Page three, forward-looking statements. Today's presentation is gonna include forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the appendix for those and read these forward-looking statements here on page three. This morning's agenda. We've got a full morning here of presentations. We're gonna kick it off with both Gerben and Bill walking you through our overall long-term strategy, how we generate cash for shareholders and deploy it on your behalf. Then we're gonna do a deeper dive on three strategic topics within that strategy. Some folks you may not have met before. Terry Watson is gonna talk to you about how we differentiate to our customer and within our channel.
Alexis Bernard, our Chief Technology Officer, is gonna talk to you about our innovation efforts, how we're accelerating organic growth, and really looking to capitalize on some attractive mega trends that are within our industry. Katie Lane , our General Counsel, is gonna talk to you about our ESG initiatives and really about how that's... Sustainability is a core part of our strategy, particularly in terms of the products that we sell on a day-to-day basis. We're gonna take a quick break for Q&A and a break. We'll come back in the second half of the morning. Allan Connolly and Pete Lau will walk you through how they execute that strategy within each of our two main business segments. We'll wrap up with some longer-term financial targets and closing remarks with Gerben Bakker and Bill again.
Finally, we'll end with a second Q&A session and a lunch. We do have other folks from Hubbell in the room today as well, so hopefully you've had a chance to mingle with them this morning. Please, during breaks and lunch, introduce yourselves, and feel free to ask them any follow-up questions. Couple quick things on Q&A, if you could please hold your questions till those dedicated sessions and keep your first- half Q&A sessions to questions covered in the first half and second half to second half , just so we can cover all the topics efficiently. We'll break for lunch, and we do have some giveaways for you on the way out, so please, stop by and get those. With that, I'll turn it over to Gerben.
Great. Thank you, Dan. Welcome everyone to our 2022 Investor Day. Excited to be back in person again with everyone. You know, if I think about the last time we were together, March of 2020, and I think it was certainly for us the last event that we did in person, and probably for many of you as well, before our world really changed and most of us got locked up for a little while.
We've been through a lot in those couple of years, but I can't start this without saying how proud I am of our company, of our 17,000 employees who really have continued to work for our customer as an essential supplier and continue to execute for shareholders over that time. Also a little bit on a personal note, this is my first Investor Day as the CEO of Hubbell, even though I've been with Hubbell over 30 years, and I'm extremely grateful for the successful company that I've inherited to build on.
I'm also surrounded by a very talented leadership team, and together we are really excited to build on the great foundation that we have been given and really look ahead to our strategy. What we'd like to outline for you today is how we're building on that base and the strategy looking forward and the journey to get that. But it really starts by what we are trying to do, what we're trying to achieve and why we exist as a business. That's to solve critical infrastructure challenges for our customers through reliable Electrical and Utility Solutions. We are uniquely positioned to drive value for our customers and for our shareholders through the unique positioning that we have along this energy infrastructure.
We have a couple of mega trends, clean energy mega trends of Electrification and Grid Modernizations that are providing tailwinds for us. What you'll hear from the team over the day is the paths and the levers that we're using to build on that base and to drive value for our key stakeholders, which are customers, our employees, and our shareholders. I wanna start with a little bit of a snapshot of Hubbell, and many of you know us very well, but I think it's always good to reflect of what that base is that we're building off. It's a 135-year-old company with deep roots in Electrical and Utility markets. A little over $4 billion in sales last year, mid-teens operating margins and strong free cash flows.
The paths, the strategy that we're going to unveil to you and that we're driving is to grow in all of these three key financial metrics. On the revenue side, we expect our markets to outgrow GDP over the cycle. Customers and innovation initiatives, as well as the acquisition playbook, will drive further growth on top of that. You will hear from Alexis, Bill, and Terry about how we're going to do that. On the margins, we've executed well over the last couple of years on price cost, and certainly we expect to continue to do that. We also wanna build on that with operational excellence and transformation, as well as investment in higher growth vertical markets that are presenting higher growth and that are more profitable.
Finally, on free cash flow, we will continue to manage our working capital while making the needed investment for this strategy and convert free cash flow at about 100% of adjusted earnings per share. Looking a little bit deeper on how we run the business, we run them through two segments, a Utility segment and an Electrical Solutions segment. A portfolio that is balanced across the two segments about equal in size and balanced with markets across each of these segments. A clear focus on serving our customers and leading depth and breadth of mission-critical components. We talk a lot about this and this applies to a lot of our portfolio, where the cost of ownership is relatively small.
We represent a smaller portion of the cost of ownership of what customers are trying to solve, but the cost of failure for our customers with our product is really high. It's an essential product in what they're trying to do. In the Utility segment, on the left, you can see a big part of that is our T&D Power Systems business, leading position in the market for transmission and distribution of components. Then more recently, in the last couple of years, we added to our Communications and Controls, the Aclara business, and we believe that combination provides a unique position for us, and you'll hear Allan talk about that later. On the right-hand side, you see the Electrical segment, and that's a combination of leading brands that we have more recently pulled together under one umbrella, under the leadership of Pete.
Recall that three years ago when we were here, we still talked about this and managed these businesses around three separate groups with separate leadership. What we found that we're able to better compete collectively, have a simplified management structure, and find operational efficiencies to drive value by combining this. These businesses together serve attractive end markets. Historically, Hubbell has played, and I was joking with Jeff earlier today about our Utility business, and for a long time, we talked about that business being kind of a GDP business. It was almost like a bond, very predictable, very profitable, but you know, it wasn't growing real fast. What we're seeing right now that these markets are growing at rates higher than GDP.
Part of it driven by the portfolio optimization that we've done over the last couple of years, and you'll hear Bill talk about the steps that we've taken there to focus on higher growth and more attractive end markets. The customer and innovation initiatives that we'll talk to you about here in a little bit to drive higher organic growth. Finally, a couple of secular energy megatrends that are providing tailwinds for our business, all of which combine to drive growth above GDP. The couple of clean energy megatrends that are affecting our business are Electrification and Grid Modernization. Electrification, simply put, is more things like transportation, industrial and commercial building application, and even home application getting plugged into the grid. Really, electrification is key to decarbonization. The second megatrend is around Grid Modernization.
This scenario we've talked to you a lot about with our Utility business, the aged grid that we have today with a lot of assets that are near or approaching the end of their life and driving reliability issues and risk. We're reminded constantly with extreme weather events of how fragile this grid is and the need to harden it. At the same time, this grid has never been more complex to operate for utilities. With the integration of renewable power, these are intermittent loads that are coming up and down as the sun shines or the wind drives and then comes down, and it's also bidirectional, and this requires grid modernization with data insights.
Both of our segments are strategically aligned around these two megatrends, and our products and portfolio really help the transition to more sustainable solutions and decarbonization. Katie will talk a little bit later about, you know, how this is also key to our strategy for our business, not just on the products that we serve, but also what we're doing within our business itself. Together, Hubbell is uniquely positioned and well-positioned to capitalize on these megatrends along the energy infrastructure. This is how we look at the infrastructure with really three categories in it, In Front of the Meter, at The Edge, and Behind the Meter. This is how we look at our business.
In Front of the Meter, we have a leading position with our T&D Components business, as well as our AMI and metering business, driving reliable solutions for our customers. On the right-hand side is where the energy is consumed. We have the leading position and brands of products that really help with the electrification. Sitting in between that, this is really at The Edge of the Utility infrastructure, we have our AMI and metering business. This is really where the capabilities which pulls together In Front of the Meter and Behind the Meter with communications, controls, and data insights. This is really a unique position for Hubbell. We're the only supplier and company with leading positions in each of these three segments.
We believe it has unique opportunities for us, and we'll give you some examples of how we're driving some of those opportunities. Those businesses are aligned around some key verticals that our strategy is focused on. You can see these six here. You'll see them repeated throughout the presentation where we'll show you how our different actions, whether it's in M&A or whether it's in innovations or whether it's in sales initiatives, are focused on these key verticals for us. In some of them, we've traditionally had a very strong position like the Electric T&D. In others, like Distribution Automation and Data Centers, we've traditionally had a smaller position, but we have a clear right to compete and win in this market. Here, the strategy is through organic and inorganic actions to drive scale.
In other markets, we've traditionally had a smaller exposure, newer to Hubbell and more developing, like electric vehicles. Here, you'll hear about an example later of where we're bringing truly the capabilities In Front of the Meter, at The Edge, and Behind the Meter to provide a solution for our company which we believe is differentiated. All of these markets sit at the center of Grid Modernization and Electrification. It represents about half of our portfolio and revenue, and it's clearly growing at above -market GDP. While we're excited about our future and our strategy and the opportunities ahead, I do wanna emphasize that this is not a 180-degree pivot for our company. Rather, it is building on the great legacy and the strength that has gotten us to this point.
A couple of years ago, we did an investor perception study, and through that study, you highlighted for us some areas that we're really strong in and some opportunity areas. Really these were things that were identified to us that resonated that we saw ourselves, and this is what we've worked on so hard over the last couple of years to set this strong base of which we're building off. Strong brands with a reputation for quality, for service, and for reliability in attractive markets. A company unified around a common strategy and a mission succeeding as an operating company. We had come more from a holding company approach in the past. With an operational rigor to drive consistent and predictable results, and that had not always been that case as well.
With a portfolio that we've realigned, we've made some moves in our portfolio that you'll hear about again, but I think you're familiar with, to focus us on higher growth and more attractive end markets. That's the base that we're building on. Our strategy is to become and to drive a more of a mindset for innovation to drive organic growth. Alexis, you will talk about that later. Competing collectively and investing in higher growth verticals to drive higher growth and higher margin for our business. Finally, continuing to drive operational excellence and transformation to drive margin improvement and to continue to out-service for customers.
Together, this strategy, and Bill will talk about this at the end, you'll see this in a chart, but it will result in growth that will be in excess of GDP, consistent margin expansion over the cycle, and double-digit earnings per share growth over this strategic cycle. To execute on this vision and mission, we use strategic pillars. It's really to focus our organization on what matters to drive this. You again see this used throughout our presentation of how this comes to life, but it's a key tool for our organization to align on what we're trying to accomplish, what our priorities are, what our actions are. It includes measures to understand how we're doing and driving the performance that we need. A critical part of how we operate our company.
Finally, none of this, and all of our ambitions are enabled by the 17,000 employees of Hubbell, where I started my comments today, that it requires. We've all come to appreciate this even more during the last couple of years. I'm proud of what the Hubbell team has achieved, and I'm also confident that our ambitious goals are gonna be achieved with this team. You see here, our leadership team. They're all here, and they're joined by other key leaders from our organization. They represent a blend of people new to their role, people new to the company, and people like myself, very tenured in both, a diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and capabilities.
You will hear from most of them throughout this day, and we really look forward for all of you that are here to engage with you over the breaks and for you to hear for yourself from them and the talent and what they bring to the table. With those opening comments, let me turn it over to Bill to really start taking us into the depth of our strategy. Bill?
Real quick, your Wi-Fi password
Till after I finish. You don't browse till after I'm done. Thanks. I really appreciate the chance to be with you all this morning. It does feel when we were together in March, the first week of March of 2020, right the week that New York City closed, feels like a long two and a half years ago, so it feels like a breath of fresh air to be here with you all. The really simple framework that we wanna establish with you all this morning starts with we believe we've got a set of products and solutions that have earned the right to grow as our end markets grow. As Gerben said, with some mega trends, the end markets we happen to be exposed to, we believe are gonna grow in excess of GDP.
We feel that's the table stakes of our legacy and our history and the management team that you see and are sitting with you today and you'll hear from. We are united in our commitment that our job is to outgrow those end markets. We're gonna describe for you several management levers that we think are in our control that will help us achieve that. I'm gonna first talk about acquisitions, which is a lever that you're quite familiar that we've deployed over decades. You're gonna hear from Terry about new initiatives in the channel, cross-selling, how we staff, how we organize around verticals, and that's gonna create some share opportunities. You're gonna hear from Alexis, who's talking about a real lean in on innovation on our part.
It's at a higher level of spending and with bigger ideas than we have in the past. With those three growth levers, we think we'll outgrow our markets. We'll also talk about at the end some margin expansion initiatives around restructuring as well as price costs and inflation management. Together, we're gonna outgrow markets, expand margins, and I'll share with you the financial implications of all that. That's the simple construct, and I'm hoping each one of us kinda you feel us contributing to essentially that story. I wanted to start with capital allocation. Really, we've got a strong balance sheet to start with at a point in time. Cash flow generation has been a really strong point of emphasis. We are willing to manage the portfolio.
We've had some dispositions over the last few years that we'll remind you of and show you, that we are willing to call when businesses aren't meeting our ownership criteria. We do expect to be net investors and add strategically to the portfolio in high -growth, high -margin markets. I wanna just kinda remind you all of our process around that, which we think is quite proven to have a program that invests as kind of a portfolio rather than episodic investment once every five years in a company equal to our size. That's not what we're talking about. Let's really start with the cash generation and where we see it going. The chart I'm sharing with you encompasses four years of economic activity.
