Venk Nathamuni, CFO, and we have Bert Subin here with Investor Relations. Exciting times at the company. We're going to go through this as a fireside chat. There is a QR code up. It was up on the screen, but I think you have access to it. You can submit questions that way, or we can just have the microphone go around if anyone has questions as we go along, so with that, welcome, great to have you here. Maybe just to kick it off here, Bob, could you just talk about the evolution of Jacobs in recent years and kind of what your primary focus is now that the spin is done?
Sure. So without getting into too long of the company's history, but the company started off with strong engineering roots 75+ years ago by Dr. Jacobs and really grew up through the decades as a leader in the engineering space, predominantly in the chemical process industry, mostly the pharmaceutical and in the hydrocarbon space. It diversified in the 1990s and 2000s when it went public in 1989.
Through that investment capital, it diversified markets, geographies, and service mix into aerospace and defense, continued down the hydrocarbons and pharmaceutical space, and then started kind of through acquisition in the infrastructure space and kind of rode that wave all the way to the recession. Post-recession, I think looking for some growth when growth wasn't necessarily coming. I don't think it was ever easy, but similar to the way it was before the recession.
And kind of for the first time in the company's history, actually executed on developing a strategy. Our strategy prior to that was, and it was formed by Dr. Jacobs, was take care of your client's business and the business will take care of itself effectively. And it worked. It worked for several decades. In 2016 was kind of an inflection point for the company where we kind of sat back, paid a consultant to not be named, a lot of money to basically come up with this. You're market leaders in certain markets, you're in geographies, and you've got a great service mix. You're also in markets that you shouldn't be. You're in geographies that aren't growing, and there's certain services that you perform that you're not really good at.
So get out of the stuff that you're not good at, that's not growing, and double down on those areas that are. That was the 235-slide McKinsey report that came out, summarized with that. And so we did. We kind of, it was Jacobs for Jacobs and went on that. During that strategy, one of the areas, and this is where it's kind of going, one of the areas that we felt like we were under-indexed in was the water market and the water sector. We had that capability and skill set outside the U.S., but very limited in the U.S. And so we were organically trying to build that up.
And then 2017, probably the most defining acquisition ever made for the company, possibly even the industry, is we had the opportunity to come together with CH2M, a world leader in the water and environmental space, and acquired CH2M in 2017 and went through a very, very deliberate integration strategy of the company, creating almost a new company and took off immediately post-acquisition. Great synergies between the two companies formed, rebranded ourselves, and really started to go deep into the space of water and environmental and growing our transportation business as well.
Coincidentally enough, a year later, we were approached by a company called WorleyParsons, who was also looking to shed some businesses and become a pure play in the hydrocarbon space. And we were offered, ironically enough, the same amount for our Energy and Chemicals business as we had just paid for CH2M. People think that this was the brainchild of people sitting in a building somewhere thinking of this grand strategy. It's good to be lucky sometimes as well. And we ended up selling our Energy and Chemicals business in 2018 and really focused in on Infrastructure and Advanced Facilities and our government services, our Aerospace and Defense work as well, and moved through. Got through the pandemic.
Kind of mid-pandemic, we started to see that this business that we had formed with our Infrastructure and Advanced Facilities business now was two and a half times the size that it was six years prior when we acquired CH2M and growing at a faster rate with margin expansion. I think at this point we had already expanded margins by nearly 500 basis points, and we were on a high single-digit growth rate in that business and kind of moderate growth within our CMS business.
But really what kind of got to us was the investment needs for both were different. We had a nice organic play in our Infrastructure and Advanced Facilities business, market leader in water at this point, environmental, transportation, and in the Life Sciences and Semiconductor space, a market leader by a margin, and probably a bit subscale in our Government Services business and a required investment. So taking a look at that and saying, what would be best for our people within, we call it a Critical Mission Solutions business, as well as what would catalyze growth in that business, made the decision working with our board to separate the businesses.
