quality first, they want service second, they want the reliability of what we provide, and price is important, but it's not the leading metric. So, I'd say while we continue to add scope, that whole model of being in that part of the pyramid with mission-critical products that represent a low total percentage of the cost, is where we see our opportunity to continue to grow, still with, you know, deploying that $2 billion plus.
Thanks. Oh, you get to me?
Not yet.
Okay. I didn't know if there were two Chrises. But, so curious about where you think you are with the pushing the HUS organizational distinctions into HES. I assume you're leveraging that somewhat today, but maybe a little diagnostic on how that's evolving and where, where you see HES-
Yeah
Today in terms of adopting some of those disciplines.
Yeah, and then maybe we'll answer that question again when Mark comes up. He's going to talk about a little bit what we did in there. I'd say there is a lot that we can apply from what we did in the utility segment to the electric segment. A good example is the sales force that Mark has realigned and restructured around this vertical. That's exactly what we did, you know, a decade plus ago in the utility business. That too had a lot of businesses with their own sales force, and we consolidated that. So it's just one example. I will say that the utility segment is more concentrated around a single market, whereas the electrical has to still the different market, even though we've simplified that.
So, I would say it's not exactly the same, but a lot of the same principles of, you know, consolidating the efforts where it makes sense, simplifying the business model across our processes, both sales process, operational processes, is the playbook that Mark is applying to. But he's going to talk a little bit about what he's doing here in a minute, so.
Okay, we'll stay tuned for that. And, Bill, I think on the acquisition profile, you emphasized the industrial organization quite a bit. Wondering if you could press down into that a bit.
Yeah, I mean, I think with, we think $50 billion+ of sales in the wholesale U.S. electrical components market, when you think about the largest players, that just leaves an awful lot of share. And so, those of you who ever go to trade shows, you know, you for us and for us, Sid, who's standing next to you, it's, you walk the floor, Chris, right? And you just see how many companies there are, and, each one of those is potential candidates. So I think if, you know, if the industry were more concentrated, I think I'd say, you know, to Julian's question, be harder to get the mass, but, that's why I emphasize the industrial organization.
I think a corollary to it, you know, from Terry's perspective, when if the customers rejected us getting bigger and consolidating, that also would be a constraint. And yet, I don't know, Terry, if you have a comment, but our customers, we were just at an AED a week or so ago, and got to see, I don't know, Terry, 20 largest customers for me in two and a half days, and it seemed to me every single one is looking for us to be bigger, to sell more, to make their supply chain easier and with a trusted partner. So those elements of the industrial organization, I think, are helping facilitate consolidation.
Yeah.
I don't know if you think the customer is like that.
Yeah, I think you hit on it. It's that, that trusted partnership and that ability to be able to provide quality products reliably and, and the service that we do, and understanding that we're investing in the same places that they are in terms of looking at these vertical markets, whether that's in data centers, whether that's, in renewables, whether that's looking at automation. But the fact that we're continuing to invest in those, same areas that they are, gives them an opportunity to, align, with people like Hubbell and be able to go after those markets more effectively and efficiently.
Great. So we have time for one more. We'll take Nigel, and we're going to have another Q&A session after Mark and Greg and Bill. So,
... Great. So, another swing at the M&A question. So Bill, you, you acknowledged that your $2 billion of surplus capital is conservative. I mean, we get $4 billion, so 2x that number. And as you get larger, you know, there's diminishing returns on these smaller bolt-ons, even though the bolt-ons have been great. So when we sit here in two years' time, do you think there's potential for something a bit more transformative to have happened in that timeframe? And I'm just wondering, you know, the, the, the shift towards utility, obviously, great end market, and that's where the growth is, but do you think there's a scope to see a shift back towards electrical in that mix as we go forward?
Yeah, let's take the third element of the question first. I think we would be equally excited in electrical or utility, so I agree with that. To your first couple of questions, I think if, if you gave me three doors, one is, it's gonna be $50 million sales, $100 million deals forever. I'd say it's gonna be hard to deploy the capital. Secondly, second door is, the same idea, 3-4 deals a year, but just being chunkier, versus the next door is transformative. It feels to me like that middle door-
Right
-is the most, most probable.
Yeah. Yeah, and I don't wanna underestimate the value and the ability for us to do tuck-in deals. It's still, if you look and you mentioned, you know, you go to a trade show, there's a lot of those that are very valuable. We're very good at bringing these businesses into the fold. It's something we do over and over again. Our GMs that are running these businesses take these businesses, they fold them into their business. Immediately, you get some of the synergies out of it. So while that's not the only lever that we can use, we've got to complement it by larger levers, larger deals. It's still... I don't wanna undermine the efficiency and the effectiveness by which we can tuck-in deals.
Great.
Yeah.
We'll take a 15-minute break and be back at 10:30 A.M.
Great. Thanks.
Nice job, sir.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Excuse me. Sorry.
Sorry.
No worries.
But you're busy playing nothing to be listening to me. What I say, I wish that you would stay in-
Okay, everybody, we're gonna get started here again in a minute, so if you could please take your seats. Yeah, you should,
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you. Okay. Good, good. Thanks. Get you out of here.
The leverage point is, like, you're assuming, like, one T&D or something.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, your point...
All right, let's kick it back off. So, we're gonna start with Greg on the utility side. Mark's gonna walk us through electrical, and then Bill's gonna bring us home with some financial targets over the long term. So, Greg-
Thanks, Dan
The floor is yours.
Well, it's great to have the opportunity to address you all and kick off the afternoon, or I should say, the mid-morning. As Gerben and Bill noted this morning during the introductions, I joined Hubbell just about a year ago, coming up on a one-year anniversary. It's been a really fast and furious onboarding process for me personally. It's been exciting. But just a little background about myself. I've got 33 years in the industrial sector in a broad range of operating roles across factory automation, the electrical sector, and the utility space. So not new to this world, new to Hubbell, and I gotta say, it's just been really a pleasure to be a part of this organization over the last year. You might wonder, well, why Hubbell?
Well, why would you join Hubbell after a career working for 33 years? I would say, you know, there's three things that come to mind that really attracted me to Hubbell, and you heard that recurring theme throughout the morning about culture. And culture is one of those things that's super important to me. So I... You know, when I think of three things that come to mind, I'd say culture, character, and chemistry was really the big drivers with the team that you see here in the room, the team on stage. I'd also say that the opportunity in the utility space is something that's personally very attractive to me. I've always liked this space. I've always liked competing with Hubbell in the past, and I've always liked working in the utility sector.
So for me, it was a no-brainer to join the organization and have this opportunity to participate in what we see as some significant mega trends that are gonna drive big transformation and a big inflection in the utility sector, and why wouldn't you wanna be a part of that? And then the last one I would say is the uniqueness of Hubbell and our position with our customers, and how well we're positioned in the end markets that we serve. And I do believe that's a competitive advantage and something that's great to be a part of. So a little bit of background about me and why Hubbell.
I hope to get across a few things through the course of, of my comments this morning, really talk to you a little bit about grid modernization and electrification, and the trends that are really driving this long-term investment cycle for T&D. Secondly, really articulate why we believe we're the best-in-class solution, utility solutions platform that's positioned for consistent and attractive growth. And then third, really strengthening the foundation. Talk about what we're doing around the two core elements of our, our portfolio, grid infrastructure and grid automation, and how we're gonna strengthen that and build on that to continue to grow this franchise. And then lastly, really to double-click and reconfirm our commitment to deliver 5%-6% organic growth and margin expansion through the cycle, through the next, part of our cycle.
So with that, I will jump in and just share on a page. This is the HUS segment, the Hubbell Utility Solutions segment, kind of at a glance. And I guess the thing I would point you to here is our segment really is a $3.5 billion, $3.3 billion dollar operation. So number one, scale and breadth, and our product offering and our capabilities really speak for themselves. It's really extensive in that regard, and we believe that puts us in a really nice position to continue to win with our customers and our end markets. We've got relevant scale across the four core business segments in our segment.