Starts on the left with cumulative operating cash flow, which we anticipate in the four-year period will average $700-ish million per year. You're getting up towards $2.8 billion of operating cash flow. Our first call on capital is capital expenditures. You'll see that we're anticipating dedicating about $500 million over these four-year period. That's about $125 million a year. Those of you who followed us would sort of recognize that as being a little bit higher than our typical average, where we've maybe been closer to $100 million. This is a lever that we are expecting to invest in in the next four-year period. We think we need CapEx for capacity on the Power side, and you'll hear from Allan talk about that.
We're gonna need CapEx to support the Electrical business in terms of restructuring efforts. There's automation involved in there on the Electrical side. We think there's some levers to help us drive value for you by increasing our amount of CapEx. You'll see I put the divestiture. We raised $350 million of gross proceeds from the disposal of C&I Lighting at the end of January, which you all know about. That cash goes into our investment kitty here. Dividends, we're anticipating about order of magnitude $1 billion of dividends. We target to have our dividend payout ratio at about 40%-50% of net income. As our net income grows, we're anticipating dividends to grow as well.
We have baked in here a growing dividend to be returned to shareholders. Share repurchase is the smallest bar on here. We tend to do it annually, just to offset any dilution that would come from option exercises. That tends to be in the $50-ish million a year ballpark. You'll see this number is larger than that, and it's because when we started this year of 2022, of the $350 million of proceeds we got from the disposal of C&I Lighting, we bought $150 million of shares in the first quarter of this year. This four-year period will have a little bit more on the share repo side.
That leaves us with about $1 billion left over for acquisitions that again, we intend to do in an intentional and programmatic way. I've added to the right, just to remind that beyond our operating cash flows and what's left after these allocation decisions, we have a balance sheet that, to the extent larger opportunities avail themselves, we have plenty of dry powder inside of the balance sheet that can complement what we'll generate in cash flow. We feel we've got a cash flow profile and a balance sheet that's really poised to invest, and you'll hear a lot about that from my partners here this morning. As part of our portfolio management, we deploy a quite simple array on the right side.
When we review operations with our management team monthly and quarterly, we use this simple construct to look at growth rates versus margin. We are obviously trying to get businesses in the upper right of this chart. When we've had them to the lower left, we have been committed to pruning. The C&I Lighting, we've talked about. Those of you who know us will maybe remember the Haefely high voltage test equipment business, which was quite volatile, as well as a line of business inside of the Aclara that we sold as well. That's something we remain committed to doing if businesses fall out. I'd say this has been a quite useful construct for us to use as a management team.
We've arrayed here our business units, but we also will look at product lines, and maybe a product line inside a business unit might fall to the lower left, and we push it down as well, even to individual SKUs, where we're looking to see are there slow-moving SKUs and try to really prevent SKU proliferation that might clog up our operations. This simple construct works at all three of those levels, right? The business unit, the product line, and the SKU level, and really, I think, is something we're trying to deploy to make sure we continue to be exposed to the attractive lines of business that you all would demand of us.
You know, I'm using the same six verticals that Gerben introduced you to in his section to show you how intentional, you know, our last five years of acquisitions has been in terms of really adding to and investing in those verticals. This represents about $1.5 billion of activity, and you can see, Gerben highlighted that the EV charging is really a product development opportunity. You'll hear about that from Allan. Terry's focused on this page and where can we develop new customer initiatives. Alexis's focused on this page, where can we do new product development? I'm focused on this page, where can we buy companies and increase, you know, our exposure? Maybe a couple are just worth mentioning that are on here.
You see Armorcast, the second, on the left. Armorcast makes fiberglass and polymer concrete enclosures that house some of the electronics for the Utility industry. You see it also appear on the far right in Communications because those same boxes have applications inside the telecom world. That was an area where Hubbell already was a strong player. There was another strong player available on the market. That's about a $130 million acquisition for us. You're gonna hear from Allan that in addition to us making this acquisition and putting it together with our existing business, there's actually still investment opportunity to add capacity in this area.
It's proven to be a really high -growth area and very attractive. I think the second one I wanted to call to your attention is Beckwith, which you see under DA, just to the right of Armorcast. Beckwith is a company that has asset protection systems and grid automation controls. It's a company that we had known very well. We were cooperating with them in selling bundled sales to our customers. Adding them through acquisition was very natural and got us, again, into very high -growth, high -margin area. I also wanted to draw your attention, thirdly, underneath Renewables and Data Center. You'll see that we're happy to say, just signed a deal in the data center space.
It's still subject to normal closing conditions, and we expect we'll close that in July, so I'm not gonna jinx it by saying too much about it other than an example of redeploying the proceeds from the divestiture of lighting to get us into high -growth, high -margin area. That's really been our first bolt-on since we announced that in January. Happy to show that the machine continues to thrive for us. You know, we go about this very intentional, very organized level of process around our acquisitions, and I wanna take just a minute to introduce you to our dedicated business development leadership team who are in the room today. Eric Christian is with us. He is with me thinking about enterprise business development.
Lily Ho is in the front. She is in the Utility segment dedicated to business development. Melissa is in the back on the corner, and she is dedicated to Electrical. If you're interested in our acquisition process and you see those folks, you know, you can say hi to them. We're coordinated and integrated as to how we target companies. They tend to be private. They tend to be companies that we know. They tend to have something, technology or a product line that we don't have. They tend to be known with their brand, and they tend to come with some talent that we need. All that to say, we're looking for good companies rather than fixer-uppers.
I think there'd probably be a way to make a great living buying broken companies and fixing them up. We are trying to buy good companies and making them better. That middle column is how we add value. It's not super intellectual or splitting atoms how we do it. It can start with the front end, and Terry can tell you more about it, but most of these smaller companies have agents or reps that they pay 500 basis points. We fire those folks the day we close, and we give it to our sales force and add, you know, five points of margin to the profile. This is a simple example.
Often they come with subscale, inefficient manufacturing operations, and we can close those down and incorporate that into our existing footprint and have a much more efficient operating scale. It's again, I recognize those are just kinda simple value levers, but they're also reliable and dependable. That's in addition to, you know, the fleets of cars and the aunts and sisters-in-law who are on the payroll that we don't need anymore. That results in strong ROICs for us. We think we're helping you all by basically being investment arm of yours and getting access to small private companies who are not raising capital right and they're not publicly traded, so not available to you all.
We think we can invest in those companies on your behalf and add value to them. We think that's a major part of how we'll go forward. Thought it'd be instructive to look at our scorecard and show that this is not a new initiative, and it has been going on for decades. I think the middle column of 10 years is the most instructive column to look at because it's easier for me to divide by 10, and see that you're basically talking about 3+ acquisitions per year. You're talking about $120 million or so invested per year. You can see our average purchase price has been, you know, modest size company, a bolt-on of $40 million.
Think maybe the bad news on that second-to-last column is valuation multiples have ground themselves upward over this timeline. Even the past five years, you see 10x. If you did it from the most recent, that's more in the 11x and 12x range. It'll be interesting if these multiples kinda ease off in sympathy with the public markets right now. This is something that we analyze closely. We review with our board and ourselves the performance of each of our acquisitions. We tend to lump them into vintages of five years and look at it as a portfolio of investments. The returns in the low teens are pretty consistent.
When we look at a five-year vintage, not all of the acquisitions are ahead of the amount of OP they promised, Gerben, but as a whole and as a portfolio, they always do. Again, it speaks to the portfolio approach rather than the episodic approach. We intend, as we said, to continue this investing on your behalf all through the 2025 period. Using the same pillars that Gerben used, which helps us work with our employees, obviously, we think acquisitions will be a very important part of how we grow the enterprise. We do expect to be active portfolio managers, though. If things need to be sold, we will, but we expect to be net investors and adders over time. We need to operate with discipline.
We have a playbook. We stick to it. We don't break from that. We do things the right way and the same way. We irritate some of my friends in the field who are with you today, claim we maybe go too slowly or too disciplined, and there's others who are willing to compete in terms and at speeds and forgoing rights to visit plants, for example, that we don't cut those corners. But we'll continue to operate with discipline. As we serve our customer, we think we're serving both our channel and end user customers by adding new products and technologies that they need, but also you, an important customer of our investors, by adding growth and returns that'll help differentiate us from just what our end markets are able to do.
That's the capital allocation and an acquisition lever. The next lever we wanted you to hear is from Terry Watson, my partner, who'll talk to you about the front end and the customer.
Thanks, Bill. Again, name's Terry Watson, VP of Customer Experience. Been with the company now 16 years. Been in this current role for the last two years. Just as a follow-up, in an effort to support shareholder value creation and elevate our customer experience, I'm gonna talk to you guys about three main things today. That is how do we drive differentiation in our channel through our combination of scale and agility? How we drive differentiation to our customers and end users through the value of our brands and the strength of our service? How we are leveraging the depth and breadth of our portfolio to accelerate growth in attractive key verticals and with our channel partners.
I'm gonna set the stage a little bit in terms of where we compete in the market and how we compete in the market with our sales force and our channel. We have a differentiated value chain with our go-to-market strategy and focus on serving our customer with a broad brand portfolio. Dimensionally, we are well-positioned to achieve above GDP growth. It starts with our decision on where we compete in the electrical products market, which we size at about $115 billion. That decision partially stems from where we don't wanna compete. We don't wanna compete with products that are commoditized and less differentiated. We also don't wanna compete at the peak of the pyramid, where the nature of the competition relies on global access as well as low cost of capital.
Luckily, this still leaves the middle of the pyramid, which is roughly about half of the overall market, encompassing things like Utility Components, Wiring Devices, Electrical Connectors, Industrial Controls, and Enclosures. Not only is it the largest section of the pyramid, but it's also the one that's the most profitable, both for us and our distributor partners. Pete is gonna give you a little bit more context on that later when he breaks down the electrical contractor bid package, but the key takeaway is that we're focused on playing where we can win and earn attractive returns. While we're focused on the middle of the pyramid, we do think we have a right to play further up the pyramid, and that is in Distribution Automation, and Allan will talk a little bit about that later on today as well. How do we go to market?
We do that with leading brands and mainly a direct sales force that's deeply knowledgeable and focused on Hubbell. Rather than relying solely on reps and agents to push our product, we have over 600 people that's in the field that's focused on talking, selling, promoting Hubbell every day, creating and driving preference. This sales force has long-term relationships with our end users, specifiers, contractors, and channel partners, and about 2/3 of our business is transacted 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 is also extremely fragmented. As you can see by the graph here, the top 10 customers for us make up almost half of our overall sales.
That also leaves a lot of smaller players that has represented about 1/4 of the market, as you can see, about 5,000 of those smaller players. This means that competing effectively in the channel both requires scale to partner with the larger ones and agility to be able to support and/or compete with the smaller ones. Playing in the middle of the pyramid with strong brands, a knowledgeable sales force, and leading products positions us well to accomplish this. While the channel is critical in our success, where we really drive and command a premium is through the customers demanding our products and pulling them through the channel. We have aligned our sales force to our customers and end markets. It's also important to note that we're executing on the same core strategy across both segments, even though the drivers may be somewhat different.
In Utility, while we still utilize our channel partners for efficient and cost-effective distribution, we've also been very successful in building long-term relationships with our core Utility customers through a relentless focus on quality, service, reliability, and driving solutions. Our underlying service as a key differentiator for us, we believe that has enabled us to take share. Allan is gonna talk a little bit about some of the challenges that utilities are facing today around renewables transition, storms, and aging infrastructure. The key to all of that is being able to have a supplier that the utilities can rely on to provide product when they need it in that manner.
In Electrical, brand value is key in a fragmented electrical contractor base who tend to stick to products that they are aware of and that they know and that they are familiar with, which helps drive spec positions and repeating demand. Depth and breadth of product offering is also critical. I'm going to highlight that on the next page, and Pete is going to elaborate on that as well. You see the common elements of our core strategy on the COGS running across the top of the page. Probably the most important one that runs across all of our businesses, and is critical to our success, is the first one. Gerben mentioned this earlier as well, but our products represent a small percentage of our customers' cost, but have a high cost of failure for our customers.
Just think about a $5-$10 connector not being there on time, failing while it's on the line, and drops the line. That outage could cost anywhere from $100,000 to millions of dollars, you know, to a commercial organization or to a Utility, and so extremely impactful that way. This means our customers value quality, reliability, and service, and they are willing to pay a premium for best-in-class brands and experience. Coming back to the strategic growth verticals that was mentioned by Bill and Gerben earlier, we're supporting our growth strategy in these areas with dedicated direct sales forces focused solely on those end markets. Some of these have been in place for a long time.
We have an industry-leading Utility sales force, and we continue to double down on our strengths here by increasing our service levels and investing in further capacity to support the growth needs of our customers. Others are newer, and two I'd highlight that Pete is going to detail later are Renewables and Data Centers. One of the quotes on the previous page referenced depth and breadth of product portfolio, and this is an area that we have not utilized effectively as we could have in the past. Historically, we've been more siloed. Sales teams that were focused just on their brand or a specific product line.