We then were approached by a company called Amentum to do a merger, and the best means and methods to do that with a tax-free basis was through a Reverse Morris Trust or an RMT and really focus in our Infrastructure and Advanced Facilities business. That decision was made back in the summer of 2023. And happy to announce, and here's the end of the story, took me seven minutes to do it, is that we were successful in the separation and the merger of our government services business with Amentum. It's now a publicly traded company doing well.
And now the new Jacobs is very focused on Infrastructure, Transportation, Water, Environmental, and the Energy and Power businesses, as well as Advanced Facilities, which predominantly is Life Sciences, Semiconductor, and Data Center work. So we're off and running, and the future looks bright.
That's great. Congratulations on that. So as you think about, maybe I'll combine these two questions in terms of what you think are really the most unique and differentiating aspects of Jacobs' go- forward organization, and then trying to get at what is your strategy for the new organization going forward. And so how do you, what are the unique characteristics, and how do you leverage those into formulating what your strategy is? Because we know you're among the elite companies in what you do in these Critical I nfrastructure and Life Sciences and Advanced Manufacturing areas. There's a handful of companies that take different approaches to it. So what's unique about Jacobs and what's your strategy going forward here?
Sure. So split it up into two parts. I'd say what's most unique about our business, and I know it was a little painful walking through 75 years of history, but I thought it was important because there is a component of what Dr. Jacobs said that really has now proven itself out after 75 years. But I think what's unique is that we pride ourselves on really understanding in our hearts and in our souls, we're engineers, we're scientists, we're technicians. But we make it a point to really understand the business of our client's business.
So the science of our client's business is really where we come from and what does that mean to drive a client outcome? Now, how we do that is through our capability set, engineering, consulting and advisory, program management, all the capabilities that we have. But why? It's the why of our client needs to deliver this asset to provide business transformation and business growth for our client, and that's how we look at things.
Some RFPs tend to be very prescriptive. We are compliant, and when we bid work, we negotiate a lot of work also, but we're looking at it from the context of how is this going to drive a client outcome? And I think that's unique to Jacobs. Kind of the differentiating skills on looking forward is because we've spent so much time understanding our client's business. Now when we look at some of the tools and methodologies and innovation and technology that's going on within our space, utilizing that to drive efficiencies and drive the best solution.
So whether it be the use of AI and software platforms to deliver a client solution, the use of innovative skills in the field in order to drive efficiencies and productivity in the field as the asset is being built, all of those things are what we're building capability sets in order to drive a better outcome. And what we're calling it, and it'll be more talked about this at Investor Day, is we're reimagining the asset life cycle.
If you think about the asset life cycle of our client's business, for years it's been very linear. You have a job, you conceptualize it, you do a schematic, you design it, you program or build it, and then you operate and maintain it. Now with consulting and advisory, data platforms, digitization of everything, we're able to accelerate that and actually get the same outcome.
That's really fascinating. It kind of goes into what I was going to ask you next, which is what are your customers asking of you now, and how has that driven them three to five years ago? Are they asking you about this sort of different asset life cycle approach, or is there something that you're bringing to them and saying, "Hey, you should think about this differently"?
I'd say more so today than probably ever before, and even if we say three to five years, even if you go back 10 years, most of our clients knew exactly what they wanted. Not exactly, but they knew what they wanted. They even had a concept of, or even a pre-design of what they wanted, and then they would go out to an engineer or a consultant to "Okay, I want you to go design this." Today, a lot of the situations we're in is that the client knows that they have an issue. They have a therapy that they've got to get to market as fast as they can.
They've got congestion problems in a metropolitan city. They've got drinking water issues in a metropolitan city. They know that they have an issue. They don't know what the solution is. So they'll call us to come in and help conceptualize what is that solution. Then it'll turn into a scope and a project, and then we have the opportunity to deliver it. That front-end piece, that has been growing over the course of the last three and five years.
Interesting. And how does that connect with your global perspective? Are you able to draw on increasingly so your global expertise in solving these problems that you may be given to you on a local basis?