This gives us deep market exposure, and also deep customer intimacy with our end markets that we serve around grid automation and grid infrastructure. The other thing I'd point you to on this slide is really the fact that, you know, we're aligned with what we see as really attractive end markets that are growing at plus GDP over the course of the strat horizon that we've got laid out in our plan. And so really nice, attractive end markets that we're aligned to. Our organizing principles within the segment, Gerben touched on this a little bit today as well, I would say is really around maximizing the market and market synergies that we see in grid automation and grid infrastructure.
Bundling our solutions and really trying to put natural collection of products together to go after making it easy to do business with, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Terry touched on the fact that ease of doing business is super critical to Hubbell and super important to our customers. Well, we're, we're focused on bundling solutions and services in a way that makes it easy for our customers to do business with us, and really be responsive to the needs of our end customer markets. We've got four strategic P&Ls. Those operating leaders are in the room with us today. These are led by very experienced executives who are here with us. I'll point them out. Neil Vander Meulen, somewhere in the audience. I don't see him. There he is. Neil's- Neil heads up our T&D Infrastructure segment.
Erik Christian, not new to Hubbell, but new to the segment, heading up Grid Automation. Pete Swales in the back, sitting next to Neil, running our Specialty Infrastructure Solutions business. And then Brad LeBoeuf, I think, Gerben introduced him earlier, heading up Integrated Substation, newest member to the Utility Solutions Group. I should also point out that our head of global sales is in the room, Bob Prantl. Is Bob here? There you go, Bob. So anything related to the front end of our organization, the global sales operation across the segment reports up to Bob. With that, we'll transition and talk a little bit about some of the mega trends that we see that are accelerating in the industry.
And I thought it would be good for us to really take a step back and talk about some of the implications around these big mega trends that you all know very well. You've heard us talk about them. But what we see here is, it's clear, it's very clear, when you look across what's happening in the industry and you look at what's happening around grid modernization, that the investment needs of our utilities are significant, and they will be for the foreseeable future. We think we're in the early stages of a generational investment cycle, that's gonna drive a multitude of factors, requiring utilities to make a lot of prioritization decisions and invest a lot of capital to address some of these concerns that you see on the page.
Foundational to all of this is really the fact that the infrastructure has been underinvested for many, many decades, and quite frankly, not necessarily designed to handle what we're asking it to do when you look at these trends. All that plays into our hand in terms of the capabilities that we have and our ability to serve and address some of these pain points, and help our utilities navigate through this transition of the grid of yesterday to the grid of tomorrow. What this is also doing is it's driving multiple growth vectors for Hubbell.
And utilities have a lot of competing investment needs, as I said before, and that needs to be balanced against the funding and labor resources required to execute and pull off some of the challenges that we have here on the page and some of the things that we're trying to solve within the grid infrastructure space. This is where we believe the depth and breadth of Hubbell really comes into play, and a partner with the scale of a Hubbell really can deliver immense value, and we are delivering immense value.
If you see what's happened with the growth of our business over the course of the last 2 or 3 years, and as we look ahead into the future, we believe we're really well-positioned and in a unique position, quite frankly, to serve these needs and to continue to grow and deliver value to our utilities. We also see our position as being very unique in terms of having leading capability and scale across transmission, substation, and distribution. And we're also one of the only, if not the only, pure-play utility players out there. So again, we believe this gives us the right to win, gives us the right to play big in the space and drive differentiation through service to our customers.
So again, this is kind of where we see the growth vectors for Hubbell, certainly playing into what we've outlined in our, in our strat cycle. In terms of the, the long-term T&D investment cycle, as you can see on the page, I think it's better that we step back here and talk a little bit about how we think about growth. We've talked about all these trends that are accelerating. I think the question was asked: Are we being modest? We often get that question. Why isn't our growth rate much higher than what we're projecting right now? And quite frankly, they could be. They could be, could be higher.
However, you know, we have to acknowledge the fact that there's a reality around resourcing, there's a reality around the fact that utilities tend to move slow, and there's also budget constraints that will impact the speed at which they can execute some of these plans and build out and modernize the grid. And so we believe that we've got good insight to that. The intimacy that we have with customers gives us good line of sight and visibility to their capital budgets and how they're aligning up those capital budgets to their projects.
And our expectation, as I noted earlier, is really aligned to about 5%-6% organic growth through the cycle, with the assumption that the utilities are gonna be at + high single-digit in terms of their CapEx investments in support of the build-out that has to happen over the next several years. And this is clearly aligned to what we're hearing from our customers and projecting in their investment profiles. In our view, we think this is an extended and a long-term, consistent, mid-single-digit growth environment for Hubbell, and we feel very good about that. We think that's a good place to be. And as I said before, it could be higher if those plans accelerate beyond that.
In terms of strategic priorities, just kinda turning the page and talking a little bit about the strategic drivers around both of our business segments. You know, we're optimizing our strategy and management priorities around each one of these business areas, these core business areas of grid infrastructure and grid automation, to profitably grow and attract adjacencies and really leverage the capabilities that we have and the foundation that we have in the T&D infrastructure space. And I'll jump into that a little bit in the coming slides. In terms of depth and breadth of our portfolio on the T&D side of our business, this is really foundational and core to Hubbell. It's who we are as a company, and it's what's brought us to where we are in the utility space.
You could see the vast depth and breadth of the product portfolio that we have on the page, and this is really a distinct. We see this as a distinct competitive advantage in the market. We define our space as everything in T&D grid other than the poles, the towers, and the wires. So we provide everything other than the poles, towers, and the wires. This is over 85% of the products, and we have a leading installed base position across the U.S. distribution and transmission markets, which, again, I'll underscore, gives us the right to continue to play and win in the space. When I think about this illustration, it's a really good picture, and Gerben pointed to it earlier, where he talked about all the components that carry that infrastructure on the T&D side.
These components all represent roughly 5% or a little less than 5% of the total cost of the distribution and transmission build-out per mile. So low cost of ownership, high value. Any one of these components that fails will tend to lead to an outage or a truck roll or a major impact to the utility service. So they're high cost of failure, low cost of ownership components. How we win in this space is really around quality and reliability. You heard Terry talk about that earlier. You heard Terry also talk about our service levels, super important, super critical to our customers. Our lead times and on-time performance is also a winning strategy, so being responsive.
I would also say the intimacy that we have with our customers and the engineers at our customers is critically important, and the specifiers that we work with. Again, depth, breadth, and scale, super critical, big enabler for us to continue to leverage that foundation to grow from. Our brand value, and then the fact that we have a really sticky install base. Because these products are so critical, so important to the functioning of a grid, utilities are usually pretty averse to making changes, and they're very slow to making changes, so we see this as a very sticky install base. So if we service it well, we take care of the customer, and we're responsive, we're gonna continue to win and grow.... Just shifting a little bit to talk about what we see in terms of the investment profile and how that's accelerating.
This kind of informs our view of our growth plan over the course of our strat horizon. You could see on the distribution side, you know, we're looking at roughly mid-single-digit growth consistently through the cycle through 2027. You can see on the transmission side, we're seeing a much higher acceleration rate of the growth, and we're actually participating in that, and we're seeing the benefit of that in our business as we speak. We're seeing a double- a plus high single-digit growth growth curve show on the transmission side of our markets. This accelerating growth really leads to a lot of great opportunities for Hubbell to continue to capitalize. But I should also note that this-- these estimates also reflect existing CapEx budgets, right?
They're not really looking at, or not factoring in what we've been talking about, and I think some questions were asked earlier about data center. You start to bring data center load on top of this, and the investments that's happening within the data center, that's only gonna add more pressure to these curves and drive more growth on the transmission side with all the interconnection requests that are coming on the heels of that. So we think there's gonna be more investment scenarios required. We think that's gonna only accelerate this transmission side of the CapEx curve, and it's also playing to our favor as, as a part of our growth profile for the business.
This, this slide really talks to the grid hardening activity, and we see this also providing a really great foundation for Hubbell and for the growth and the build-out of the grid. On the left-hand side, you can see some charts and some statistics around grid infrastructure, the aging of the infrastructure. You can also see the fact that outages are increasing, and the frequency and duration. All that leads to the fact that we've got an infrastructure that's not sustaining the load profiles that's being put on it, and it's not really geared towards what we're asking it to do. This is also foundational for Hubbell, and foundational for the products and solutions that we bring in.