What we have done recently is put together a dedicated sales force team focused on strategic end markets, where those teams now wake up every day focused on pulling our products together across the Hubbell portfolio to market and sell bundled solutions to a solar EPC or Data Center customers. That's enabling us to accelerate our growth in those markets while making it easier for our customers to do business with us through our partner relationships. This also has us aligned with where our channel partners are also investing. Earlier, I mentioned our top 10 partners making about 40% of our sales. I wanted to give you a more tangible example of how we all pull this together to drive incremental sales. If you look at the chart on the right, this breaks down our sales by segment through our largest channel partners.
You'll notice that in most cases, we aren't really balanced between segments. The blue bar represents Utility and the gray bar displays electrical penetration. In a lot of cases, there's good reasons for this. A distributor may be just focused in one specific area on the Electrical side and do nothing on Utility, and that makes all the sense in the world. We believe that there are significant cross-selling and conversion opportunities embedded in the channel where we can do a better job of penetrating. Even if we looked at the Electrical segment by itself, you may have a particular partner that's doing business with two or three brands, but not the other 20 brands that we actually have in that space that we can then, again, penetrate a little bit further.
We see significant opportunity over the next few years to go to market in a more coordinated way, both within the unified Electrical segment and across Utility and Electrical. How do we capitalize on that? One lever is organizational structure, both across the segments as well as within the teams. Pete is gonna talk a little bit more about that as regards to the unified Electrical segment. Within the sales organization, we have dedicated strategic account executives to each of the top partners. With a more coordinated and unified business structure, we're finding that we can do a better job of allowing this team to sell across Hubbell. We're already seeing accelerated growth with these accounts versus the others. Another lever is the vertical market strategy that we just talked about.
As an example, if you're a distributor who typically carries Burndy connectors but not Hubbell Wiring Devices, and now we're bundling and marketing these products together for EPCs to ease installation for the end customer, you're gonna wanna be a distributor that wants to carry all of our products to be able to support that market and support that end customer. This allows us to continue to exercise our scale and agility supported by our marketing activities. That brings us to the last page. We think about the combination of the customer initiatives we are driving will allow us to outgrow end markets by half a point over the next three years.
Our objective as a sales organization is to be the partner of choice to our customers, and we do that by focusing on the customer experience and intimacy, developing solutions and strategic growth verticals, and more effectively utilizing the depth and breadth of our product offering to go deeper and wider with our channel partners and end customers. Serving our customer where they wanna do business with a continued investment in our digital capabilities. Now, Alexis will share how innovation plays a critical role in differentiating Hubbell's customer experience. Thank you.
Thank you, Terry. Good morning. My name is Alexis Bernard, Hubbell's inaugural Chief Technology Officer. I joined in March 2020, you referred to, just before COVID hit, and I've been working extensively with the leadership team and across the entire organization to see how we can reignite Hubbell's thirst and ambition towards innovation and organic growth. Why, might you ask? Gerben mentioned company has been successful for over 100 years. Our strategy is strong, with amazing people, products and brands to execute on our vision on behalf of the shareholder. However, historically, our markets have moved slowly with relatively few disruptions. Today, we face a once-in-a-generation confluence of mega trends and market disruptions. They present both challenges and opportunities for Hubbell. My role is to help Hubbell capitalize on such opportunities. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Simply put, we're optimizing organizations or processes or portfolio or talent across the company and reinvest resources towards a higher return, higher purpose innovation. Let us walk through this journey together. As we noticed, many mega trends are tailwinds for the organization. Grid Modernization, Electrification, among others. They are likely to drive disruptions and growth. Question is, how do we capitalize on such opportunities? My partner, Bill, highlighted our historical lever of inorganic growth. It's been a core part of our strategy for multiple decades with a well-proven capital allocation model. What we want to commit to today is the same level of dedication and commitment towards organic growth and innovation. Despite Hubbell's innovative roots for over 130 years and since the dawn of electricity, today, Hubbell relies more on bottom-up, sometimes siloed and tentative innovation, leading to relatively small, reactive and conservative projects.
However, the math doesn't compile to grow a $5 billion company over time with small projects. We need bigger innovation. With the creation of two strong segments, strong leadership and strong strategies at the segments, with the emergence of this coordinating technology innovation position within Hubbell, we're shifting our innovation towards a more proactive and strategic innovation, including better project ideation, better project selection, project execution, stage gating processes, organizational alignment, cross-BU collaboration, and overall talent management. This enables us to link the mega trends directly to the segment strategy as well as to the project, technology and talent portfolio and roadmap to drive this strategic innovation investments. This page summarize our innovation principle is better absorbed bottom up. At the foundation of Hubbell's R&D is the new product development process. It's a mix of two things.
On the bottom, you see our more custom responsive made-to-order project, which is core bread and butter of the corporation, as well as just above our low-risk BU-specific, typically product line extensions. They form the basis of Hubbell and the foundation because those two layers sustain and maintain our strong market share in existing markets. It's been the core of our success. We commit today to execute on these two layers in a more efficient, effective, and cost-conscious manner. We're well on our path to achieve a 20% productivity gains on the NPD foundation. However, the goal is not to cost reduce NPD. The goal is to meet our new organic growth aspirations. We will co-fund the NPX portion of the pyramid, which is above at least 50% with this newly created engineering headroom.
Now we're proud to announce that we have now introduced a separate, distinct fast-track innovation process called NPX to identify and commit to few carefully selected large-scale strategic innovation programs with attractive returns and margins. By design, the NPX pyramid mandates higher purpose innovation at all levels of the corporation. At the business unit level, leveraging the brands. At the segment level, leveraging the business units within a segment, as well as at the enterprise level, leveraging the unique position we have on both sides of the meter, as mentioned earlier. We're pleased to announce that within one year of the launch of the NPX program, we've already identified and committed 15 exciting projects.
The scale and the scope of these 15 NPX projects is literally 10x, 100x, 1000x bigger than our traditional NPD projects, hence the name X in NPX, accelerated in orders of magnitude, bigger innovation aspirations. Enough about the process. What are those 15 projects? Here they are organized against the six strategic growth levers that we've presented a few times today. Some projects are generically labeled for IP and competitive reasons. Allan and Pete, in their presentation, will talk about the projects shown here in bold. Allan will talk about Distribution Automation, and EV within HUS and Aclara. Pete will talk about Data Center verticals, Balance of System Renewables, and Screwless Terminations within HES. Allan and Pete present the projects as the NPX programs reside entirely within the segments, and over 200 people are already working on such NPX projects.
For now, let's take a step back and look at the portfolio nature of our NPX, which is also a good process for risk mitigation. First, you can see it's a good balance between Utilities and Electrical segment. It's a good balance between the BU level, nine bets, the segment levels, four bets, and the enterprise level with two programs. The innovation horizon, many of them, most of them are within our core, a few towards adjacencies, and one towards breakthrough innovation. The value lever is also balanced between primarily product innovation, but also go-to-market and inorganic. The technology portion of these bets are primarily hardware, but they're coupled towards controls, communications, and software.
The risk type is also well-balanced between commercial risk and technical risk, low, medium, and high risk, which also then means that the time to market of the bets is from within 12 months to up to five years. The economics of the existing funnel is strong. Even including a 50% success rate, these bets result in a highly promising above average gross margin profile of portfolio. We feel great about those 15 bets in the portfolio that we have today, but we feel even better about the sustainable and affordable innovation mindsets and capabilities that we're bringing towards Hubbell. NPX is rapidly becoming a brand, a name, a verb, to allow everyone in the organization to think big, take risk, and be bold. Bold regarding both investments and promising returns.
Taking a step back again, Hubbell is now two years into its five-year innovation transformation journey, shifting our innovation from being reactive to being more proactive, and over time, strategic. We accelerate organic growth profile by investing on our core, our core markets, our core customer, our core businesses, without doubling R&D projects or timelines and budgets or becoming a software company. We focus on two things. Number one, being very proactive about managing our NPD funnel and portfolio in an efficient and effective manner. Number two, by augmenting the NPD innovation with NPX innovation that matches mega trends with segment strategy and roadmaps. Together, we're confident that we can execute on both NPD and NPX while keeping our overall investment in RD&E at 3% of sales. In closing, we've developed our innovation strategy, again, fully reflecting the four key pillars of Hubbell.
Number one, we serve our customer by providing innovative solutions to existing customers facing new disruptions and pain points. Number two, we develop our people by providing exciting new projects to work on with nice initiatives in mega trends-backed opportunities. Number three, we operate with discipline by optimizing organization processes and resource allocation. Most importantly, we grow the enterprise by joining inorganic growth with organic growth and are well on path to increase our growth profile by 50 points yearly. I look forward to reporting back on the progress of our innovation journey frequently. In the meantime, I'm pleased to invite Katie to the stage. Thank you for your interest in Hubbell.
Thanks, Alexis. Good morning, everybody. My name's Katie Lane. I'm Hubbell's Senior Vice President and General Counsel. I've been with Hubbell for 12 years, and I've been GC for the last three years. I'm pleased to speak with everyone today about Hubbell's sustainability programs and to highlight how ESG is an inherent part of our business, one that is attractive for all of our stakeholders. Our focus on ESG is a reflection of our existing business model. The products we sell, the customers we serve, and the markets within which we play are already geared around the sustainability-focused mega trends of Grid Modernization and Electrification. You've heard a few of us talk about that already today. Hubbell can provide sustainable solutions for our customers In front of the Meter and Behind the Meter while continuing to deliver value to our shareholders and ensuring our employees are supported and developed.
I also will discuss Hubbell's progress on establishing sustainability-focused metrics, how we outperform these goals, and our plans going forward on the reporting side of ESG. Before I get into the reporting and programmatic parts of our ESG strategy, let's start with the foundation of it all, our products and our business. Our products make critical infrastructure stronger, our grid safer and more functional, and help drive the growth and success of renewables while also bringing electrical efficiency to our customers. You'll hear later this morning from Allan about our Utility Solutions segment. Our Utility Solutions legacy Power Systems business has a storied history as a leading provider of critical grid hardware and components. As power grids age over time and are further weakened by the impacts of climate change, our Power Systems products help strengthen the grid infrastructure and its functionality.
Our products help the grid run reliably and efficiently while protecting it from the increased frequency and severity of storms. With the advancement of clean energy and renewables, our Power Systems products also facilitate the transition to renewable energy. Our products help Utility customers ensure that renewable energy solutions can be safely integrated onto the grid while providing the product requirements that these customers need. As more and more renewables are added to the grid, our Utility segment also solves for the increased Communications and Controls technology needed for two-way grid power flow. Our Distribution Automation business brings together the durability of our Power Systems products with the technological strength of our Aclara business. Collectively, Distribution Automation helps offer data-driven solutions to predict, plan, and respond to system conditions such as increased renewable energy generation across electrical and gas distribution networks.
Finally, our Aclara smart meters and AMI solutions help utilities and buildings track energy and water use and detect overages or potential methane leaks. We're facilitating the transition to Renewables not just by our Utility Solutions segment, but also via our Electrical Solutions segment. Our HES segment has had strong success in selling products into the renewable space, with its products in high demand by EPCs and contractors for wind and solar farms. You'll hear from Pete later this morning about how HES is investing and focused on Renewables as a high-growth vertical and HES's Balance of System approach. This means not just selling existing HES products in areas like solar and wind, but pulling more of Hubbell's enterprise products through to this growing segment. Terry walked through that earlier today.
Beyond Renewables, HES further makes products that increase the energy efficiency of buildings and homes while also supporting the Electrification of Everything. Overall, Hubbell manufactures products that make our infrastructure stronger, our grid safer, and help drive renewables and electrical efficiency. To us, this is the core of our ESG strategy, producing products with impact. Sustainability is clearly ingrained in our business strategy from a commercial and product standpoint, but we are also committed to sustainability from an operational perspective. Over the last few years, we have focused on establishing sustainability goals and implementing the programs and processes to achieve these goals. As a manufacturer, we believe it is important to be responsible stewards on this front while recognizing that environmental reduction goals can also make us a more efficient enterprise. In 2019, we baselined our enterprise greenhouse gas and water usage.
This baselining exercise was to help us establish multi-year goals for targeted reductions in these areas. We paired the baseline work we did with an enterprise-wide materiality assessment that we conducted in 2020. Also in 2020, we issued our first-ever multi-year environmental reduction goals, targeting a 10% reduction in our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas usage by 2025. A 10% reduction in our water usage, also by 2025. At the end of 2021, we satisfied both our greenhouse gas and water reduction goals. Our ahead of schedule achievements are the direct result of both certain footprint restructuring projects we completed and CapEx investments we made in HVAC, lighting, and other systems to make our plants more energy efficient.
We do not intend to rest on our laurels, though, for the next few years, and instead are in the process of establishing new multi-year reduction targets for greenhouse gas and water reduction. We will issue these new goals in Q1 of next year, after we have completed our second enterprise materiality assessment later this year. In addition to the refreshed greenhouse gas and water goals, we also will release, for the first time, multi-year waste reduction goals later this year. These goals will be tied to the enterprise waste usage baselining review that we conducted last year. We're proud of the work that we've done to bolster our ESG programs and to establish various environmental reduction targets over the last few years. As we did this, we also increased our disclosures around our sustainability efforts, most significantly by publishing our inaugural sustainability report in 2021.