Absolutely. And that's been something we've been working on for quite a while. If you think about the infrastructure space, even in the private sector within kind of the tech manufacturing space too, it was for years very vertical. If you had a transportation or if you had a water job that was in California, you did all of the work for that job in California. And then as talent continued to rise up in different areas of the country, then the world, not that it started, it's always been there. We just identified it.
Now we're able to utilize talent that we have in Europe, in Central Asia, in Australia, New Zealand, to bring together a global solution delivered locally. And that now makes up nearly 70+% of all engagements that we have. We have people coming from all over the planet delivering on that work. Before, it used to be called offshore engineering or low-cost centers or different types of terms over the years that have been utilized. We don't see it that way at all.
Interesting. And you mentioned before some of the different tools that you're now bringing to the market. So I think digital might be one of those. You can correct me if I'm wrong. So how do you see digital evolving in the context of your business? Is it more internally focused? Is it more externally focused? Can you get a competitive advantage in digital? Can you talk about that?
Yeah, it's both. Maybe I'll talk about what we're doing externally, and then maybe Venk can talk about what we're doing internally. Externally, so if you think about an engineering challenge or a challenge that needs to be engineered, what is it? It's nothing but data. It is the use of data in order to drive a solution. And so for years, whether it be transportation planning, conceptualizing treatment plants or waste treatment plants, there's a tremendous amount of data that we would go collect, synthesize, and then deliver into a design solution. All of what I said on the front end now, we can do with these software platforms that are AI-enabled, and it's accelerating our ability to get to the solution with optionality that's right in front of us. So I'll use an example.
One of the platforms that we've utilized now that has really took off. It's probably over 100 plants in the U.S., and we're taking it outside the U.S. too. It's called Aqua DNA. And effectively what Aqua DNA is, we're in partnership with Palantir. We're using a very strong. I'm not a computer genius, but computer science genius, but we're using a very strong algorithm developed by Palantir that was designed to collect mass quantities of cyber and intelligence data.
We've modified that, put our proprietary software on top of the stack of this algorithm, and then an existing water treatment plant asset being able through sensor technology to collect chemical usage, energy usage, and water quality and make decisions that can extend the asset life cycle of the treatment plant while using less chemicals, less energy, and better quality water. So that has taken off. So what's great about it is that we utilize it in order to operate and maintain in a more efficient manner, but also leave the software behind and collect SaaS revenue as a component of that platform. Maybe Venk can talk a bit about internally.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And then so from an internal perspective, clearly AI is now at the forefront of some of the capabilities that we can use across the entirety of the organization. So clearly from an engineering perspective, how do we improve the efficiencies? B y incorporating AI into digital twinning and things of that sort.
But also internally from a finance function, I'll give you a couple of specific examples. We have on any given year, we have 25,000-30,000 projects, the ability to gain insights from those projects and then identify what are the commonalities that we can replicate from one project to another, that's one. In the finance field, clearly DSO collection efficiencies is a big focus for us. How do we go through all the various regions, identify what the opportunities are for us to improve the DSO?
And then one additional example is if we look at the contracts, there are several contracts that have some commonalities, some contracts have unique variations, so to speak. So how do you make sure that you are identifying the right set of parameters that are best practices for us to deliver value to our clients, but also make sure that we are not leaving money on the table? So multitude of opportunities from the standpoint of just incorporating advanced technologies and improving the operational efficiency of the business.
Value add and efficiency, good combination.
Yep.
Okay, maybe we can shift gears a little bit to growth, and I know you're going to quantify some of the growth elements and forecasts at your Investor Day, but maybe we just talk a little bit qualitatively about the potential and how investors should think about the growth opportunities here. Is there a way that you want people to think about the algorithm in terms of is it basically multiple legs of a stool where you've got some structural private sector and market opportunities and then everything infrastructure? What are the sort of growth framework that you want people to think about?