We've seen a transition from what was traditionally mostly OpEx spend in a break-fix kind of environment in the utilities to more of regulators with the support from regulators moving, and utilities moving a lot of that investment into a CapEx kind of environment, which is good for the customer, it's also good for the utility, and also gives us more longer-term visibility into those budgets so that we can plan our CapEx investments to support the growth that we see coming, as a result of the build-out of the grid. Interconnections, we talked a little bit about that as well. This is also increasing transmission activity for us, and you can see that shift.
What's really impressive about this, you could see that, you know, there's a 7-year, 7-year lead time on most of the new transmission plans projects that are out there, which means that the stuff that we're doing today was stuff that was planned years ago. So we have a really nice outlook into what's happening with the transmission build-out, and you can see that on average, I think the question was asked earlier of the content, less than $50,000 per quoted mile on a transmission build-out for Hubbell. This, if you just do the math on how much miles are being built out, it tells you a lot about what we see in terms of the front log and the opportunity for growth there.
One of the things we're doing here is really building out our service model to support the utilities. And there's a video that I'd like to play just to really illustrate how Hubbell is differentiating ourselves by packaging our products and making it just in time available for our utilities to deploy as they're building out these transmission projects. So why don't we go ahead and play the video, and then we'll continue on with the presentation.
The following video details our PowerPad service and all that it entails. What is PowerPad? It is customer-specific material management and shipping logistics. We do the work for you, all the way from the design assistance, drawing development, packaging solutions to the laydown yard for the installation site. In doing so, we allow you to spend your valuable time stringing lines instead of sorting, counting, verifying, and staging material at the laydown. Our process is broken into four simple steps: One, assembly, design, and manufacturing. Two, assembly fit check. Three, packaging per assembly or customer specifications. Four, shipping and delivery. In our assembly design phase, we coordinate with the customer to ensure that our designs meet the requirement of the customer and the installation crews.
We accomplish this through our engineering team, which has combined experience of 200 industry years, and our sales team, with another combined experience of 67 industry years. We have standard transmission assemblies that make it easy for the customer to figure out what they want, and we also have the capability of custom designs if needed. With the help of our new product development team, pattern shop, and our state-of-the-art 3D prototype lab, we are able to design complex designs that meet the needs of the customer. After the design phase, we check the fit and form our assemblies through our fit check process. This process is useful in catching any design irregularities or any incompatibility with a customer item. We also offer Corona RIV testing for our projects to ensure that our design can meet the voltage level demanded of the assembly.
In our packaging phase, we make it easy for you by packing to the customer or contractor specs. Here is an example of a component list that doesn't use TowerPak. And now here is a component list for the same order using TowerPak, thereby making it easier for the customer to pick up a box, set it at the tower, and install. We also provide detailed engineering instructions and drawings to make it easy for the contractor to read and follow directions.
In summary, we strive to be a one-stop shop for all your needs while helping you reduce complexity in orders by reducing line items in orders, reduce cost of testing, remove the process and cost of sorting in the laydown yard or warehouse, create needed products, gain an extra set of eyes while maintaining component fit and function, create an efficient construction process at the job site, save time and money. Thank you for watching, and please visit our website for more information.
So, so again, just a small example, one of many, where we are, you know, trying to make it easy for the customer to do business with Hubbell, quite frankly, by derisking the install of packaging, prepackaging, pretesting, and bringing a kit to the site and allowing the customer to move quickly through their installs. Shifting gears and kind of along the lines of this build-out and substation, Hubbell was really well-positioned prior to the acquisition of Systems Control in the substation space with components. We really like this acquisition, and it's really played out well for us, as Gerben and Bill pointed to earlier, and puts us squarely into a different place in the value chain with our customers, particularly some of our large VIP accounts and many of our utilities out there.
Tons of synergy between us and Systems Control. We see this also supporting a high single-digit growth CAGR over the cycle as we continue to integrate this business and derisk the whole substation environment for the customer by building these in a controlled environment where they're pretested, dropped down on site, plugged in, and they go, versus doing a stick-built architecture out in the field, where you take on tons of risk and bring in lots of variables that the utilities really don't wanna have to deal with. So for us, this was a really great acquisition, and we're really happy with Systems Control as a part of the Hubbell family. In terms of strategic priorities, just shifting gears to talk a little bit about our grid automation business that's led by Erik.
When we talk about grid automation, historically, we've talked about grid automation, and you know us as meters and AMI. Bill talked about the acquisition, the deployment of capital to buy companies that we've made over the course of the last couple of years. We've built out this portfolio by bringing in more protection and controls businesses to form what we call grid automation today, along with our meters and AMI portfolio. And I think this has been a really good move for Hubbell. It's been a great move for this business, and it really positioned us to win by integrating systems and solutions and delivering value higher up in the food chain of the utility.
We're leveraging our unique experience across components, controls, and comms, and you'll see some examples of how we're doing that. We've got new product introductions addressing key pain points for the customer, and we're expanding across complementary solutions and portfolio across our portfolio with these acquisitions. Look at Beckwith and EIG. Those are two of the recent acquisitions that we talk about that helped us build out this portfolio. Beckwith was acquired back in 2020, generating roughly $55 million in revenue. You can see we're on a path with double-digit CAGR, so a really nice accretive bolt-on to the overall grid automation space. EIG, also a great example, roughly $60 million, we acquired this back in 2023, and you can see growing at double-digit CAGR.
Significant value creation from two relatively small acquisitions, playing in a high-value space and helping us build out our grid automation footprint. This is a great case study that I'd like to share with you around what we're doing by taking and putting together a package of values for the customer, by putting all of our components together, wrapping comms around that, and developing a customer-integrated solution that is really helping us differentiate ourselves in the market, leverage all of the collective capabilities that we have in our unique components, and deliver a solution, what we call integrated capacitor banks, to our end markets. This has turned out to be a really home run for us in terms of how we launched this product.
We've seen our orders outpace our capacity in our initial limited release of this product, and we're gonna continue to build this out and leverage it in the marketplace as we promote the capabilities of this solution that we've launched. It's called Integrated Capacitor Smart Bank Solution. In terms of Aclara, just to give you a little bit of an overview of where we are with meters and AMI. Our Aclara performance, we're very happy, first of all, with the business. We're happy with this acquisition, and we still like it. We've had some lumpiness driven by the pandemic. We've kind of ridden through that.
We've had chip shortages and, you know, in the nature of this business, we ran through in the COVID cycle, we actually built a tremendous amount of backlog, and we've kind of been working through that backlog. We've gotten through the chip shortages and some of the supply chain challenges with the Aclara business, and so we've had strong recent recovery with double-digit growth in 2023, in Q1 of 2024, and roughly about one year in backlog. So overall, the business is performing well. It's a strong franchise that really services electric, water, and gas. We've seen a little bit of a delay in the replacement cycle that all of you have been paying attention to. The IOU replacement cycle has been a little bit slow to kick off.
However, we're making big inroads with our install base with co-ops and munis, and we're seeing a lot of activity in the pipeline around water, the water replacement cycle, particularly outside of the US. So we're well-positioned with some of the R&D efforts that we've put in place to new features and capabilities that we've built into the platform to prepare ourselves for the replacement cycle that we think is gonna come on. We're starting to have good conversations with customers around what's coming up next in their replacement cycle pipelines. In terms of innovation at the edge, Alexis talked a little bit about what we're doing in the innovation arena. One I'd like to touch on very quickly is our distributed AI meter platform.
We recently launched a partnership with NVIDIA, and what we're doing there is, with Utilidata and NVIDIA, we're bringing a AI-enabled smart meter platform to the market. This is really a new technology and innovative solutions that's gonna help customers solve very big problems for the utilities, bringing more compute power and edge compute all the way down to the edge, to the point of consumption, if you will, where that meter is placed. And we're doing it in a way that's gonna drive near-term value. We've already got 150,000 endpoints committed with three pilots. And you can see that we're generating roughly $75 million in revenue, beginning in late 2025, already committed on this program. So again, this is something that we're really leaning into.