We issued our latest report reflecting our 2021 numbers and investments earlier this year. These reports illustrate some of our important achievements, programs, and areas of focus, and also provide more granular details about our ESG commitments and performance. After touching on how important our products and environmental commitments are to our ESG strategy, now I want to broaden the lens a bit and focus on Hubbell's robust programs in the areas of S & G. These are typified by our strategic pillars of Operate with Discipline and Develop Our People, two of the four strategic pillars that you heard Gerben discuss earlier. Whether it is our safety culture, our employee development programs and inclusion groups, or our board of directors' ongoing focus on strategy, enterprise risk oversight, and governance, Hubbell has programs in place well-dedicated to the social and governance sides of sustainability.
I'll now highlight a few of our accomplishments in the S&G space. For the first time ever, in early 2021, Hubbell published EEO-1 level diversity data for our U.S. employees, while also continuing to report Hubbell's gender diversity in both the U.S. and globally. We led many of our manufacturing peers in providing this level of transparency, and we'll update this information annually. In addition, to provide greater transparency to our employees, we further committed to give internal updates on this data on a more regular quarterly basis. Hubbell's charitable foundation, the Hubbell Foundation, supports education, STEM, and diversity initiatives. The foundation facilitates match opportunities for charities based on Hubbell employees' donations or volunteerism. Hubbell itself offers employees a paid day off to volunteer for a charity of their choice annually.
We were also pleased to be named one of the world's most ethical companies by Ethisphere for the second year in a row. This award is a reflection of our employees' commitment to doing the right thing and our continued focus on driving an ethical culture at Hubbell. The foundation of Hubbell's compliance culture is our code of conduct for Hubbell employees and directors, and our third-party code of conduct applicable to our various business partners. As part of our sustainability journey, we've had conversations with our shareholders, customers, suppliers, and employees on our ESG areas of focus and programs. We will continue to actively engage with our stakeholders on this topic and how it is part of Hubbell's overall strategy.
You can learn more about our programs and disclosures via our hubbell.com website, which has a dedicated ESG sustainability section, and our sustainability reports, both our 2021 and 2022 reports are posted there. We welcome your input and thoughts as we continue to evolve and drive our ESG strategy going forward. Thank you very much, and we will now move to Q&A.
We got a couple mics wandering around, so just raise your hand and we'll get to you.
Thanks. Looks like I might have it here, Gerben. I guess I'll keep the questions on the part of the presentation we've done so far, right? Instead of skipping to the last slide. I was actually curious on the EV effort. You've got it clear on the slide, so my gut is you're looking at some kind of metering grid interaction kind of...
Yeah.
Got it.
... real-time feedback in terms of what the demand is and what the demand response needs to be. Could you maybe then elaborate a little bit on how you would compete effectively in that space against, you know, the broader electrical players that might have all the apparatus and switchgear and other kind of balance of plant in the building that perhaps you don't have?
Yeah. This, I'm giving a little bit away of what we're gonna talk about here in a second, but this application really starts with our utility customer. It's through our engagement and through voice of customer discussion. What we ask them is, "What really is the challenge that you see with EV?" Indeed, what the feedback to that is the stress that that will put on their grid. If you think about the distribution transformers that have and the capacity for them to absorb a large scale EV.
It's not so much t hat it can't handle it at all. It can't handle it at certain times. What utilities are trying to already manage through is peak load shaving. This application has a real opportunity for us with a utility-grade metering solution to give utility companies the ability to manage that load for their system. Different than where electrical applications and you know EV chargers. I mean, we thought a lot about too, do we wanna be in EV Charging? That an EV, just a regular, and I know there's such a term as a regular, but EV, the more traditional EV charger is not of interest. We believe that's more in the bottom of that pyramid.
We see this as a very specialty application of EV meter that has a big potential we see. We'll talk a little bit about that when we get to that and how particular this application applies.
Yeah. Good morning. Thanks. So just wanna come back to the specification and the service comments. You mentioned you're growing the, you know, the differentiation of the service capabilities, but also the specification within the portfolio. What percent is now specified project? And, do you have any, you know, standing targets for how much you wanna grow the service piece for the next, you know, three years here?
Mm-hmm. Terry, you wanna?
Yeah, sure. In terms of spec position, I would tell you it's probably about 50% of that's spec'd in to some degree. That goes around whether it's sole spec or preferred spec when you start to look at that. You start to look at the balance of that just being around how we are well positioned from a quality and brand perspective to be able to then drive the service component of that that then takes that next step, right? When you start thinking about having that spec position at 50% and then start thinking about the quality and the brand and the service that that can complement that's where we are putting our focus at.
Right. Maybe to your second question, I'm not sure if your question on service was related to literally becoming more of a certain service provider. Mostly when we talk about solutions, it's bundling the applications of our products together to provide solutions for our customers rather than pure service business. We do have a component of that in our Kumi's AMI business. Really there we use it to bundle again a solution and really it's almost like one throat to choke when you're putting these AMI systems in that we can provide the meter, we can provide the AMI infrastructure, and we can install it and hand it to them and run it. Particularly effective within the co-op and municipal markets.
Another piece of that would be the on-time performance, and I think that's when we talk about service, it's about our on-time performance to the distributor, to the end user, and being able to provide that and making sure that we hit in certain levels with that.
I have to say that is a passion and a focus of our organization to do, and it served us well through this pandemic. We're not nearly at the service levels we wanna be in. We would operate traditionally in the mid- to high 90s% on-time delivery we're talking now. This is living up to the commitments we make to our customer. At the height of the pandemic and the low of our service, we were probably under 80% in that metric. We're back in the high 80s% right now. Our customers tell us that we're outperforming in that and it's the best way to gain share and to maintain share in this market. We're passionately focused on serving our customers.
Yeah. I wanted to come back to the NPX pipeline a little bit and sort of how you balance maintaining a robust pipeline with not overwhelming the system and what's underway. Then the second part of it is just if you could elaborate a little bit more on the cost side. Is this not cost additive? Are you borrowing costs from other parts of the business? How are you managing the cost attached with this kind of focused energy on the innovation pipeline?
Sure. I can talk about the pipeline. Maybe I'll let you handle the investments. We do have targets at each level, BU enterprise in this segment, to really promote innovation, promote ideation, making sure you cannot just not submit a bet. Also there's a limit on not too many bets. They're few and carefully selected. It's more of a subjective discussion than a very purely math driven. We've set up a separate NPX board with a few of us here in the management team to make that subjective call. Really the goal is not to exceed a certain number where we start diluting management attention, investment dollars and focus, but also go -to -market over time as well as potentially, you know, organic if we need to. It's a balance. We'll manage it over time.
I would say it's somewhere between the 15-25 that we expect to have at the same time. We will manage it carefully. Today is the first arrival of projects. Also, we've already deselected two projects based on early voice of customers and technological returns that we see from the team. The goal is to accept that a bet may not pan out and then leave room for the next bet while only keeping a certain number of bets in the pipeline. On the investments?
Yeah. Before switching to investments, I think an interesting part of not overwhelming the system is, you know, we are pulling some people off their day jobs to now take on a supposedly riskier project that has a chance of failure. In our first couple instances, we're having to promise those people they'll fail upward if they do, right? So that, they don't feel overwhelmed, like, "Geez, I'm just gonna stick to my nice, safe day job." We're kind of in a bit of a cultural revolution to make these jobs high profile, desirable exposure to the people in this room and whatnot. I think preventing the expense from being overwhelming.
You know, we're talking about adding about $10 million of incremental cost, which I think is quite affordable and the returns on that are great. Below the surface, Alexis has done a really good job on productivity and actually repurposing costs from much smaller kind of incremental projects that maybe changed an off-white to an ecru, and now we can take those people and put them onto these bigger things. There's much more effort than the incremental $10 million, and that's what I find is gonna be powerful here as we go through.
Go ahead, Tom.
Question for Bill on M&A priorities. I think you mentioned it's $1 billion or more in cash deployed through 2025 and maybe two to three points of top line growth as a result. Can you get there from here with the bolt-on playbook? Or should we take away from your parameters that there are some chunkier deals that you'd like to pursue as well?
Yes. If you break it down, Tommy, by year, you know, that would be doing $250 million a year as opposed to that 10-year slice where it was kind of $125 million. Yeah, I mean, I think we could do $550 million a year. That would be possible. But I think you're right that it's more likely there'll be a couple hundreds, maybe a $250 million, you know. I do think maybe something of the chunkier variety probably in this four-year horizon. I think you're right to expect something like that.
Thanks. Chris Glynn, Oppenheimer. Bill, wanted to pick up on something you talked about. You alluded a couple times to the divestitures you've done, you know, indicating you have a couple other things maybe are under consideration. You also kind of brought it down to the product family and SKU level. I'm wondering how, you know, new or robust that process is around SKU. What are some other benefits besides mix that you might be targeting through that process? You know, you talked about reallocating as well, bandwidth, people and such.
Yep. Yeah, so we've had a tool in place, Chris, at the SKU level, for several years now. Again, in the spirit of trying to keep it simple, we're putting SKUs in buckets, and where something hasn't been sold for a couple years or its margins are low.
Will food be ready by, like, 11:45 if we end it early?
Uh, uh.
Will food be ready?
Sorry. He's live miked out there. That is good news. There's food coming. That's good. That really puts the onus, you know, Gerben in particular leans hard on that Southwest bucket of SKUs. Is it really, do we need to keep continuing that? Can we discontinue that? It clogs up warehouses, it clogs up factories, it makes getting to long runs, you know, inside of planning a factory harder.
We've been just again, it's that same simple two by two at a SKU level, and you just put the numbers up and it almost put the onus on Pete and Allan and their teams to say, "Do we really need to keep some of that Southwest stuff?" I think it's, we've moved the needle on that quite a bit. It's just, to me, important to have the mindset of-
Yes.
Let's try to have our SKUs, our product lines, and our business units always pushing, you know, to the upper right, Chris.
Right.
That I feel like it's a journey, but we've, I think we've made good progress so far.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I add to it because I think back, as Bill say, when I was part of running the Utility business, and you know, you will see that business as, you know, certainly an attractive margin business. If you look at what we did over the years, it goes back to the point that you say of product lines. That business is made up maybe of when it was the Power Systems business, and at the time it was maybe $800 million of about 10 product lines. Those product lines had a variety of margins. They had very high ones, and they had lower ones. We really focused on driving improvement on the underperforming business units there.
It's through relentless cost takeout, through pricing actions, through simplification of the structure, or to getting out of certain product lines. By taking the bottom up, we're able to take the whole portfolio up. It's a mindset that I know works. It's been successful for us in that business, and we're bringing that across the portfolio. Looking at entire business segments, and you saw that when we got out of the C&I Lighting business, doing it at product lines and doing it at the SKU level as well. If you work that, and you have to work it as a continual action. It can't be episodic that you do this. You will drive improvement in the entire portfolio over time, margin improvement.
There's some interesting trade-offs going back to the question of do you overwhelm the system, right, Chris? If we tried to sell, you know, every little million-dollar business, you know, that it would overwhelm the business development effort in trying to run sell sides. You gotta balance where it makes sense.
Yeah.
Maybe just a quick one on the Data Center acquisition you did. Any color you can provide on. It said bolt-on, I think, on the slide. Any color on kind of size or type of business and Data Center, a multiple you're paying, and then also kind of the strategy there to build a bigger business and compete more effectively over time with the players who are much more established in that market would be helpful.
Yep. Just because it's signed and not closed, I really don't wanna go into any of those details. We'll be, I'm hoping, closed in July, so on our call in July, we'll be able to tell you more about that. I think you're absolutely right to think about what is the implication for us inside the Data Center. When Pete talks through the Electrical business, he's gonna describe a Balance of System kind of principle. I think Pete's using a renewable example, but the analogy of inside the Data Center.
I don't know, Eric, if you can get Pete even a microphone, but just thinking about inside the Data Center, you know, we're not obviously doing servers, but there's a whole Balance of System around that that I think we have ambitions to be able to provide.
Yeah, no, I think, Bill, you said it right. It's a fast market, fast-growing market. It's a profitable market for us. We have a really nice collection of important brands, reliable, proven, that we've just not gone to market in a cohesive way in the past. As we think about putting those brands together and delivering a solution that may be a Balance of System and not one of the you know, the big systems in the Data Center, we would look to continue to add to the Balance of System solution and make sure we build it out. I could see our Data Center business over the next five years being you know, in the double-digit percent of our you know, our total sales, and that's what we're looking to do.