Yeah, so I think it all starts, and this is not uncommon from our peer competitors, competitor mates, a lot of our partners as well, is that start with the market disruptors. What's happening in the markets that we serve from an underlying disruption perspective? So I'll clump Infrastructure all as one and Advanced Facilities all as one. Within the Infrastructure world, the effects of climate and continued urbanization, as well as aged infrastructure is kind of that undercurrent that's really driving the markets that we have. Sometimes we like to think about it from the top down, where there are areas that are being stimulus funded, and that's creating the growth. It's actually from the bottom up in our view. Stimulus assists, but those growth trends aren't going away.
And so we kind of think about, hey, so long as we're getting deeper and deeper into our client's business, we've got a long-term secular growth trends there in water, transportation, environmental, energy, and power that aren't going away. So part one. Within Tech Manufacturing, it is the innovation of science. And we've already used AI 14 times , so we'll keep using AI as well. If you look at what's happening in both life sciences and chip manufacturing, the use of AI in Life Sciences and Drug Discovery is, I think that Dave Ricks, the CEO of Lilly, says it the best. It is that Drug Discovery is all about the mean time between failure. You try a formulation out, you're moving the molecule into different formats, you fail, you learn from your failure, you play it forward.
Now that time between failure has been completely accelerated because you can run all of these simulations in seconds rather than days and weeks. And so that is driving then the need for new discoveries, whether it be GLP-1s kind of is like the recipe of the day, but there's also tremendous amounts of discoveries that are happening in oncology, immunology, in a whole variety of therapies. And so that's accelerating CapEx needs to get to commercial scale manufacturing fast.
And in chip manufacturing, it really is about the long-term effect of the development of AI chips. And so what used to be a very logic-centered type of community is now turned into high bandwidth memory chips in all of the just the ubiquitous world of the infrastructure that's needed in order to drive that through, which is also soon to come gigawatt- level data centers too. So that's how we're kind of looking at the long-term growth trajectory.
Yeah, just for context, if I could add, in the last earnings call, we talked about the fact that we're looking at our business in three categories. So we have Water and Environmental that Bob talked about, roughly 30% of our revenues. Critical Infrastructure that includes transportation, rails, roads, and such. That's another 40% of our revenue. And then Life Sciences and Advanced Manufacturing is the other 30%. So there are clear secular megatrends across all these different sectors. And what we're excited about is clearly executing on the opportunity in front of us, both from a revenue growth standpoint as well as from a margin expansion standpoint.
Terrific. So maybe if we kind of focus that a little bit, within those, would you say there's any particular market of all those that you say you're most excited about the growth opportunities at the moment? I know you've talked a lot about water the last couple of years, but there's certainly lots of exciting things about Life Sciences. How do you sort of rank what you find to be most exciting for the next couple of years?
Across those three, the way we've categorized them, right now all three of them have double-digit pipeline growth. So the opportunities are, we can see them, and this is a multi-year kind of pipeline that we see. The two that probably rise to the top though, Steve, is clearly Water and Life Sciences. Those, even during as the geopolitical volatility was felt in Europe and in Australia and New Zealand over the course of the last 12-18 months, our Water business across the world was pretty constant at double-digit growth and double-digit pipeline growth. So I think that's an area that just the need is there. It's a sector that if you go back 20 years or even 10 years, grew at 3%-5% in perpetuity. And now we're seeing a spike, a lot of that being driven by climate.
The Life Sciences piece talked about, that is also accelerating as a result of, first, it was kind of onshoring, reshoring. But then during the pandemic, we learned a lot about these globalized manufacturing networks and what happens when the world logistics stop and people can't get insulin, right? Because there's pieces that are coming from all parts of the world. And so that has accelerated this trend to taking manufacturing and bringing it back to the U.S. It didn't really, unlike chip manufacturing, it really didn't totally leave. It stayed around the R&D hubs in the U.S. and in Western Europe, but it's really accelerated coming back.
On the water side, would you differentiate in any sense the international piece versus the North America piece? Anything different in the growth rates and growth potential and opportunities?