It's also informing our next-gen meter development platform that's gonna allow us to kind of use this architecture and repurpose it across a number of our meter platforms. In terms of key takeaways, I thought I would just touch on, again, the four pillars that we talked about. Gerben really talked about these strategic pillars as an enterprise. You know, we manage the segment along these same guiding principles. So it's a proven playbook. It's working for us. We firmly believe in continued execution across these four pillars, and we think that they will deliver incremental value above market for all of our stakeholders. We're committed to driving profitable growth across the near term and short term, and long-term performance of the segment and for Hubbell.
With that, I think with 10 seconds to go, I'm gonna ask Mark to come up and talk a little bit about HES.
Which one? Green?
Green. Green.
All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mark Mikes. I'm President of Hubbell Electrical Solutions. As you heard earlier, I've been around quite a long time. In fact, this week, I'm celebrating my 35th anniversary with Hubbell. And, you know, one of the questions I sometimes get asked, "Why you stay around so long at Hubbell?" Well, you saw six folks get up and talk earlier. There's six reasons, there are another 15 reasons in attendance today, and there's a whole lot more reasons at our various locations throughout the organization. That's really the singular reason why I've been around so long. So 34 years on the utility side. The last several years were spent running power systems. And since then, the last year, I've been running hard on the electrical solutions side.
Some observations of electrical solutions in my first year. First, it's a very strong franchise. Probably ought to get to my slides. It's a very strong franchise. I like the products, I like the brands. More importantly, I like the people and the leadership team. Very, very strong leadership team, and with that, we'll be able to accomplish a lot together. That leadership team managed very well through a dynamic period that Gerben talked about earlier, and he also talked about how he streamlined the portfolio during that period of time, and those results are certainly showing up in our financial performance now. I mentioned the time at Power Systems.
I would say that there is a lot of similarities between Power Systems, the utility component business, and the electrical segment. The products delivering high, you know, essential products that have a high cost of failure. I also think there's a lot of opportunity to grow and this accelerate our growth in the segment, not only on the top line, but on the bottom line as well. So I see strong margin performance ahead for us. Gerben also mentioned a well-developed playbook, and we are following that. It's well-developed, it's comprehensive, and it's pretty straightforward. There's a lot to it, there's a lot of initiatives, but it's straightforward, and that's what's gonna help us do it. But we've got a solid team.
The team is aligned and committed to making, delivering on those results. So what do you need to know about Hubbell Electrical Solutions? One, I already said it, strong portfolio, brands in the electrical space. That space includes several high growth verticals. That's very good for us. And then we have really great opportunities to accelerate within those space, in fact, the entire business, not just that space. And that's through sales force realignment. That's we're making ourselves less complex and more efficient. All of those things are going to work together to drive above GDP growth with strong margin performance. It's helpful to look back a little bit before we look forward at the core businesses and the impact of those divestitures that we mentioned earlier.
You can see here on the page that the drag that residential lighting had on the business, it was divested in January of this year, and C&I drag, which is not on the chart, would be much worse. That was divested in 2021. So the good news is, if you look at the core businesses, they had double-digit growth over the past three years, and the better news is there's more opportunity to grow. So if we take a look at the core businesses a little closer, made up of three businesses, led by VPGMs. Our electrical products division is run by Peter Fehl in the back of the room. Peter is a solid wiring device franchise. His business will grow a little closer to GDP than the others. Nonresidential is exposed to nonresidential construction, industrial markets.
His growth is primarily gonna come through new products, pull through from the vertical work that we're doing, and margin expansion through footprint rationalization. One thing I failed to mention at the beginning was that all of these businesses are exposed to the mega trends, the growth verticals, just in varying degrees. Peter's happens to be the lesser of the three. The highest of the three is our connecting and grounding business, run by Kevin Ryan in the back of the room. The good news here, that's our highest margin business. It's also our highest exposed business to his growth verticals. That's a nice combination. Burndy is the premium product in that portfolio.
In fact, when we talk about cross-selling and all the things that we're doing with our sales organization, we often lead with that particular product line as a premium product that enables a lot of pull-through for us. The third business of Electrical Solutions is our industrial products division, led by Christophe Vogel. It's a nichey business of power distribution products, industrial controls, but a high exposure to the data center market with our acquisition of PCX, which we'll talk about a little later. I also wanna mention in the room two other important teammates, Melissa Wozniak . She's a VP of strategy and helps with our run, our business development group, and Joe Capozzoli is our VP of finance. Really important players and teammates in our market. So how we play and how we win?
Well, we are a mix of attractive businesses across multiple markets, but it's really the same formula, no matter what market or what business you're talking about. Similar to HPS or Power Systems, it's a large product deck with a high quality of failure. And so we have got to improve our service, deliver top—you know, service is our top priority. And many lines, you know, in many of our lines right now, we have our services equal to or above pandemic levels. In fact, in some of our lines, there are at all-time highs. The better news about that is still opportunity to improve and become easier to do business and more reliable for our customers. The playbook, as previously mentioned, our playbook is comprehensive, and it's straightforward and really consists of two elements.
One element is really addressing the front end, which we'll talk about in a few minutes, with sales force realignment and our investment in vertical business development groups. The other part is simplification and unification across the business. That's really from the front end to the back end. Literally, it's everything that we do, delivering high level of service and becoming easier to do business with, is literally the aim of every initiative that we have. Let's talk a little bit more about sales force realignment. I'm really excited about this one. In fact, you know, the feedback that we get consistently from every customer or channel partner is, "We're glad you're doing this." The comments are all unanimously positive.
In fact, Bill mentioned that we were in AD here a week or so ago, with 20 of our top partners, to the person, that was-- it was, "This is a great move. It, it's gonna serve you well." Previously, each of our businesses were, brand-focused, had brand-focused sales organizations, redundant resources, you know, suboptimized coverage across the country. Effective January first, when we changed the organization, the group is now unified. We have one national sales manager responsible for selling all products, supported by five regional vice presidents, and 20 district managers all selling the entire portfolio, and not just one product. Those 20 district managers are supported by approximately 300 territory managers, and there's where we can get a lot of, product expertise, that's needed to sell the entire package.
But all are very focused on selling an entire solution and not just an individual brand. Not to mention, after our reorganization, we have a much stronger geographic coverage than we had before with the different sales organizations. They were spread unequally throughout the organization, throughout the country, and now they are spread fairly equally, and we've got great coverage. Part of that reorganization resulted in a savings of resources, but rather than pocketing all of that, we invested it into six vertical business development groups. These groups, you see them on the middle of the page, what we're concentrated on, but the purpose of these groups, too, is enhance our relationships with the decision-makers, the end users, the EPCs, and our customer partners.
It increases our visibility into the projects that are coming our way. It helps us drive specifications. And you heard earlier, Alexis and Terry both talk about new product development. These business development groups are able to feed our new product development pipeline. So today, we have a lower cost, more effective, more efficient sales force, cross-selling all of our products each and every day, and we're seeing good progress already out of that group, with more progress expected to come. So a couple of examples in the growth verticals. The two hottest ones clearly are renewables and data centers. Starting with renewables, we are focused on utility-grade solar. We have $120 million of Hubbell sales. I want to emphasize Hubbell because it's not just electrical solutions.
So not only are we doing cross-selling and more solution selling within the electrical segment, within our vertical business development groups are selling the entirety of Hubbell's package. So we've put together a leading package in the electrical balance of system on the renewable side. We started with Burndy. Like I mentioned earlier, it's a premium brand. It's in there. And then we were able to, through the development of our vertical business groups, to pull through other products and, of course, adding more new products as we go. So if you look at the chart, you see gray dots, and you see yellow dots. Those gray dots represent Hubbell Electrical Solutions products, and those yellow or gold dots represent those of Utility Solutions. So they're, again, representing everything.