Maybe if I can add, Pete. As a vertical, it's one of our six verticals. There's a very established framework now to look at what we have today, but we did not sell in a cohesive manner, as you mentioned. What we do not have, what should we have organically or inorganically, and of course, areas we shouldn't play into because we don't have the right to play. Now there's a clearly well-established Data Center lead that is looking at organic and inorganic opportunity, and this is the first inorganic opportunity that we saw. But there's also a very strong organic focus, and together, including go-to-market, it looks at a very organized one Hubbell perspective towards Data Center.
Well, sort of two parts on go-to-market. I think, you know, one with a focus on Strategic verticals. Just can you talk about the timeline of that a little bit? How far along are you? Is that kind of fully implemented and up and running at this point, or is there more work to do? And then the other part is when you think about bundling solutions, what are the margin implications of that? Is there a pricing element of trying to bundle, or is it really just a volume piece for you?
I'm trying to think of the first question. Sorry. Repeat.
How far along?
Oh, how far along. Yeah. I would say depending on the market, it's varied. One of the key growth verticals is T&D. We're very well established in that market and we'll continue to build scale in it. In other ones, like Data Centers, like Distribution Automation, I would say it's earlier innings. We're organized around it right now, both with our organizations, both with our strategy, and I would say that that still needs to play out. Then in other ones yet, like the EV, it's early innings. We're brand new in it. It's part of the NPX, so there is no guarantee of success in this even. I would say it really varies throughout which of these verticals we're talking about.
Overall, and that's the thing I wanna reiterate, these verticals today already represent half of our portfolio that's benefiting from the secular above GDP growth trends.
I think on the pricing half of your question.
Yeah
I don't think we're looking at it as a chance per se to raise price.
Right.
I think it's more the convenience to our customer.
Value
... The more efficient SG&A from our perspective will make it profitable. We're not looking at it as specifically a price lever.
I wasn't sure if the nature of bundling meant price down to try to get that extra volume.
No.
No. Actually, Joe, I think quite the contrary.
Yeah.
I think we can use the breadth of all of our brands across Hubbell to make the buying experience for those customers.
Right
... easier, such that they can consolidate their suppliers. The more we can offer a single customer and the more they can consolidate their spend, we know that there's a terrific amount of value to those customers by us being able to do that.
Yeah. Yeah, we have a lot of discussions. We have the fortune of our size and the prominence that we play up on markets to have strong relationships with our partners. Terry talked about the top ten partners that make up 40%. We engage with them at the specification, at the engineering level, at the sales level, and at the executive level. You know, I meet with these CEOs at least annually and sometimes more with our leadership team, and we talk about where the business go. One of the key themes, in addition to what they're telling us that we're outperforming and out-servicing during this time, is their desire to cut off the tail of their supply chain.
They're realizing much more during this time, during these challenging times, where they're having to fight for supply and having to do that with thousands and thousands of suppliers. There's a real desire by them to cut that down. That's the unique position we have by being able to bundle our solutions to cut some of that tail for them off.
We're aligned with where they're investing as well, and I kinda mentioned that when you start thinking about some of these verticals, whether it's communications or Data Centers or Renewables, a lot of the work that we're looking at doing is around specification work, and working that through the end user back through the channel, right? The channel's also making investments specifically in those areas, so we can be aligned, collaborative in regards to how we actually support the end customer at that end.
Okay. You might have heard a rumor we're running slightly ahead of schedule, but we're gonna stick on and take a 15-minute break. We'll come back at about 10:20 A.M. with the second half of the morning. There's coffee and drinks outside, and feel free to filter out.
Thank you.
Just grab a coffee, I got. All right, we're gonna get started with the second half of the morning here and kick it back off for the segment discussion, starting with Allan for Utility Solutions.
Thanks, Dan. Hi, I'm Allan Connolly. I'm the President of Hubbell Utility Solutions. Good morning. In summary, we continue to build out a world-class Utility Solutions platform. It covers not just electric, but water and gas utilities. We're in a really good position to exploit the secular trends in the space, and again, that applies to electric, water, and gas. The issues that have been driving the lives of utilities difficult over the last couple of decades continue to become more and more complex. That puts us in a really unique position because while life is tough for utilities, we're in a position where we can really provide solutions and technology to really help them. To do that, we're investing across the board.
As you heard from Alexis this morning, we've got a much greater focus on innovation and internal development, as well as continuing our history of successful M&A. We're now looking at significant capital investments to provide better capacity, better productivity, and better performance. The business, I'm gonna go through the columns. Power Systems run by Mark Mikes, who's sitting over here to my right. Our Aclara business, which is predominantly AMI and meters. Where's Kumi? Kumi runs our AMI business and our utility automation business. We have a Distribution Automation business, which is a significantly bigger presence than it's been, primarily through some acquisition. Our Gas Connectors business, which looks a lot like the distribution side of our electric business.
This is a business that provides all of the connectors and all of the pieces you need to distribute gas from the main distribution lines into homes and businesses. Today I'm gonna take you through some detail in the Power Systems sector. Within Aclara, really wanna spend some time on Distribution Automation because it's an important space for us. On to the Gas Connectors. This is a really interesting set of brands and companies. Hubbell itself dates back to 1888. Coincidentally, our Electric Meters business was founded in the same year. Ohio Brass, Anderson, both have histories of over a century. You've got brands like Aclara that have only been around for 15 years. We have a full spectrum of heritage and brand.
Within Power Systems, it's really focused on the components, the mechanics that keep the grid together. Aclara's looking at the metering, the controls and the sensing. Distribution Automation, we like to think, is in between the two bookends. You've got the components and the hardcore materials produced by Mark. You've got the software sensing solutions and metering produced by Kumi. Distribution Automation we view as a really great space for us to expand into 'cause it comes in from both sides. This is the first time you've seen this slide, but you're gonna see it a few more times this afternoon. This is our playbook. It's essentially how we do a one-page summary of how we expect to execute within a specific business unit. Most of the stuff to the left is what we control. That's choosing what markets we play in.
For us, that's obviously not just utilities, but specifically Grid Modernization, the infrastructure, dealing with T&D and Electrification. It's a sustainable GDP -plus growth in all of those segments. What is it gonna take for us to be successful with our customers? For us, as you're going to see, it is really about quality and service, and that's throughout all of HUS. That's the big part of how we win. We discussed innovations taking on a bigger thread. Parts of HUS have always had a deep technical bent, like Aclara, but there's other parts that haven't had that experience. I think Alexis is doing a great job adding that strength and putting it across all of HUS. All I wanna say on price -cost, inflation in productivity is I'm glad we are where we are.
It's been an interesting two years, getting through this environment, but we now feel like we're in a really good position with price where it needs to be, and we'll continue to manage that. Footprint has been a big part of this business and optimizing it for years. I think the team, particularly in Mark's area, have done a phenomenal job maximizing that efficiency. We're seeing real growth. I know there's some people who are talking about temporary growth because of supply chain, because of other concerns, and there is some of that. The underlying business is seeing significant growth across the board that we have to make sure that we manage. Now, it's a critical decision to balance what's temporary demand versus long-term growth, but I think we've got the right structure in place to assess that.
I'll take you through some of the examples. Last, very important for us is M&A. Continue to look for targets. Now that we're doing it in a much more combined way with the innovation piece. What do we wanna develop ourselves versus source? I think we're doing a really nice job taking the innovation piece and tying it up with the M&A to make sure we get the best bang for the buck. With that, we're looking for 7%-8% CAGR out to 2025 and a high teens OP business. What are the mega trends? What is really good for our positioning is there are very few players in this industry that have the breadth of offering that we do.
We're covering everywhere from transmission to Electrical distribution, telco into the substations, gas distribution, meters, utility columns, all in a connected, nicely connected, but it gives us a great opportunity for a full suite across a customer base. Each one of these sectors is experiencing the same sort of growth, again, greater than GDP, typically 2 x. Externalities such as government funding, other opportunities are there. We're not counting on them. But if they come forward, that's an additional upside. Wanna spend a bit of time on this. We've seen the many versions of this chart. It's really focusing on what makes life tough if you're running a utility. The issues driving Grid Modernization are listed across the top, and they're somewhat chronological. Aging infrastructure has been an issue within the U.S. for a very long time, decades.
Identified and known, but not addressed. Safety has always been a concern, and I'm not talking about just employee safety, I'm talking about preventing fires and safety risks to the community. This industry has a brain drain with aging workforce starting to retire. They've been around for a long time. Now you start to get into environmental concerns, climate, grid hardening, prevalence of renewables, extra focus on electrification, you're literally moving from gas to electric, and now, of course, cybersecurity. The table on the bottom left is the latest survey results. Every year, a detailed survey is done of electric utilities about what is it that keeps you awake at night? What are the biggest issues? Obviously, it moves around year by year, but over the last decade, there's been a very consistent trend tied into what's at the top of this page.
The top four issues on this chart, if you went back 10 years ago, three of them were not in the top 10, and one of them was at the bottom. They've all moved up, and they're all around reliability of the grid, renewables, distributed energy, et cetera. I'd like to point out, for the first time, EVs have made the list. Might be at number 10 today, but I guarantee you it's gonna slowly move up this list over the next few years. Graph on the right comes from Bloomberg. It's, I think, a really interesting way to look at not just aging infrastructure, but the sheer volume of material. So the top plot shows the current estimated age of assets, major assets throughout the grid. You can see the stuff we nominally call 50 years. That's end of life. What happens over the next 30 years?
The graph at the bottom is a prediction of what we think the asset distribution will be in its age. I'll point out the two peaks you see between one and 10 on the top plot become the two peaks between 30 and 40 at the bottom. You can see two things. Obviously, end of life issues we do not think are gonna go away. There's gonna be end of life assets as an issue for some time to come, but the sheer volume of material that's going to get added to the grid is significantly higher when you start to compare the size of those peaks in the top and how they start to shrink by the bottom. This is not an issue and a story about just replacing old infrastructure.
It's about putting infrastructure in today to deal with issues and concerns like cybersecurity, renewables, environmental, et cetera. Starting with Mark's business, how do we win? How do we lead? What do we offer? We've often joked in this business that if you look at a power pole, transmission or distribution, we make everything on that pole except the pole, and that's pretty close. We've got a very broad array of offerings on the transmission side, and not just the actual components, the tools needed to install. Same applies to the distribution side, where we're particularly strong. We've got an 85% product portfolio. Again, not just the actual mechanical equipment that goes onto the grid, but the tools, the enclosures, the anchors, everything else you need around it. A great combination of the two.
Gas distribution, nice business for us, been growing smaller, newer for us, but does very similar things with gas. These are ways of tapping into main distribution lines, safely laying runners, putting in excess flow meters, putting in meter sets. Nice business. Same dynamics we see in the electric side. We look at our value offering, and we like to say we provide essential components that are a low cost of ownership, but a huge cost of failure. Putting up power lines is not cheap. You can see the typical average breakdown of where the money is spent on the left, and you can see huge amounts spent on real estate, installation, materials, project management. The piece we provide, the hardware, is that sliver on the right. That sliver is the sliver that has to work.
You don't have that piece. You don't have a transmission line. For us, how we go to play, utilities really care about two things far more than price, and that is the quality of the product and the service levels. If the product fails, all that other money goes to waste. If they don't have our components at the right time, they can't repair or manufacture the lines. Our focus is on quality, service levels, delivery. We've had a tough time for the last couple of years, as has everyone with the supply chain, but we've been consistently told from our distributors and end users that while we've dropped our service levels, we've consistently done better than our competitors. We're happy with that, and now we're starting to get them back up.
Adding capacity and capability is key for the next few years. This is an example of one of those areas. This is a large CapEx project for us. Enclosures seem simple enough. These are cement plastic or cement resin enclosures that are designed to be strong, weatherproof, and are used by electric, water, gas, telco companies to either bury or secure above ground connections of equipment. They're very heavy and there's a lot of air, so shipping these things, the logistics is a really big part of the economics. This business is doing well and continues to do well. As the 5G rollout and all of the stuff we see around transmission line development for renewables, we continue to see. We expect this growth to continue for some time.
We need to add capacity, and this will be an interesting case study for us on the HUS side. For the first time in a long time, we're actually going to add some footprint. We're gonna do that 'cause the capacity we can get out of the existing plants is starting to get to the end. The logistics and the transportation and access to skilled labor made Oklahoma a really attractive spot for us because logistically it's filled in a gap from a supply chain ship-out point of view, and the talent we need in that space is there. It's been a great place to add bodies. It's a $40 million investment. It's a greater than 30% ROIC, and it's also a hedge. It gives us some functionality and optionality that we can use in the future.
Moving on to the communication side of it. We're now going back to Kumi's side. The fundamental core of what we offer here is ubiquitous, secure private communications that utilities can use their own network. It is our core capability on the Aclara side. We have spent a lot of time and effort developing a really robust RF product solution. It actually started with a product we developed several decades ago in our water and gas space, and we've now ported over into the electric. It is designed not like a traditional AMI system to just read a meter, it's designed to do a lot more. For us right now in this space, we cover the full gamut from Electric Meters, Electric AMI, Water and Gas AMI, Installation services, and Distribution Automation.