Actually, we've seen the growth rates the same.
Really?
Yeah, across the globe.
Interesting.
Yeah.
On the Life Sciences side, you talked a little bit about it a couple of minutes ago, but maybe also just coming back to that for a minute or two, just to understand where the market is relative to its potential. I know we've talked a lot about GLP-1s, but you just mentioned oncology and some other things. So could you just talk about what's the growth path within life sciences? Is it more of these solutions? Is it different customers out there to be penetrated by? How does that business evolve?
Yeah, I think it's more the solutions. It's more the top, if you look at the top 20 biopharmaceuticals, we'll put biotechs and pharmaceutical companies in there. Almost, I just read the statistic, it's almost like 80% of the capital investment goes on with the top 10 or top 5 pharmaceutical players in the world. And so that is a high concentration. And we have focused in on those clients for the better part, well, actually, Dr. Jacobs was a Merck employee, so we've been in that space for a long time.
And so the discovery that's going on there and more personalized care. So you hear these things called cell and gene therapy. That is Steve Fisher has a certain DNA profile. We're going to manufacture a therapy just for Steve Fisher, right, and his DNA profile. That's also generating a different wave of next- generation technologies.
I can just add more context to the Life Sciences and Advanced Manufacturing. The way to think about it is the vast majority of it is Life Sciences, call it two-thirds of it, and then we have a third of the business in Semiconductors, and the rest of it is relatively small. The data center opportunity within Life Sciences and Advanced Manufacturing is something that we're really excited about. We think it's in the early stages of substantial growth.
Also, in addition to just being a data center design play, it's also an intersection of multiple facets in terms of water, energy needs, and so forth. When you talked about differentiation earlier, that's one of the areas where Jacobs is uniquely positioned to provide cross-cutting solutions across a range of different categories for the soup-to-nut solution for a client. So we're able to bring to bear our expertise across multiple domains so that we provide a comprehensive solution for our client.
Yeah, that's really fascinating. We were going to maybe jump into that next, so maybe we can do that now a little bit more detail. And maybe the way to do that is to start by bringing up the data center topic. So what would you say is Jacobs' role in the data center market today? What have you done so far? What lies ahead? And then to the extent that, like you said, any given one of these projects might touch a number of different areas, can you give an example of how you would kind of fit at that nexus of those various needs and the cross currents and how you can provide a solution to your client?
Yeah, maybe to contextualize it first on what it was and now what it's going to be, because we're in kind of that transition mode right now. So what it was, was we were in the 50 MW -1 50 MW scale data center. A majority of the complexity was sitting in the server room. And so that's where Jacobs kind of made its name of designing those server rooms. The power requirements weren't you could connect it to the grid, right, kind of thing. So it wasn't that big of a deal. Now, as we move forward, and just in the last two quarters, we've probably received, I think, 53 new studies and concepts for the gigawatt-plus- type data centers from not just hyperscalers, but a few of the colocation folks that are building on behalf of that hyperscaler.
So this complexity of now the server room kind of looks like it did before, and you've got the equivalent of you need an SMR, a nuclear reactor on the power pad because of the power requirements that are required. So that interface is really what these studies are looking at. A lot of people are looking at kind of the leading indicator. There is what's going on with the electrical equipment manufacturers, the Schneider, the Eaton, the others, because they're getting out, the hyperscalers are getting way out ahead of it in anticipation of moving forward.
I think the real challenge is going to be how does grid modernization and solving the power need come in parallel with the need for the capacity for the AI-driven data center capacity. And so that's what we're right in the middle of today. So I'd see that being a bigger part of our business in a few years. We're going to talk a lot more about it. In fact, we're calling it the sustainable data center at our Investor Day.
Nice sneak peek there. So is it possible then that we could see, you said 53, so dozens of these opportunities kind of going on for you at once, and they would become bigger scope as the project goes along?