We'll flip the page here and give you a couple of examples of that innovation product, product pipeline. These would not likely have occurred, certainly not in the timing they occurred, without our business development groups out there looking, building relationships, spending time in the field, looking for opportunities to improve contractor efficiencies. IPCC, the Insulation Piercing Compression Connector, is a great example. It creates a level of flexibility that doesn't exist in the installations today. It reduces the wiring installation by greater than 30%. Connections are well organized. There's flexibility that doesn't exist today prior to this product. Once again, contractor efficiency is really important, and in fact, I would say it's really important to all of our ideation and new product development programs moving forward.
Greg's video on TowerPak, the examples that he gave of the pole with grid automation, are all examples of taking existing products that you could buy one at a time today. You certainly could do that, but packaging them together, assembling them together, creates a solution and a value that is very attractive to all our customers. The other products at the bottom of the page, the combiner box, the load-break disconnect, they are more traditional in terms of how they are used. But the combination of our insulation piercing device, these products together enable an expanded Hubbell product offering into the space and solar farm configuration. We expect to see greater than $50 million just from these products alone over the next five years.
Keenly focused on looking for those other opportunities in the renewable space to continue to add to our package. Next is data centers. A lot of questions about data centers earlier, rightfully so. I don't think I've participated in too many business conversations where data centers didn't come up in some form or fashion, whether it's driving the need for more energy and transmission on the utility side or on the electrical side, and all the business that it's doing. Today, we are at $170 million of sales. We spent a lot of time, Melissa and her team spent a lot of time trying to look at what our product offering should be and our market reach.
We are focused on growing our share in the electrical infrastructure side of the data centers. That's where we play today, and we have a strong right to play based on the products that we offer. We'll offer modular power skids through PCX, the existing products pull-through that we talked about earlier. Our business development teams are actively out there working directly with cloud customers on those modular power skids. Our contractor teams are out there looking for ways to specify our products through the relationships with the EPCs and the channel partners. And we also sell into the data center market through supporting OEMs and other powertrain providers. So we have many avenues to get there.
We feel really good about the strategy to grow our $175 million by double digits over the next three years. Talk a little bit more about our acquisition of PCX. This like Systems Control, it's modular skids, but the modular skids here are the powertrain for the data centers. PCX is a leader in the low-voltage modular skids. Modular skids are really important. They cut install time for the contractors by 30%-50%. They cut the overall labor cost in the neighborhood of 20%-40%, depending on the size of the data center. There's a lot of momentum, as you would expect, for modular data centers with that precious contractor resource shortage that's out there and all the work that's ahead.
Anything that we could do, as we said, on other solutions, to build products, to integrate our existing components, to allow them to save time is really good, so thus, the momentum for modular centers. Not only does it save them time, it's done in a controlled environment, it has higher quality, it's more repeatable, lower cost, and again, of course, again, that contractor efficiency. So we see a good road ahead there. As I said, PCX has strong hyperscale relationships. We're in the process of growing our customer base. One important thing about PCX is that they are involved in the design stage. That's really good. It gives us good line of sight, and it gives us the opportunity to specify other Hubbell products that we can pull through.
So we'll switch gears on our second of strategic priority of unification and simplification. As mentioned earlier, keenly focused on service and ease of doing business, and driving productivity through reduced capacity in every form. Akshay talked about footprint rationalization earlier, and a lot of the investment that he talked about was actually related to the Electrical Solutions platform. Electrical Solutions grew through a number of acquisitions over many years. With those acquisitions came many factories creating subscale footprint for us. Subscale footprint, though, is another word for opportunity. The team has been doing a really good job over the past few years of pursuing that opportunity. And the good news here, again, there's more opportunity ahead of us, and we're have projects underway to do so.
Goal, 15% reduction, as the slide says, and that's net of expansion. There are places where we definitely need to invest in more capacity, but there's between that efficiency that we'll gain, and the expansion that we do and do it in the right way, the effort, I can assure you, is well worth it. Efficient factories equal higher margin and better service. Another way that's important to us is this SKU rationalization program that we've got going on right now. It helps our factories by not distracting them from business that they probably shouldn't be doing, reduces complexity and making sure, again, we're working on profitable business.
While depth and breadth, I mentioned, is very important to us, it's part of our competitive advantage, multiple changeovers for low volume, low margin products is not always in our best interest. So we've taken all of our SKUs, it's approximately 100,000 of them. We have put them in the four quadrants based on their margin and volume profiles. We are concentrated on that lower left quadrant, where we are either going to price it up, take cost out, or eliminate that product. Again, all within mind of raising margin, allowing our factories to run efficiently, which will also allow us to raise margin. Probably the most boring slide of the day is this one, but it's also some very important topics on here.
If we look at the systems first, I almost said HES. I did say HES. Hubbell Electrical Solutions has many company codes. There's many company codes mean to order our products, you have to have, you'd have to cover all of them if you wanted to order everything that we had. So we're underway right now. We have a plan to reduce our domestic company codes by nearly 50% by the first quarter of 2025, and with additional reductions planned through 2027.
What that means is fewer quotes, fewer purchase orders, a bit larger, but that's easier for our customers to manage, it's easier for us to process, easier for us to be more responsive, take out duplicated resources that are involved in having so many company codes and the complexity that goes along with that. Once again, all of those things equate to improved margins and better service. Internally, we're touching everything. All these businesses that have been operating independently do things differently. So we're harmonizing our planning and scheduling of our factories, but we're also harmonizing everything that we do in terms of all of our processes, sharing best practices instead of doing it many ways, we do it the same or similar way. We are implementing Lean that Akshay mentioned earlier as well.
We do Lean in some of our factories. We do it well. In other factories, we have opportunities to improve. Then from a customer engagement side, I would say that anything that we've mentioned system-wise or internal that we're going to, we are addressing, the customer will feel those things. Our customers are already feeling the benefit of the sales reorganization. We're hearing that. Next up is harmonizing our company codes and all the terms and our customer-facing processes and procedures. Some of those were systems dependent, and we're getting those out of the way.
Again, once again, as we engage our customers and become easier to do business with, that only supports a growth proposition that we have, along with all the many other things that we're doing to add to our portfolio and become more efficient, will drive that, the profitability as a result. So in summary, you've already heard it, but our broad portfolio—we are made up of a broad portfolio of leading brands. We are exposed to high-growth verticals in our space. We have many opportunities to reduce complexity, and we're actively doing that, as we speak. Our playbook is well-defined and very comprehensive. We have been doing it for years, on the utility side, and we're getting good start on the electrical side, making very good progress. We have a strong leadership team that's aligned.
We couldn't do it without them. We couldn't do it them without being aligned with our team and our organization. I estimate the journey lasting somewhere in the 18-24-month time frame. But at the end of the journey, our customer will be very pleased, we'll be much easier to do business with. Our shareholders should be pleased because we're gonna outgrow GDP while significantly growing our operating margin. So with that, I'm gonna turn it back to Bill for an overview.
Okay, I'm gonna try really hard not to compete for the most boring slide competition today. But it's been, you know. I wanna thank my partners, Gerben, Greg, Mark, the functional leads that you heard from, the business unit managers who are here today. I hope we've given you a good feel for who Hubbell is in 2024. I think it's different than who we were in 2022, and I know it's a lot different than who we were in 2020. My objective of this section is to tell you what we're gonna look like in 2027. So this meeting is all about our medium-term outlook, but my guess is you'd like to hear on Q2 in 2024. So we are reaffirming, you know, our outlook.
June, sorry, May is not closed yet, but certainly, the performance in the first part of the second quarter is quite consistent with what we've been expecting. To remind everybody, the first quarter, we beat consensus by $0.10. We added that $0.10 to restructuring, and we maintained our guidance. So we'll obviously be talking with you all in several weeks about the second quarter in detail. But the guide for the year, just to remind everybody, involves a 9% sales growth midpoint, double-digit operating profit growth, and $16.25 midpoint on EPS. We've had a very strong level of execution relative to our last Investor Day, and I just wanna remind everybody of what we said and where we are.