We've had a great record with the co-ops and the munis, but less success other than with the meters in the big IOUs. A big part of the design for the RF system was to allow us to have a system to penetrate that space. We've built that system and it's going well. For today, we're up to 43 utilities that are using it. Not only is the number of utilities growing, but the size of the utilities is growing. We've got a pipeline of $4 billion qualified, $6 billion in total if you count early stage projects, and it's a big opportunity. The average system is designed to last 15 years. The first generation. That's the design life. That's not a warranty or guarantee, that's the targeted design life. The first IOUs to start to use this technology, their systems are now 15+ years old.
They're just kissing on that 15-year mark, and we're starting to see rate cases pulled together. It's still a little unclear as to when the first replacements will happen, but it's close. We've got our first pilot with an IOU about to start. The contract's done, we'll get it started next year, but it's a good setup for our first big IOU play. Why are we so focused on the comms? It's really about where the grid is going. Today you can think of the grid as hardware, the modem in the AMI piece, bit of sensing and control, but not interconnected. It's, I think, not well understood that within the U.S., the vast majority of the electric network is what we call dark. It has no intelligence, no communications, no ability to monitor anything. Almost half the substations have nothing.
When you start to get out into the transmission and distribution network, it becomes even sparser. There's a little bit of data that comes up to the utility, but very little goes out. If you really wanna start to deal with the issues we discussed earlier around renewables, EVs, cybersecurity, grid stability, you need a lot more data coming in so that you can see the network. More importantly, you need to be able to push a lot of data out to actually start to control and regulate what's happening, particularly in situations like storms. The focus of our network development, the next generation of RF, is to maximize our ability to deliver on this. There's two things at play here. We've got our own major NPX working with Alexis's team, and this is the next generation of our RF product. Our existing product's great.
We can do a lot of the things we've already said we wanna do with it, but this is about expanding its capabilities, its robustness, its latency, the amount of data it can move in, and its resilience. We wanna take this comms from Aclara working with Mark's hardware, we wanna bring them together. There's a piece that's missing in the middle or was missing for us until recently, and that is the actual intelligence that goes out in the field. We purchased Beckwith, and that's exactly what they do. Aclara's comms are now talking to Beckwith's control systems out on distribution poles that are then making changes to capacitor banks and switches. Before they were connected to a network, you had to send out a truck. A truck would have to go up a pole with a linesman, reconfigure the controller, come back.
You also didn't know what was happening. The controller in the field had to be autonomous and do everything on its own. Now we're in a situation, and we've implemented this in setups. We can talk to all of those controllers. We can configure them, we can change them. If you go into a fire season, you can make them more reactive. There's a lot you can do to proactively manage it. Now they can put this equipment anywhere in the field. This is something we've been looking at for many years, and they're all finally coming together. We've got Mark's hardware, Kumi's software and communications, and all this Distribution Automation equipment. An example I spend a bit of time on, a lot of people think this is very different to Distribution Automation. I would argue that it's exactly the same.
Dealing with utility scale EV is a Distribution Automation problem. We are not talking about charges for residential consumers. We are talking about helping utilities resolve and manage the EV load that is coming. This actually started with questions we were getting from Utility customers that were becoming more consistent and more broadly held. The first driver for this was utilities asking us, "How can we encourage the adoption of EV?" From their perspective, they obviously see EVs as a way to grow the top line by growing actual sale of generation power. They've had lots of different concepts.
We've heard lots of different business cases as to how they would structure this, but they all sort of circle around providing cheaper power for EVs than for regular use, which means you've now gotta be able to measure and monitor what goes in the car versus the home. They also, though, want some controls. As we started to talk to more and more utilities, there was the upside they see, which is selling more power. The downside is the grid's not ready for it. How do you play those two off? We're putting together a solution which combines all of Hubbell's offerings. We've got a lot of staff from Hubbell Wiring Systems who are developing the charger, which is all coming from Pete's side. There's components from both Pete's part of the business and mine.
We've gotta have a utility grade metering if you wanna charge, so that means putting our metering into the charger. More importantly, putting into a charger that can be controlled. The whole idea is to start to be able to throttle back when it makes sense. You take our AMI communication systems, and we can talk to every single one of those in real time. We know exactly where EVs are connected, how much they're pulling. This is critical 'cause like I said, the first contact we had with utilities was about encouraging adoption. The second actually came from series of utilities that are in areas where the adoption rate is high, and they're starting to have their first issues with managing what happens. This is a case. We're not talking about cities with 20% or 30% adoption.
We're talking about some cities with 4% or 5% adoption. What's happened is they're starting to see pinch points. It's not the whole network's a problem, but pinch points where there happen to be a lot of EVs, and they need a way to manage it. That's the idea about able to go out to them and slow them back, but not everywhere, just where you need to. It's early days for this, but we've had really good response talking to a variety of utilities across the country and across size and scope. Lots of IOUs, lots of co-ops, and everything in between. We've started developing our first 4 pilots, which we expect to put out into the field this year, and it's a learning game. It's learning about the mechanics. It's learning about the infrastructure.
It's working with the utilities to help them work on the various business case workshops and just on how you would implement it. We can provide a full utility scale solution from a software interface in a utility showing where every single EV is and how much power it's drawing, to going out into the field and actually controlling them and measuring them. Think it's an exciting opportunity, but I think Gerben summed it up well that this is an area we probably know the least about because it is the newest, but I would hazard the best bet that we're all in that same boat in the industry 'cause it is so new. In short, we're gonna continue to make investments in the three phases, innovation, CapEx to improve our footprint and capacity, and obviously with the M&A.
We're gonna continue to expand out the space. We're really happy with the position we're in and with the connection. Now from the Hubbell Utility Solutions side, it's great after, you know, six or seven years of laying all this out to start to see it all come together. Exciting times. With that, I will hand it over to Mr. Lau.
Okay, thank you. Welcome to the 2022 Hubbell Investor Day. I appreciate the opportunity for us to talk about the Electrical segment. My name is Pete Lau. I've been at Hubbell for a little under two years when Gerben made the decision to bring the Electrical segment together. We're really excited to talk to you about our journey today, our transformational journey. Been a lot of fun, a lot of hard work and still a little bit of work left to go. There's four key messages that I want this community to take away from today. The first is, we believe in the electrical market that we're very well positioned for the electrification megatrends. Excuse me. We are investing in high -growth verticals to drive our weighted average exposure to those megatrends.
The third is that as a segment, we're competing collectively to drive efficiency across our operations and our supply chain, scale in every part of our business, and speed in innovation, speed in solution, speed of delivery to our customers. Last, we think that there's significant opportunity for long-term margin expansion in this business by operating more collectively, operating better, and driving real productivity in the business. Here is an overview of the Electrical segment. $1.9 billion in 2021 sales. This does exclude the $500 million dollars of the C&I Lighting business that we announced that we were divesting in October of last year and we closed on in Q1 of this year.
We are organized around four businesses in the Electrical segments that are really organized around how our customers bid, how our customers buy, how our customers transact, and how our customers install. The first one is our Electrical Products business run by my colleague, Peter Fehl over there. He's got Wiring Systems, Enclosures, Industrial Enclosures, Electrical Rough-in Boxes and Fittings. The next one is Connection and Bonding, run by my colleague, Kevin Ryan over there. He's got Connectors and Lugs, Bonding and Grounding, Specialty Tooling. The third one is Industrial Controls, run by my colleague, Christoph Vogel over there. Christoph's got our most global business and arguably our most complex business, Power Quality Solutions, Industrial Controls, Reels, Transformers, and the like. The last, residential lighting, run by my colleague, Sean Veit. We do fixtures and fans in the residential lighting space.
You'll notice under those four umbrellas, we've got 24 brands that we call out here. 24 brands, really well-known for quality, really well-known for reliability, really well-known for service over their history. We believe that the power of bringing those brands together and delivering solutions is something that really sets us apart and is unique for us, not just in the channel, as Terry explained, but also in our high -growth verticals. We talked about our opportunity to consolidate customer spend, make it easier for our customers to do business with us, with one supplier. We're really excited about how well-positioned we are, really excited to deliver differentiated solutions in very, very attractive industries. We think that'll prove out over the strategic horizon in growth and predictable margin expansion.
The last time we were together, Gerben alluded to this earlier, we were three businesses operating really in the same end markets, Hubbell Lighting, Hubbell Construction and Energy, and Hubbell Commercial and Industrial. Today, we are a unified operating segment, Hubbell Electrical Solutions. We feel that the benefits of doing this are very much similar to the benefits that you would expect in an integration. Synergies around people, putting our world-class talent in jobs that deliver the most value for our employees and for our shareholders, providing meaningful career pathing for our people, and making this company a destination company for the industry's best talent. The second is product, process and productivity. We believe that by bringing this segment together, we know that we can offer more resources to tackle our toughest problems in the aggregate.
We believe that we can consolidate our spend and drive productivity in our sourcing. We know that we can deliver on things like better pricing. Bill will show you a little chart later today about our history in pricing. What we've done as an Electrical segment in the last year has far outpaced anything that we've done to combat inflation on the pricing side. We do that by harmonizing our processes. We do that by harmonizing our organizations. We do that by better connecting our back end to our front end so that we know what's ahead of us in the coming days, in the coming weeks, in the coming months, in the coming quarters. We can price, we can plan appropriately. Again, we believe that this operating segment is well-positioned and poised for growth and margin expansion in the long term.
There's six key levers in our operating strategy. The first is markets. We believe we know that the infrastructure bill is coming. We know that we're well-positioned for electrification. We also know that, as Bill talked about, we have a lever of portfolio management to help us drive our weighted average mix towards a more positive end market and help us deliver greater than GDP growth, 1.5x GDP growth, for a business that's historically been GDP or a little bit less than GDP. The second is customers. We're investing, and I'll talk a little bit about it in a few slides, in high -growth verticals. Vertical-type businesses that allow us to take advantage of the breadth of the product portfolio that we have to offer and consolidate spend. Terry talked to you about that same strategy, just in the channel.
We have a lot of different sales forces selling those brands, who when they prick up their ears and ask about other opportunities of the contractor, at the end user, in the distributor, we know that we can do a better job and will do a better job cross-selling our brands, which will allow us to grow faster. Innovation. Alexis talked about our harmonized NPD and NPX process, and we're really excited about the opportunities for us to not just deliver a better customer experience, but also help us fill holes and gaps in our offerings to our customers through the value chain. Lastly, our operations. Talked a little bit about pricing and productivity.
By consolidating our back room, we've been able to deploy lean manufacturing resources, people that specialize in sourcing of metals, to go drive cost out of our system, but also give us advanced intelligence around what pricing we need to get. Also, those 24 brands that I referenced on the previous page, many of them have their own manufacturing and distribution center footprint. We know that we can take footprint square footage out of our system while also allowing for this growth over the strategy horizon, and we believe that there's a lot of productivity and ability for us to get closer to our customers and deliver more quickly for our customers. Here's a look at how we're exposed in the end markets. This has significantly changed since the disposition of C&I Lighting.
We are now more exposed to the industrial end markets than we ever have been before, which we've told you in the past is a really good thing for us from a growth perspective, but also a profitability perspective. Our industrial businesses are more profitable, faster-growing, and we really like this mix where we are today, but that's not saying that we can't use things like innovation, things like portfolio management to continue to drive ourselves to a better and more attractive end market. We know there's a lot of opportunity on the right-hand side of the page. The trick for us is gonna be where, and how, and how quickly we deploy our capital over the strategy horizon. But we know there's lots of opportunities there, and we know that we're poised to go take share.
Terry used this pyramid a little earlier in his presentation, and I really like it. I wanna bring to life really kinda what this means for the Electrical business. Our businesses are organized, as I told you earlier, around how our customers bid, buy, transact, and install. We do not play in apparatus switchgear. We do not play in the commodities, the lighting, the pipe, and the wire. We believe that benefits us. We know that benefits us. Because ultimately, we provide components that are mission-critical, high cost of failure into any project anywhere in the world. When customers make decisions on whose product they're gonna use, it's generally around quality, it's generally around service, it's generally around reliability, and it's not so much around price.
We believe that the profitability in this component sector and the opportunity to drive profitability in this component sector is really greater than if we had participated at the top or the bottom of the pyramid. We know that with our collection of brands, we can out-brand a lot of our competitors in the industry, but we also know that by staying in this, in this space, in the connector space, that we can out-nimble, we can out-service, we can out-quality a lot of our competitors. That's where we feel our niche is, and we're really excited about that. We talked a little earlier in the Q&A session, and in Terry's section about verticals.
In the businesses I showed you before are horizontal product businesses, and what we're creating in Hubbell are vertical businesses that look across not just the entire Electrical segment. All of Hubbell, the entire enterprise, to deliver solutions that consolidate spend and make us an easier place to do business with and make our customers come to less suppliers to do a job. A couple of these high-growth verticals are here on the left-hand side, but I wanted to use the example of the solar system, 'cause I really think this is a really nice example of what we're doing. The products there in red are Electrical Products. The ones denoted in yellow are utility products.