Absolutely. In fact, we're having an internal debate right now. We like to think vertically, right? That's a Water job, that's a Transportation job, that's a Life Sciences job. But now with this cross-cutting element, we were kind of talking the other day about our data center work, we might just end up calling that an Energy and Power job because it's moving that way.
I'd say just put some metrics here. Historically, the total install cost or the cost of a hundred, it was about $1 million a megawatt. So 150 MW, $150 million data center. The Jacobs play in that would be about a $5 million design fee. So you needed a lot of these in order to, and even then, you still don't show up in a $10 billion P&L. You show up as, like Venk was saying, a small percentage. Tomorrow, the gigawatt, so that probably scales to a certain extent, but then you add all of these other items. And so now you're talking about a potential fee revenue component of the data center looking a lot more like a Chip manufacturing plant or a Life Sciences plant from a Jacobs engagement perspective. So it's exciting.
Wow, it's material.
Yeah.
So speaking of that, maybe we could talk just for a minute about the Semiconductors and the Chips. So we've seen maybe some starts and stops in some of these customer opportunities. What do you think the debates are at the moment that you're helping your customers think through on these semiconductor opportunities? And where do you see that market going from here?
Yeah, since 1976, we were the engineer of record for Intel. And that's public information. Now, obviously, Intel's in the news, made a big business decision back in 2021. Kind of what the end of that story is going to be, it'll be. Can't opine on that. But a lot of that work for moving in the business model in that direction, we've done. So as things were stopping and starting within the Intel world, that really didn't have that much of an effect on us because that starting five fabs all at once four years ago, we had already finished a lot of that design. What that's led to is a lot more diversity in our client base.
So now other DRAM manufacturers and even now outside the U.S., what's going on with India with regards to not just commercial scale manufacturing, but test and assembly and packaging, we're in the middle of that too. So you're going to see a different client mix while the chips are getting more sophisticated.
And if we can just add a couple of things. In terms of just the Semiconductor landscape, clearly we think we're in the early stages of the onshoring and reshoring because, as you know, the vast majority of chip manufacturing capabilities reside outside the U.S. today. A lot of it is now coming to the U.S., not just for the advanced AI process nodes, but also for areas like Automotive and Industrial. A lot of the capacity today resides in China and Taiwan, and that's coming mostly to the U.S. and Europe. And so we think of it as a multi-year phenomenon. Any given quarter, there could be some cyclicality, but over the long run, we feel pretty good about our presence in the semiconductor space.
Great. Maybe just one sort of strategy point to talk about in terms of larger projects versus smaller projects, and then also related to sort of Program Management. I'm curious if you have a philosophy about how important it is to be focused on large projects and programs. And I know you've announced a number of Program Management assignments recently. Is this a critical part of your strategy to do larger projects and more Program Management, or do you not necessarily say, "We just need to have a certain mix of large projects"?
Yeah.
Curious how you think about that.
So maybe I'll start off by giving our perspective on what Program Management is and what it's not, right? We see Program Management as a capability, not as a vertical, right? So Program Management at its core is really consulting and advisory during the course of an entire asset lifecycle, right? And we do a lot of that. So I know ENR and others want to label it as almost a sector, right? But it is a capability set that crosses all of our markets that we have, and we have that skill set along with other consulting and advisory skill sets. So the balance to the first part of your question, the balance of larger jobs, engagements, consultative assignments. It's a balance.
It's not like we have a prescriptive, we need to have 50% in large projects and 50% in Consultancy and Advisory because it's almost like this virtuous cycle. One feeds the other. And so you get these early assignments that may turn into a project. A lot of times, especially long-term clients, we might be doing consulting and advisory work to not build the job because it's in the best interest of our client for the long term. So it's that client relationship and then how that balance. So at any one time, Steve, we might have 50% of our portfolio is in projects, $500 million and above type projects, 50% in consultative engagements, average price on that, $500,000. And sometimes that balance might go shift one way or the other, but it's really on where our client needs are.