We're gonna commit to you today to deliver compounding at double-digit earnings for the next 3.5 years. So let's just remind ourselves of where we were a couple of years ago. We talked about 3%-5% growth rate for the time frame of 2022-2025. We outpaced that. That's a combination of both very constructive markets where we're fortunate to be exposed to, as well as a very, very successful pricing strategy. I think you see the pricing strategy come through on the operating profit margin line, 400 basis points above where we were, and already $2.33 of earnings ahead of where we said we'd be in 2025.
I wanted to use this slide to make a very simple point, which is that we're taking our most recent level of performance and committing to you all that that is our new base. And off of that base, we are going to grow double digits. So rather than paint a picture of, boy, we got ahead of things, and it'll pull back, you know, that's not what it's gonna be. So to me, that's a very important point that I wanna make sure that we're all clear. We are basically emerging from the pandemic as a larger, more profitable company, and we're gonna get better from here, given the leadership team you all have been meeting with today. Alyssa made some reference to benchmarking.
This is a tool we use with the leaders of the company, and we push it down actually to all the executives of the company. We use a peer group that involves 20 electricals and multi-industrial peers, and when we review this internally with the group, we have more rows. Dan has selected those rows, which have moved the most in the 6-year period, so we can show you where we've improved the best, but he's also picked very important drivers of performance here. So when we started using this tool, the reaction was, "Well, those competitors aren't really like us. They're not really the same." And it's been good to have a different sound now, which is back in the late teens, there was kind of rejection.
The gray implies we were bottom half performance in all of those metrics, sales growth, OP margin, working capital efficiency, and return metrics. What you see by 2023 is we're first and second quartile in all of those. So that's an enormous way to come. I think we have several contributing factors. One is the portfolio management that we've been actively managing. Another is the pricing success that we had. Another is the commitment to executional excellence as well as a real commitment to customer service. So it's an amazing, to me anyway, to see how much impact you can have. Dan and I often get questions about, "Why aren't you more profitable? Your peers are all more profitable than you.
Why is that?" This is a first quartile gap OP margin, which maybe suggests they're better at adjusting non-GAAP add backs. There may be something else, but that's what it maybe appears to me to be the driver. So, this is a tool we use. We're really happy how far it's come, and we're suggesting to you that we wanna improve off of this. This is not some kind of peak. This is our new base. So let's switch to the construct of how we wanna talk about our medium-term commitments to you and longer term commitments. And it starts at the top line with sales. And so we've broken out our two segments here, and we're showing you the organic growth that we believe is available to us in each of those segments.
So you see utility segment at 5%-6% organic growth and electrical at 3%-5%. Around each pie chart, you can see the various components and where there's kind of maybe higher or lower than the average. On the utility side, you can see the above average strength from substation, from transmission, as well as from grid protection and controls, although the profile in utility is quite consistently strong there. On the electrical side of the pie, you see non-res at the more modest end of the range, but data centers and renewables being the big drivers, helping lift that up. So, this really informs us of what we think we can compound at on the top line.
During the break, I had a couple conversations about price cost and our framework here. To me, this is quite important to think about half of our costs being material related. You can see on the left side, which is the material-related half, you can see the raws being order of magnitude a third of the half, and you're gonna be able to buy your raws, you know, at market, right? So when Akshay was talking about productivity on the sourcing side, you're really focused on that two-thirds of the material-related piece, that's components where there's some kind of value add. I think one of the reasons we're highlighting this is just to show how sensitive ultimately we are to material costs.
It's an interesting time to try to figure that out, given right now we have steel and copper appearing to be going in opposite directions, which is a little bit hard to, to think through. But, the balance of the cost in labor, RD&E, freight, transportation, and overhead. Obviously, needing to make sure we're very mindful of the costs there, and that's where some of Akshay's restructuring and some of his plant consolidation ideas affect things, and as well as some of Mark's SKU rationalization helps us run those non-material costs much more effectively. So we're targeting to have price-cost productivity be better than neutral. One of the conversations I was having is: Is there opportunity for it to be better? And the answer is yes.
I do think it's important for us to convey to you all today that we feel we have pivoted from a period where we were, I think, a little overly dependent on the price lever, and that we think that's gonna be much more, quote, normal going forward. And I think that's why we wanted Akshay to talk to you all about productivity, because we think we're gonna be much more productivity dependent in, in this, in the future. That being said, as soon as cost starts to outstrip - if the, if inflation is above our productivity abilities, price, price is our lever, and we feel much more adept and confident in using the price lever than we, than we ever have.
So this is kind of a so what chart of all the last few hours that you all have been listening to us. So, we think this takes us to 4%-6% organic compound annual growth rate over the next three and a half years. We think that that volume will drop through in the 25%-30% incremental range. That mathematically gives us about 150 basis points of margin improvement over that four-year period. And you'll see we're talking about 100% free cash flow conversion. We've been in the 90s as our CapEx elevated a little bit, and I think we're gonna be elevated for a couple of few years on CapEx.
But this is, I think by the end of that period, you'll start to see us back around 100 on free cash flow. So, I think as Jeff was doing quick math on the acquisitions, and we're adding two to three points, so the 4-6 goes to 6-9, and all of that drops through at the earnings level to a double-digit growth rate compounded over that period of time. And so I think we're trying to convey confidence as a leadership team, that we're exposed to attractive markets, that we're gonna get our fair share of those markets, that we're doing things like Salesforce redesign, like innovation, to try to make sure we maximize our share within those opportunities. And we're gonna invest in this franchise, both organically through CapEx and inorganically through acquisition.
We think this is a sustainable model in attractive markets with expanding margins and building off of the base that the last two years has basically been a reset to a new base. So, I'm sure there'll be no questions on this, so I'm gonna turn it back to Gerben.
Good. Yeah. Let's do another Q&A session, and then I'll close it, close it out.
Bill, really appreciate the snarky comments about other companies. It's definitely a new lead for you guys, so appreciate that. Just on the businesses, could you guys maybe have been some choppy macro data points. You guys have a, you know, nice spread of industrial exposure, utility, and then maybe just more specifically on the Aclara side. If you could talk about what you guys are seeing, kind of on a day-to-day basis here in the second quarter on industrial and then utility, and then secondarily, on Aclara, how much visibility you have into these bids in the second half and the orders needed to, you know, make next year look a little bit better on that front.
Yeah. So maybe I'll start with some comments and you can add. But I think what we're seeing on utility side is quite good strength on T&D. I think the T is stronger than the D, and the D continues to have, we think, a little bit of excess inventory, not so much in the channel, but at the end in the actual utility in their yards. But that business, we think, is doing quite nicely. I think in the specialty side of utility, you know, we continue to have softness, Steve, in our telecom enclosures business, that's continuing to persist. And on the Aclara side-
... They had a big first quarter, you know, and we think, you know, they can continue. I think you're right that in places like the meters business, you start to get some visibility. And if you're, I think our backlog, you know, is close to being in the one-year kind of range. And so I agree with your, I think what you're suggesting is, you know, at that stage, you're looking for good orders, you know, to backfill, you know, that, and keep that backlog with some healthy visibility. So that's what I generally say about where utilities is.
I think the only thing I'd add is, I think for Aclara, we're really focused on the back half of the year, really converting what's in the pipeline to orders. We had a really good start of the year with nice, strong momentum out of the gates in terms of volumes. We're clearing a good bit of backlog in the Aclara business, but what we're seeing is the business is leveraging very well on volume and delivering nice accretive returns, both on the meter side and our AMI side. As I said before, we've got a lot of quote activity going on with munis and co-ops, so feel very bullish there. The water space is going through a big replacement cycle, particularly in the U.K. A lot of activity in the pipeline there.
Then, the IOU replacement cycle is a little bit slower to come to fruition, so we're watching that closely, and we're having conversations. But, again, the big focus for the back half of the year is really pipeline conversion, just backfilling the backlog.
I guess just on industrial markets, broadly, and electrical?
Anything, Mark, you'd call out?
I don't see anything that's out of what we expected to see so far. Across all the markets that we're serving right now, they're kind of behaving like we anticipated from our plan.