We have a team, a business, a vertically aligned business, that works on the selling and the specification, but we also have engineers and product resources and fulfillment resources that are dedicated to understanding what a solar or a wind farm looks like, what we have in our product basket, what we need to introduce organically, what we need to go get inorganically to end up filling out this package. When we reference ourselves back to that pyramid, we can say for this solar field installation, that Hubbell provides over 80% of the components, the bill of material in a solar field. Which again, speaks to the fact that we can consolidate our customer spend and make us an easy place for them to do business with. It's also less than 15% of the total cost of the solar field.
Which again gets back to the point that we are high cost of failure, mission-critical, safety, quality, reliability is what's important for the products that we sell and deliver into these markets. We know that we can copy and paste this strategy into other high-growth verticals and have a lot of success doing that. That's where we'll spend a bunch of our time moving forward over the strategy horizon. Wanted to talk a little bit about innovation and our focus on innovation. We focus really in four main areas as we look out and understand who uses our products, the users of our products, generally the people that are installing. We think about installation efficiency. No secret that the skilled workforce is declining and declining fast, and that's one of the biggest problems that we can solve for our customers.
Reliable and protected connections, reducing the amount of callbacks to job sites. Regulatory compliance in an ever-tightening regulatory environment. IoT, limited participation in connected products, participation nonetheless, but we also know that we can build out and we can help build out the infrastructure that's required for IoT. I wanted to bring one project that I really like to the forefront and talk about what we're doing here. This is a product that Hubbell was essentially built on, the wiring device. In any wiring device, in any application, in an industrial application, commercial or residential application, when installing a wiring device, you need to terminate the connection. Generally, that's done with screws. It's done with four or six screws somewhere, and installer's in there turning a screwdriver, tightening a screw against the wire.
What we've come up with is an innovation on an over 100-year-old product that is screwless termination. If you look at the pictures below, you'll see those red plungers. What'll happen now is instead of using a tool to tighten the screws, you simply take your thumb and depress the plunger, and it terminates the wire. What that means is 80% labor reduction for those installing. What it means is there's no tool required anymore. What it also means is if you've ever turned a screw and you know that vibration or movement generally over time loosens the screw, which makes it for a less reliable connection. On the back of our plungers, we have teeth that dig into the copper wires that ultimately, when that vibration or movement happens, that connection then becomes stronger because it digs into the wire and makes it a grittier connection.
We also know that this has improved field safety over time. Again, just a wonderful example of how we're innovating and how innovation can mean a lot of different things. It doesn't have to mean a new market, doesn't have to mean a totally new product, but it can mean a meaningful innovation on something that's proven and reliable for over 100 years. Last, I wanna talk about operational performance. As we've come together as a segment, we have a very intensified operating cadence and operating system. Again, we talked about how we've done on pricing and productivity in the last year, and we're able to get pretty quickly last year, once commodities spiked, into a price cost positive space within two and a half quarters, which Bill will show you over time, was record time for us.
We know that by combining our backroom organizations, we have productivity in the supply chain. We can send out teams to solve our toughest problems. We have productivity in our company code structure. We have productivity in our human resources and our people. I talked to you a little bit earlier about footprint. Many of these brands have their own footprint, manufacturing sites, distribution centers. We can take 20% of the cost or 20% of the square footage out of our manufacturing footprint and still have enough capacity to deliver on our growth targets over the strategy horizon.
We can take the footprint that we already have today at the endpoints, at the distribution points, and instead of distributing all over the country or all over North America from one point per brand, we can use that footprint and leverage that footprint to put multiple brands in many different distribution centers, such that we're getting our products to our customers faster than we ever have before. Lastly, Bill talked about it earlier today. From an investment standpoint, we've been investing in automation for a few years now. We absolutely see some of the synergies that we're gonna get back to invest and 2x the automation over the next couple of years. If you think about our story, we are very well aligned to the Hubbell strategic pillars that Gerben laid out earlier today.
A unified operating system that's driving an ease of doing business. Above-market growth using cross-selling in the channels, but delivering solutions to our verticals and an ease of experience, customer experience. Operating with discipline, which is gonna help us expand our margins consistently and predictably over the strategy horizon. A world-class talent base from which to draw upon and continue to drive and make sure that Hubbell is a destination company for the best talent in our industry. Thanks very much. I hope you're as excited about the Electrical business as we are, myself and my team, and we look forward to sharing more with our journey over the next couple of years. Now I'm gonna hand it back to Bill to close it up for us.
Thank you, Pete. I'm gonna try to synthesize everything you've heard this morning into some dollars and cents. I am gonna make some comments on the short term in addition to the medium term. It really starts with reminding you all that in April when we reported we had raised our guidance, that was a result of volumes being stronger than we had thought by about a point, and incremental price had added to the wraparound that we had guided on, and that had caused us to raise the midpoint of our guidance by about $0.20. We now have the benefit of having April and May in the books, and we are certainly heading towards the top half of this range rather than the midpoint.
That's being driven by continued high sales, very healthy order intake. The price traction continues to be really strong. We need all of it because the inflation side of the story continues to push up, and that's not just material inflation, which I'm gonna share you a little analysis, but also non-material inflation. We're happy to let you know that from the short term, i.e., the next six months, we're expecting to be at the top half of this range rather than at the midpoint based on what we're seeing. We have a really virtuous cycle that where our strategy and our business model drives our performance and our cash cycle.
As I get into this chart, I wanted to kinda introduce you to a couple more folks on the team who really provide us with keen insights into the future. First is Joe Capozzoli, who's seated to the right over here. Joe's been looking after operations and all of our functions and the insights that come from that. Jay Penn is at the extreme left over there, who does our planning and analysis. Our view of the future would be incomplete without knowing how Jay and Joe are thinking of things. It really starts with where our growth is and allowing that increase in sales to drop through at attractive incremental margins. We're then focused on expanding margins.
You heard Pete talk about managing price cost as well as restructuring and related footprint optimization initiatives. I think we had a decent discussion earlier this morning on some of the portfolio moves and SKU rationalizations. That increased sales and widened margins give us more cash. We are focused on the working capital part of that equation as well. It's been a challenging time right now. I think you heard both Pete and Allan talking about our service delivery and meeting our on-time promises has been harder with some of the supply chain disruptions. As a result, we've invested more in inventory this year than we ordinarily would. Make sure we can support the customer.
I would tell you the feedback we're getting from our customers that while we're not at our level, we are outperforming the competition. I think that investment in inventory, while it eats a little bit into cash flow, has gotten us some share here and certainly built relationships for the future. That cash flow then in turn creates the ability to invest in the CapEx, the dividends, the share repo, and the acquisitions that we all talked about. Those acquisitions then in turn come back and cycle through and create new growth. This virtuous cycle informs how we think about the business.
I thought because I had mentioned the short term, that I should give you a little bit of insight into our sales and orders, and a little bit of a picture of how the backlog is growing here. On the top in blue, you see our order pattern. We smooth this a little bit as a 30-day average, and the yellow line on the top is our shipments. You can kinda see before December of 2020, you can see the illustration of a book and bill business, taking orders and we're shipping. Now you see the last six quarters, a pretty dramatic build-up of strong orders, with strong billings growth, shipments growth, but the bottom depicts the creation of an ever-growing backlog.
We spent a lot of time fielding questions from you all about how sustainable the order pattern is, are customers ordering ahead. I thought I would add maybe for some illustration purposes, the orders on the bottom that are in gray are meant to be delivered 90 days from now. I thought that would give you a sense of are customers expecting future price increases, are they expecting longer lead times, and therefore, do they need to put in orders that are longer dated than typical? The answer to all of that is yes.
I thought this would give you at least a little bit of insight into how our year is shaping up and how to the extent customers were to pull back on orders that we've got a substantial backlog to live off of for a while. I also thought the price-material equation is important for us to share some granularity with you all. This data goes back to the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. I found that period to be reasonably dramatic. You can see how the yellow is the material price and the blue is our price to customers. It really illustrates. I hope you can see kind of the lag effect.
Back in September of 2008, as Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, you saw the economy go into a contraction. You see the material prices go down, and you see our price to customers lag that. Yes, it comes down, but the area of the blue above the yellow represents, you know, margin that's dropping through, for us. As you go through, really, the last 11 years or so, you can see that relationship being maintained where material costs inflate. We get price within, a couple of quarters, then as it rolls over, we hang on to the price for a while. We do create some distortion for you, where during an inflationary period, we're typically lagging and our margins are a little thin. During times of rollover, our margins are gonna be, a little bit wider.
I just really find that this chart kinda illustrates the order of magnitude of what we've been through inflation-wise, in this COVID period, and to show you how quickly the blue line of Hubbell responding with price much faster and preventing getting too far behind there. I'm not here to predict when that yellow line will roll over. I'm assuming that it will. We're seeing signs of steel, which is our single largest commodity, is showing some rollover in it, but other areas of aluminum, copper, certainly areas of fuel and derivatives of fuel, that's not showing those signs.
What I'm here to tell you is we'll manage with the blue line, we'll manage with price, and as it turns around, we'll hold on to price and get some more margin in. I wish I could do a better job of predicting this for you, but we'll do just fine from our end. The third leg that I thought would be important to go through is our restructuring. You heard Pete Lau refer to some footprint optimization. Our program is several years old. It's unfortunate that in 2021 you see our expense come down a little bit unnaturally. That was not a lack of commitment on our part to continue to wanna optimize our footprint.
That's really a sign of all hands on deck, all engineers needed to build product and get customers satisfied. Now you'll see a ramp up back to the sustained run rate in 2022 of about $20 million of restructuring. The really good news about that is what happens on the right is just accumulation of a better cost run rate. We've been seeing and continue to see two-to-three-year paybacks. I get pushback from some of you that that seems a little slow, but from our perspective, that's a really good return. Order of magnitude, we feel that that $20 million run rate of R&R expense can give us about 20 basis points a year of margin expansion.
You see, we have over the last several years improved our sales per square foot by greater than 20%. You heard Pete talk about an additional potential to take 20% of the square footage out on the Electrical side. I get asked a lot, "Is the restructuring program, you know, dry of ideas?" It really feels like in the middle innings. I think this also illustrates. I know a lot of our peers out there like to add this back like it's extraordinary. We put this cost into our results, as you know, and that's because we view it as an ongoing investment that we're gonna continue to make, and we believe the savings justify that and they have very good returns on that spending.
I wanted to synthesize what Pete and Allan showed you, this stairstep. It starts with markets. We believe that through 2025, we're gonna see 6%-8% organic growth rate. Now that starts with the fact that from 2021 and 2022, we're in double digits, and we're envisioning more of a mid-single digits for 2023 and beyond. Netting out to mid- to -high single digits from the markets, we believe that's gonna be a half turn to a full turn above GDP. The second lever, you heard Terry talk about our customer and how we're going to market, and where we can make investments in cross-selling, where we can make investments in vertical market selling, and becoming more important to our customers.
We think the outcome of all of those initiatives that Terry described should contribute about a half point of growth above markets, which is really I would use the phrase share gain around those initiatives. Alexis described NPD and NPX processes to you. We've got that extra investment into innovation, and we believe as well that that innovation can create a half point of outgrowth from the markets to our total growth rate. I just showed you a decade-plus of our price cost productivity. We're factoring that in as neutral or better through the cycle. It'll have distortions in it, as I said, as things inflate or deflate, but through the cycle we will do neutral or better from the results of that.
I frankly think we and our customers together learned a lot about pricing during this last couple of years. I think we're better for it. Our relationships are stronger and we're communicating better. The two-segment structure, I think, really enables us to do that in a more coordinated and constructive way from our customers' perspective. The footprint optimization is gonna be more centered on Pete's side, the Electrical side of the business. We are anticipating 20 basis points of margin expansion each year from that. That creates kind of our organic expectation for the future.
The result of that is margins increasing about 250 basis points from last year's level to just under 17%, and our cash flow and our historical around 1x adjusted EPS. That leaves the portfolio work and the $1 billion of M&A to invest. We think that will result in two to three points of extra growth. What we're aiming to do on behalf of you, our investors, is grow the top line by double digits and see some margin expansion resulting from that. I'll synthesize this into earnings per share on the next page.
You'll see that we're anticipating from 2020 to 2022 mid-teens compound growth rate of EPS from the low $7 range, to this $9.20-$9.40 type range we're anticipating now for 2022. As you lengthen the lens from 2022 to 2025, we think we're gonna see good contribution from our markets. We quite recognize here that we've got strong tailwinds, we've got big backlog, we've got really strong order book. We're obviously quite well aware that the consumer is facing significant challenges from higher interest rates, higher inflation, and that it's quite likely that that consumer will be forced to contract their spending in the not too distant future. We're actually finding it, frankly, easier to talk about 2025 than probably talking about 2023.
That's kind of counterintuitive, but to the extent the consumer goes through a rough patch here, we think this gives us another couple of years. Frankly, one of the reasons we like having the six levers is we can make decisions and trade-offs between them to try to deliver this level of performance to you. The customer initiatives and the innovation, nice green bar of contribution. You see that investment that we talked about, and as it was asked, not an overwhelming amount of investment. R&R giving us savings to get to a really an operational $12 a share, which would be double digits between the 2022 and 2025 period.