Okay, excellent. So I wanted to touch upon margins, cash flow, capital allocation. We have a handful of minutes left. Maybe at this point, we'll just see if there's anyone in the audience that would like to ask a question, and we can pause for a minute to see if anyone has any questions. And while people are deciding that, we can roll along here to talk about margins. So now with the spin completed, you've put out a 2025 target. How do we think about just some of the core margin drivers kind of qualitatively from here?
Yeah, thanks, Steve, so I'd say from a high-level perspective, just for context, in fiscal 2024 that ended a month and a half ago, we did roughly 12.8% in EBITDA margin, which represented a 100 basis point improvement over the prior year, and then in fiscal 2025, we have guided for EBITDA margin to be in the range of 13.8%-14%. So that's another 110 basis point improvement from year-over-year, and a lot of that is driven by the fact that we did a lot of operational efficiency improvements in fiscal 2024. We only got partial benefit in the year because it was happening throughout the year. We get the full benefit of the annualization of those operating efficiencies in fiscal 2025, and that will be the largest contributor to our margin expansion in fiscal 2025.
But outside of that, there are a couple of other opportunities that we're pursuing. One, certainly from the standpoint of the differentiation that Bob alluded to earlier in terms of our global delivery mechanism. So the ability for us to implement these projects in different geographies, regardless of where the project is actually won, that is actually a source of really good margin performance for us over the long term. And then the third piece of it is the mix. So some projects can be on the consulting and advisory side of the equation. Some could be at the other extreme on O & M. So to the extent that we can move the mix such that we're moving higher in the value chain, that'll allow us to also expand margins.
So now that's obviously a multi-year phenomenon, but I'd say the vast majority of the margin expansion for fiscal 2025 is going to come from continuing operating efficiencies. But we see good tailwinds, which we'll quantify, by the way, at Investor Day in a couple of months to talk about what are the other drivers of margin expansion over time.
Excellent. So on cash flow, this past quarter showed very nice improvement there. Obviously, cash flow is more than a one-quarter dynamic. Can you talk a little bit about whether there's more work to do, more focus on cash flow improvement? How do we think about the sustainability of that nice improvement that you just made?
Yeah. Oh, yeah, thanks for pointing out, Steve. I think from a free cash flow conversion standpoint, obviously, it's a really good measure of our operating efficiency. So we reported 100% + free cash flow conversion, and we've guided to fiscal 2025 free cash flow conversion staying above 100%. Clearly, more work to do in terms of just our operating efficiencies and DSO collection data and such. But also from the standpoint of just the CapEx requirement, we put out a fiscal 2025 forecast, called it roughly 1% of our revenue would be in CapEx. So that's how we see it at least for the next couple of years, which allows us to now obviously generate a lot of free cash flow. And we want to return that cash flow to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends.
So to your question about capital allocation, as Bob alluded to earlier, we are very excited about the growth opportunities in front of us. So first order of business is to invest in the business and the organic growth. And then the second most important priority from a capital allocation perspective is to return a lot of that cash to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. So last year, we did double-digit dividend growth performance. Obviously, that's a board decision, but we continue to expect that to move forward. And then from a capital buyback perspective, we did almost $550 million in capital returns to investors, and we expect to do something on a similar scale. And we'll quantify that at Investor Day in a couple of months.
Is there any M&A that makes sense to do at this point?
Yeah, great question. I mean, M&A is certainly something that is an option for us, and again, for context, we have a pristine balance sheet, less than one-time net leverage ratio, and we're generating a lot of free cash flow as I just mentioned before, and so for us, I have the ability and the willingness to do M&A, but the next few quarters, we're going to focus on organic growth, and then we'll use M&A as an accelerant where we think we can double down on some of the areas that we're already very well invested in.
Terrific. Well, we are just about out of time here, so I think we'll wrap it there. Thank you so much, Bob. Thanks so much, Venk and Bert. I appreciate your time, and we'll look forward to the Investor Day in February.
Steve, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, everyone.
Take care.
Thank you, everybody.