And then just, sorry, one more. For next year, year after that, as you kind of go out for the next three years on growth, do you expect any variability in that growth? Maybe, you know, slower growth next year and then a reacceleration as utility budgets grow? Like, any, any, any degree of—any view on-
Yeah
... kind of the volatility of that growth for the next three years for the company?
I mean, you're right to point out that I pretended the lines are all smooth-
Mm-hmm
... which they won't be, but I don't think there's anything of note that I would call out.
Not at all.
in that regard.
I agree.
Maybe also on, on utilities. Greg, on your slide, you had kind of role of EPCs, but you didn't really address that. Are you looking at EPCs to do more to kind of uncork more volume? Is that the comment you were making, or is there some other element with EPCs that's kind of coloring your view of what growth might look like?
No, it's, we're locked in with EPCs. We're doing a lot of business with them. So no, there's nothing coloring it outside, and it's baked into our 5%-6% growth picture that we've painted.
How do you think about the role of stimulus so far? I guess you could maybe argue, you know, in your P&L last year and maybe even this year, there might still be very little. But also just a question of kind of the fungibility of those dollars. I mean, dollars are being spent-
Mm-hmm.
But is it really incremental? Do you have visibility on that sort of thing, and how do you see that playing out?
Still a bit early. We are seeing some of the BEAD funding release and the stimulus is coming through, but not materially impacting our numbers at this point. So we're factoring that into our 5%-6%.
Yeah, and as we've stated, Jeff, you're right to point out it's a little bit fungible, and it's hard to see what specifically. We believe that it will drive a point of outperformance. In total, we see some of the renewable projects we're benefiting from that. Some of the infrastructure funding is still flowing to the state. We think that will happen over this strategic time period, so we believe we'll benefit from it. It is very hard to point out this specifically is 1% or 0.5% or 1.5% that's driven from it.
Just one other little one. Just this utility scale EV solution that you've developed seemed like it was very nascent two years ago. It feels like it still is very nascent today. Like, what's the prospects for that effort?
Yeah, I would say it is that we're running pilots right now, and you know, I think earlier it was said, you know, the utility industry is a pretty conservative industry. Utility customers are going to make sure this stuff works. So right now, we have pilots running on these materials. So you know, I would expect that again, to be measured in years, not weeks or months for that to come through. But it's a very innovative solution that can really help with one of the big problems today, which is peak load, which is only if we think about load being added to the system, where that's gonna manifest itself is around the peak load.
And so for us to help our utility customers manage through that peak load, this is a great example of when you get the electrification of transportation, it's gonna just worsen, right? We all come home, we plug our cars in at a time where we're sitting at the peak, and if we can manage through that and have the utility be able to manage to not necessarily charge that car in the peak load, but in the three hours after that, and still have a fully charged car in the morning, that's the innovation that we believe that will add value for our customers. But this will play out, I think, over the next years of being able to show the success and penetration.
Maybe, just on, the margin front. So I think you talked about the sort of 150 BIPS expansion, the 25%-30% leverage. Do we think about utility-
... margins expanding more just because of the higher growth rate and similar leverage, or are we thinking kind of similar margin expansion across both segments?
Yeah, we explicitly stayed away from giving margin targets. But in terms of your question, you know, I think Mark, in Electrical, given some of those changes in the second half of his pages and comments around unification and efficiency and competing collectively, I would say, you know, Mark has more runway to expand margins, if you were just comparing, you know, deltas.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, maybe a good way to look at that is the construct that we provided of the incrementals, right? If you think about 25%-30% incremental, in light of what the utility margin today is, an extra dollar of, of growth, while very attractive in the earnings that you get for it, doesn't necessarily move the needle that much, versus when you look at the Electrical segment, which is much lower on margin today, and you have that same, incremental on your volume, it obviously moves the needle, aside from the actions that Mark is still taking on, on the restructuring and co-competing collectively, that has opportunity for margin expansion. So definitely higher in the Electrical than Utility.
Just one follow-up on, you know, scale came up a lot today in various presentations, and the importance of scale and having a broad sort of product range. I just wondered, sort of, do you think that over time, the larger electrical players in the U.S. are taking a lot more share than was the case 10 years ago? Or it's more of a steady, just kind of accretion of share. Just any perspectives on that and what that might mean for acquisition activity?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's possible, but it hasn't been any kind of seismic shift. I don't know that it has a ton of impact on acquisition. I still think there's gonna be smaller scale companies that, you know, if in Electrical side, if Mark were to buy a tuck-in, you know, sometimes its facility is subscale, so he moves it into a space that we already have. Sometimes they have, instead of their own sales force, they have reps. And sometimes it just has, you know, a, an S&A structure that's a little high.
So there's a lot of levers that come into play that we just need to buy a good company with good product, and we're not looking to do turnarounds, but even buying a good company, we feel highly confident that it's more valuable on our platform than it is trying to compete on its own. So-
And Bill, I would say that that's part of the benefit of selling a package and a solution versus selling individual brands. When we add new products or sell existing products that we have today, then we're out there, and the conversation's much different. Whether you wanna buy this brand, or you wanna buy all these, all these other products that we offer, we can be a lot more assertive in the marketplace about pulling those sales through and preventing new entrants from taking share, cherry-picking, if you will.
Yeah, yeah, thanks. Just to follow up on the earlier margin question. So you, you gave a lot of examples on the work streams you're targeting in terms of 80/20 simplification, the restructuring, you know, price cost. It seems like those actions alone amount to at least 50 bips a year. Why wouldn't you be entitled to a normal volume incremental through the facilities? Is there some offsets or what you're thinking there?
No, I think what we modeled for you is the lift from the incremental. So, I think to the extent we're successful at some of those other things you highlighted, that's where there could be upside.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. And then just to follow up on distributed AI, sounds like some early, you know, solid wins. What does the funnel look like, and what is the addressable opportunity there, for customers that would reasonably, you know, adopt this kind of AI-embedded technology?
I would say it's still very nascent for us to size the market opportunity around it. But we would say there's a high degree of interest out of the gates, and as I said before, we've got 150,000 endpoints already committed, three pilots. So once we get through that, we'll have a better read on what the real market potential is there.
Yes, you got a combination of a set of software that can be very analytical, supported by a processor that can do-
Right
... tons of calculations, and, I think the business case of that is still gonna be proved by, by these-
Right
... by these endpoints. So in other words, maybe you don't need as much processing, so you can maybe do it a little bit cheaper. And at the same time, it'll highlight the real business case of where the benefits, when somebody uses this. And so I think that's. We're excited to try a crack at it, and we'll learn as we do that, I think.
And this, by the way, is a great example of infrastructure spending helping us. This is a program that's been funded by Grid Resilience Infrastructure stimulus money that we're able to do these pilots on to really prove the use cases. But at the same time, I think what Greg said earlier, it also provides us the opportunity to provide the next-generation features in our own product that will serve you know, well beyond the infrastructure funding support.
Joe?
Thanks. Greg, can you just talk a little bit about the T& D side of utility CapEx and what you tend to see over cycles in terms of if it's gonna be more attractive over the next several years on the T side? Is it natural that there will be a handoff, and at some point, that's going to require faster spend on the D side? And then related to transmission, anything that you would call out in a product or capability gaps that you're focused on filling as fast as possible?
Yeah, I think that, that I would put more emphasis on the higher growth on the T side. Whether it's a handoff to D, I don't think so. I think D is gonna be pretty consistent, mid-single digit. And more of the pressure in terms of growth and investment is gonna come on the T side over the strat, at least the strat cycle that we're looking at. The backside of your question was, repeat the back, the second part of the question?
Just the T sort of product portfolio today, and in terms of exploiting growth opportunities, anything on sort of product or capability gaps that you'd like to-?
Yeah, I would say the biggest area we're focused on right now is just making sure that we stay ahead of the capacity requirements. We don't see many product gaps, and where we do, we have pretty good partnerships to leverage in a buy, resell kind of environment. But we're always acquisitive, and we're looking at opportunities to continue to bolt on and fill. I can't point to one big product gap in the transmission side of our business today. It's really capacity is what we're focused on to make sure that we're staying right ahead of the demand curve.