Then deploying $1 billion in M&A in that four-year timeframe, roughly $250 million a year from 2022 on, gives us another dollar to take it up to $13. Again, I think I've known most of you a long time. We've probably traditionally together talked about Hubbell as a GDP grower and trying to get something in the high single digits towards double digits. This is meaningfully different than that.
This is a sign that we believe that there's some megatrends out there, that through pruning our portfolio, we're much better exposed to those megatrends, and that we have a number of levers and capital at our disposal, to make smart investments, and to manage and navigate through some challenging markets and environments to deliver this good double-digit performance for you all. It would be my privilege to deliver these results for everybody. I know there'll be no questions on this, and so I'm super happy to hand it back to Gerben.
Okay. Maybe we'll go to Q&A here for some of the opening remarks. Let's open up the mics again.
Bill, you might have taken your seat a little early 'cause I.
That's why Gerben's standing far, far away, Tom.
Let's talk about some of the algebra underneath those bars. Now, appreciate the insight on the organic outlook versus inorganic, and then basing off 2022. If we just look at the organic 2022 to 2025, I think you're looking at, on the revenue side, low to mid singles and then double digits on earnings, which would imply some pretty healthy incrementals.
Yes.
through that period.
Yes.
Maybe two ways to unpack that. Some of it potentially is just mix with your higher margin segment growing at a higher rate, so maybe we could talk through that. But I also wanted to hit on the gross margin side. Is there? We don't have an explicit range on it, but is there an embedded assumption that that should trend higher as well and drive some of those incrementals?
Yes. The gross margin, we think, is gonna be impacted, Tommy, from a couple of areas. One is the innovation itself. That outgrowth is coming in at higher gross margins. Two is the restructuring that we're talking about, really is gonna affect gross rather than SG&A. With those two levers, we do think the gross margins are coming up. We also are anticipating that the M&A will be in the higher growth, higher margin areas. We've got quite a bit, and as you saw, you know, for us to get towards that 17% OP, to your point, there's about 60 basis points a year of margin expansion embedded in that. Pretty lofty, but I do appreciate you pointing out mix, 'cause I was talking to Jeff beforehand.
We don't think of mix as cheating, but there is quite a bit of mix that's just math lift as opposed to operational lift.
Thanks. Just coming around to, so price, what are you assuming for price in that 2023-2025 window? Then also just thinking about 2023, and I appreciate, I guess Yogi Berra said predictions are hard to make, especially those about the future, right? If you think about 2023 now, we're starting to get into wraparound price for 2023, right?
Yes.
As opposed to kinda flatlining into 2023. The question really is what are you expecting for 2023 to 2025, and what does the wraparound look like now into 2023?
Yeah. You'll see close to a couple points of wraparound, but we've kind of punted on your question by lengthening the lens to really a three and a half year period. We've said that price will go up a little, to your point, in 2023, but should come back down in sympathy with materials if that happens. We kinda just put that bucket and described it as neutral without actually making an explicit price assumption inside those organic growth rates. If the sales growth is lower because price is lower, we think that just means the margin expansion will still let us get to the $13. We've kinda finessed your question, unfortunately.
Yeah. It's a really dynamic environment because while there is price wraparound, as you point out, there's still a lot of inflation, right? We see steel coming down and then going up again. We see, you know, other metals at the highest point they've ever been. Fuel and fuel related, the resins and, you know, spiking... It's really dynamic. I think the important thing for us and where we're focused is don't let that lag be on top of it, right? That's why those charts are coming much closer together of when costs go up, that we generally lagged it on a longer period to catch up. Now we're much more focused on being behind it quickly.
Just on the guide tweak, is it, would you point out one lever more than another? Is it volume? Is it incremental price cost? Is it mostly in Q2 when we're still kind of assuming the back half looks the same?
Yeah. It's more on the volume side. While price is good, as Gerben said, the inflation continues to eat away at that. It's kinda neutralizing the earnings effect of that price. The volume is. It has been better in April and May, and that I think we thought clear enough through two-thirds of the month that we need to share with you that it feels like it's trending towards that top half rather than midpoint from. You're right to say that's basically new information for us since April.
It's mostly in Q2, or are you taking the whole year up kind of in full?
Yeah, I think it's. We'll see. We'll talk to you about that in a month and a half or so.
Yeah. Maybe this one's for Allan. Back to Aclara. I'm just curious what the software attachment rate is on new project deployments today. Is there a target you wanna get to? Then, you know, specifically around organic and inorganic investment, I mean, do you think you need to do more there on the software side, inorganically?
No, not inorganically. We have, I think, a very competent internal software development team, and we've now got them in four different countries, and they've given us the skills we need. Our catchment rate is every system that we sell, if we're selling the whole system, goes with software. It's 100% what is essentially a bundled system. The biggest change we've seen over the last couple of years, and I can't quote the number off the top of my head, but the number of utilities who are willing to take a SaaS model as opposed to on-premises hosting is going up. We obviously have a revenue stream associated with that. We expect that to continue. Like everything with utilities, they're conservative. It's a slow adoption, but steady.
You think you're able to monetize the software versus it being a cost of doing the business right now?
We already monetize it today. We have licensing fees as well as hosting fees, and that is becoming a bigger piece. It's slow at this point. We expect it to continue.
Thanks.
Maybe just quickly back on pricing. Can you just remind us what you expect for the year now, this year on price in total? Then, the slide number 78, I think, which showed the orders and the revenue history just, it doesn't show May orders in backlog. Maybe Dan forgot to extend the chart out, but was that up a lot in May given buying ahead of the June price increase, I think you guys put through? Any color on that would be helpful.
Yes. Let's start with price. We started to Jeff's question with five points of wraparound from last year to this year. That's how we initiated our guide. There's about two incremental points of price coming in with a decent amount of that, as you said, in June. That's up to seven points of price in there. I don't know why Dan didn't have May, but it's maybe a printing error, I don't know.
Yeah.
May, the May trends are doing fine. Yeah.
Was there any buying ahead with the increase there?
You know, I was trying to say I think there's buying ahead of a lot of things. I think the fact that the 90-day order backlog that's getting more significant implies that orders are being put in in anticipation of price increases and just lead time extensions. Both of those factors, I think, are driving that.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Okay.
Thank you. Two questions. First, how would you characterize or quantify your historical level of outgrowth over the last five or 10 years versus what you're envisioning over the next three years? Secondly, it looks like on the margin you're expecting a little bit more outgrowth in the Utility-oriented businesses and the Electrical businesses. Is that part of the model? And if so, what underlies that?
Yeah. If outgrowth, you're using that phrase to imply what's outgrowing GDP or what's outgrowing end markets. We happen to believe if you looked at us going back, I think you'd see some modest half point maybe of outgrowth from our perspective. What's happening now is through the exit of C&I Lighting, which would've been an anchor to that equation is now creating uplift to the balance of the portfolio, that which is exposed to utility. Again, I think utility used to be an MRO GDP-type business, and we've seen that really step up towards the mid-single digits. I think that's market, so it's outgrowing GDP, but it's market, and I think we are earning our full share of that market, you know, there.
I think the real drivers of your question of why we're anticipating more outgrowth than we have over the last decade is a function of, one, the portfolio's shifted to more attractive areas. Two, we do think some of these megatrends are creating growth rates of where we're exposed to be significantly above GDP, and that's, I think, quite good news. We're preparing ourselves to have to invest in that. The good news is this virtuous financial model that we have. We keep kicking out more and more cash flow that allows us to make more acquisitions, and it's gonna keep our business development team pretty busy here.
I just wanted to ask again about price cost, and I'm trying to understand. It was a very impressive chart showing the price cost sort of catching up with each other more recently. I thought, you know, there was just a natural lag between, you know, with LIFO costs versus when you can implement the prices. Wondering what changed there. More specifically on the backlog, which is going up a lot, are you able to reprice that? How are you. You know, 'cause that should be a hit in price cost just 'cause you're fulfilling older orders eventually. I'm just wondering how you're able to sort of get in front of that as well.
Yeah. Let's start with your first question on the lag, which I think the way you described it is accurate. There's a natural lag. When we see a sustained move in the commodity, we analyze that. These guys and their customer service teams put together analysis and respond with a price increase that has a couple of months, you know, lead time to put that in, and so you end up with these natural lags. I think the response in 2021 to that steep rise in the yellow curve was a function of seeing how relentless it was. It was quarter after quarter, right? We saw that just really push up. We saw Pete frankly reacted the Electrical side reacted actually a little bit quicker. Utility side, a little slower. As Allan mentioned, utilities now are creating that line.
It's good news that we've matched the height of the yellow. It is, though, when you look at it, you can see a significant area between the blue and the yellow. As it inflected, that was, you know, headwind in margin for us. We still have, you know, work to do to kinda analyze where our price levels are versus where cost levels are. I would tell you that we used to rely on a nice quaint formula where our price would pay for our commodity costs and our productivity would pay for non-commodity inflation. We find that productivity initiatives, when we add them up across the enterprise, they get you kind of in the 2.5% range.
With inflation at 8.3%, that gap, it's just not possible for us to do enough productivity to do that. We've kinda taken that excess and put the burden back on price. What you're describing is a really important kind of operational relationship and financial kind of skill.
Yeah.
that we've gotta get it, you know, just right, or risk either, you know, losing customer relationships or underperforming financially. We have to stay intensely focused-
Mm-hmm.
on what you're describing.
Yeah. Maybe to add to your question, what changed? I think in the Utility business, we've had this in place where we have a pricing discipline, we have a pricing group that drives that. The lag there is more a function of the longer-term view that we take with Utility customers, or that we've traditionally taken. We saw the hit of that last year. We're clearly seeing the benefits of how we do capture that price. I'd say on the Electrical side, the opportunity was more that pricing was deeper into the business. It was inconsistently applied. There wasn't strong data science behind it. I think what Pete and his group have put together is that discipline.
Not only are we able to react quicker to it, but we're able to react better to what price do we really need to offset those costs. I think we have made structural changes to our business to address this, better and quicker.
It was interesting. We were just out with Pete at the NAED out West, and so we had the chance together between Gerben and Pete and I to meet with maybe our top 15 or so customers. It's a pretty unique time when each one of those meetings started with, "Is there more price increases to come? Just tell us, you know, because we need to process them." It wasn't pushback on, "Don't give us more." It was, "Get us the material and communicate price." That's a pretty unique point in time where we are, that's... Pete, that's just a you know, pretty unique kind of customer perspective right now.
Agreed.
Just on the backlog and sort of how you're handling older orders that are lower price.
Do you wanna, you and Allan.
Yeah.
You guys both have them. We have selectively repriced backlog, even in places where we thought it would be incredibly problematic, just in terms of the nature of the T's and C's we had in place. Parts of the business, like Gas connectors, have done this in the past. They're set up for it. It's sort of almost mechanical. We've learned from them. The Enclosures business in Mark's business has done this very well, and it's simply a case of that industry, not us, the industry's out of capacity, so it's a little easier to manage that side of it.
The Meters business, because of the price in electronics, which was the toughest one, the sales team working directly with the customers has managed to get pricing on a backlog that we've never been able to do in the past. I think it's an acknowledgment from the utilities that we're not making this up. They know it's real. Everyone's pushing it through to them. Again, they're far more interested in delivery assurance than price at the moment. So long as we keep executing on the delivery side of it, they've been remarkably understanding. I would also add from the utilities we've spoken with, you know, our biggest supply constraint now is still electronics, but they've been remarkably understanding.
They'll look at us and say, "We don't like it, but we know you're doing everything about it," and we've kept them informed. Between the information going out, I think, has given us a lot of opportunity to manage the backlog.
Yeah. I think on our side, we're pretty well caught up. You know, we go through blips where maybe we get a little behind, maybe we get a little ahead. It's not so material that we would cut off our nose to spite our face, if that makes sense. You know, we talk all the time that we're in this business for the next 10 years and not the 10 months. You know, if we got really behind, we would talk about doing something about it, but repricing backlog is a two-way street, right? On the way down, where we think the worst is probably behind us, and the best is still ahead of us, we don't wanna invite that sort of scrutiny into, you know, into our business.
The facts are the electrical has maintained a much more book-and-bill.
Right. Yeah.
kind of relationship.
Yeah.
The bulk of that backlog that I showed you is on the Utility side.
Yeah. Fair point. Okay. Great. With that, I'd just like to close this by expressing that I hope that we've been able to provide you with a clearer picture of how we're building on a very successful base of a company that serves, you know, attractive Electrical and Utility markets. We're benefiting from some secular tailwinds of megatrends of Electrification and Grid Modernization, and we're focused on a set of strategic priorities and levers that can drive value for our key stakeholders, our customers, our employees, and you, our investors. We look forward, I certainly look forward to continue to update you throughout our quarterly earnings calls, throughout other engagements that we have together on the progress that we're making. And with that, I will close our 2022 Investor Day. Thank you all.