The other comment I may add to the distribution side of the business, it's a good part of that is O&M, the maintenance side of it. We know the grid is very aged, and if you think about an environment that utilities are gonna be facing of load growth and revenue growth related to that, I think an opportunity would be that part of that growth that they're enjoying now, that they would reinvest it back into the D side. So, you know, we're pretty confident that at a minimum will do what Greg just said.
Tommy?
Two-part question on the utility margin comments you've provided. So to grow from here, what's the assumption on mix impact, if any, there? And then secondarily, what's the risk that there ends up being a ceiling here on the margin just from a competitive standpoint? Thanks.
Yeah, so the mix, you'll see, Tommy, just in that pie, you know, where we think the higher growth is coming in transmission, and substation areas, as well as on the control side. So, you know, between T and D, don't surmise there's a big mix margin kinda difference. I think, and on the control side, good margin, too. So not a ton of mix effect on those different growth rates.
On competition?
Yeah, I mean, I think, obviously, we feel it's a competitive industry. So I think part of our job is to make sure we're serving it on time-
Okay
... that the products are reliable, they have high quality. And I think we're starting to get into some of these places where maybe we can innovate in a way that adds value. So anytime, you know, Greg can sense something, communicate it, and prevent a truck roll, you know, he's providing a ton of value to the way utility has to kinda run their operations. So I think all that comes together, but you're right, that's also part of why I would say I think Mark has more margin runway than Greg.
Yeah.
All right.
Two questions here. First, is there any risk that transmission CapEx by utilities cannibalizes distribution CapEx in the same way that we're seeing, you know, AI spend on the tech side begin to cannibalize software spend?
Yeah, I mean, I think, I'll, I'll just say, Greg, you can-
Yeah
... you can chip in. But, I mean, to me, I kinda put T and D a little bit more in one bucket. I and I would have thought your question might have been, if there's load growth and there needs to be more generation, will the generation dollars crowd out the T and D? And, you know, our feeling on that is no, and that so much of the need on T and D is driven by capacity constraints. You saw some of the outage data that Greg shared on both frequency and duration, and, you know, that's just... you know, these are not nice-to-haves, in our opinion, from the utility.
They're must-haves, and so figuring out how to do that in the most constructive way, and that's a little bit of Gerben's talking about shifting load to later in the evening, can that help spread those dollars around? And we're hoping that load growth pickup creates more revenue for the utilities, which will create more cash, which will allow them to invest a little bit of that, of that extra, too.
Okay, my second question is: do you feel that you need higher benefits from productivity in the next few years to, you know, make that-
... price, cost, productivity equation, you know, neutral or positive than you have had, you know, in past years, maybe, you know, thinking more pre-COVID years?
Yes. I mean, I think we believe that we're shifting to a little more reliance on that productivity, and kinda have price be that more reactive lever, you know, should inflation be different than we anticipated.
Yeah, I think that's certainly true for the utility side of the business. I mean, we're taking a more modest view on pricing through this cycle. Productivity is where we're double-clicking, and we, we feel very confident we have the-- we've got enough levers on the productivity side-
Yeah.
-to more than offset the pressure that we're gonna have on inflation-
Yeah
and some of the pricing challenges at work.
But importantly, to understand that while we're taking a productivity engine and targets up to the extent that it doesn't cover inflation, we will use price to maintain a neutral or better dynamics. And then it comes back to the position of our portfolio, the strength of our position, the strength of what we-- how we service our customer. We represent a small part of the total cost of ownership, but a huge part of the cost of failure to that, and that entitles us to be able to use these tools to net neutral or positive.
You have one more, Christopher? Take two more quick ones. Go ahead, please.
Yeah. Hi, Scott Graham from Seaport. I have two questions for you. When you pull together the chart on page 66 with the distribution versus transmission, you know, the sort of the blend is about a mid-single digit plus spend by utilities, and yet your HUS target, you know, 5-6, is about that same level. Or just connect the dots there, is that because you're expecting Aclara to grow slower than that?
Yeah, maybe I can help a little bit. If you look at those, those are the CapEx dollars-
Yep
-that are spent, and we have an OpEx portion to our, particularly to the distribution side of the business, that we see slightly lower, which gets us to that mid-single digit.
That's very helpful. Thank you. The second question is, Bill, you sounded a little agnostic on, hey, it doesn't matter where the acquisitions come, either side of the house. Is it possible that the industrial piece of the pie maybe actually starts to grow a little faster if you could find some faster growth opportunities there?
Sure. I mean, I think we are, again, we're trying to be intentional as to where we're gonna add, and industrial would fit. We think reshoring, and we think there's some plays there, so absolutely.
Well-
It depends, depends on actionability, right?
It would have to be accretive, though-
Yeah
to the company's growth rate.
Okay.
Michael?
Great. Can we go back to the inventory comments, Bill? I think you mentioned the backyard was a bit more impactful right now than the channel. So maybe just double-click into that comment and, you know, when do we think we may be working through this shadow inventory that you're seeing out there?
Yes, so it's a little bit hard to say. I'm looking for Bob Prantl, but he's probably been... He's our sales leader on the utility side, and I think he's maybe been a little frustrated that we don't have perfect information on how much is in the yard. So we're a little bit dependent on dialogue, you know, and, and imperfect, anecdotal kind of feedback. But it feels to us like that has been burning off.
Right.
Things like storm, a stormy month like we had in May, kinda would help accelerate that maybe to a very slight degree. And at the end of the day, the effect, you know, it isn't really—I mean, it might be trimming just a little bit of orders, but the T&D growth, when we look at 2024 and look at the organic growth in T&D, it's gonna be robust, even with this little bit of overstocking in there.
Okay. That's great.
Yeah.
Then a quick one, you know, on-
He's smiling 'cause I didn't ask him to answer, so he's-
Mm-hmm.
I'll get him afterwards.
We'll get him later on. Then on the kinda like the comment where you talked about the sort of framework, you talked about consumer price fatigue as a factor. So I'm just wondering how that's feeding through into some of the rate decisions you're seeing out there right now, and how do you think that influences the next couple of years in for utility?
Yeah. I don't know if you have any pricing comments to recent actions. The stickiness is still very good.
Yeah, our price is holding. We don't see much of a reaction. You know, you're always, you know, you're always dealing with some ankle biters that come in with nichey, you know, small segments of the portfolio competing. But, given the scale and breadth and depth we have across the segment and our position with our key accounts, we're not seeing much downward pressure on price overall.
And Terry's-
There's pockets where we're always gonna be challenged, and we manage through those surgically.
Then Terry's sitting next to you. We were just at NAED, and I sat through maybe 20 customer meetings, and I wasn't asked once to cut price. So I think the channel continues to feel they are a champion of price with us. They feel... And again, Terry can comment if he feels different, but they, I think, they, they're enjoying the price as much as we are. They don't feel that it's been eating into elasticity of demand in any way, and you know, they're more concerned that we communicate it effectively to them, let them have enough time to properly incorporate it, rather than us jam them. And that's more of a statement of the last two years, when things were kind of fast and furious.
So I think we've developed, at least in my sense, Terry, a better partnership with them on the dialogue and communication around price increases. As Gerben said, there'd be a justification because inflation's outstripping productivity. It would be, it would be a dialogue and a discussion, not a surprise.
Well, it's also why we're doubling down so heavy on service levels, because if our service levels stay up at or above the market performance, price becomes a non-conversation, right? They, they're really looking for good service. If they're getting good service, they're not gonna pressure us on price.
Okay, great. Let's wrap it up here. Thank you again for joining us, and I hope you found the materials and the discussion valuable. We are excited about the opportunities in front of us, and we're confident in our ability to continue to execute on our strategy to drive strong performance for all of our stakeholders. And for you, our shareholders, what that means is double-digit adjusted earnings growth over the next few years on top of this strong foundation. We look forward to continuing to engage with you through the balance of this year into next year, but perhaps more importantly, we look forward to continuing to demonstrate our team's ability to deliver for you. So thank you very much, and have a safe rest of your day.