A few logistics before the presentations begin. This review is being made available via webcast, accessible through the investor relations section of the Johnson & Johnson website at investor.jnj.com. There, you can also find today's presentations. For those of you in the room, please utilize the J&J event app to follow along the agenda and to access additional content such as exhibit descriptions, videos, the event survey, and more. Please note that today's presentations include forward-looking statements. We encourage you to review this cautionary statement regarding commentary during today's review, as well as the company's Form 10-K, which identifies certain factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those projected. Our SEC filings, including our 2017 Form 10-K, along with reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures utilized for today's discussion to the most comparable GAAP measure, are all available at investor.jnj.com.
A number of the products discussed today are being developed in collaboration with strategic partners or licensed from other companies. This slide acknowledges those relationships that are not noted on individual slides. This slide provides the agenda for today, which is also available on the app and our website at investor.jnj.com. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Gorsky.
Well, good morning, everybody. It's great to see you here. I appreciate those of you that had to get through thunderstorms and weather. I heard one story from David Lewis right before I got that all the flights were canceled out of Boston last night, so he drove in and got here about 3:30 A.M. David, kudos to you. We'll make sure you get plenty of coffee throughout the day. We tried to arrange everything and make it pretty convenient and nice, except for the weather. That's one thing that we probably can't control. Again, we really appreciate the effort that you made to be here with us today. Really welcome to the 2018 Investor Relations Day for both our medical device as well as our consumer segments.
I think we've got a really exciting and interesting day planned. I'm not going to spend too much time up here because I don't want to steal the thunder from the people who are actually closest to the business and who are making things happen each and every day. I'm very excited about what we, and particularly what they're going to be talking about with you today. Since we're here in New Brunswick, the very home of Johnson & Johnson, where we started over 130 years ago. In fact, if you get a chance, we took the original building, the powerhouse, and we turned it into a museum. We've housed it now, and it's got some wonderful stories about our heritage. Of course, a seminal piece of that heritage is our Credo.
This year happens to be the 75th anniversary of our Credo because it was really institutionalized literally on the eve of the company going public by Robert Wood Johnson. What I would say is that it's as absolutely relevant today as it was 75 years ago, perhaps even more so given the turbulent world that we live in and we're dealing with every day. It starts with our first responsibility, again, very first being to patients, consumers, to doctors, to nurses, mothers and fathers, all the other customers who use our products each and every day. It also includes our employees, many of whom you're going to meet here today, not only in this room, but when you're outside at the exhibits. The communities, yes, here in New Brunswick, but more broadly now around the world.
Of course, our commitment to you, our shareholders, many of you who are in the audience with us here today. Now, as the management of this great company, I think we've got a real responsibility to keep you informed about our business. Our goal today is we want to make sure that you understand not only why, but actually how all of our efforts are really centering on a few primary areas. One, it's about innovation, it's got to be about innovation in everything that we do. Yes, about our products, but it's also about the way we're connecting with customers, everything that we're doing each and every day.
Next, it's about execution, because we can have the best plans, the best PowerPoints, but at the end of the day, if we're not making that come to life, if we're not delivering on that, we're not doing our job. What you'll see today is a strong emphasis and focus about making sure that we're delivering on all of our commitments. Finally, it's about customers, because we think that Johnson & Johnson, we're uniquely capable of partnering with doctors and surgeons and patients, hospital administrators, trade partners, and other people in that broader healthcare ecosystem. Simply put, we're here to better serve their needs. All of this, of course, is designed to consistently and constantly improve our performance.
Now, one of the most important reasons I think business reviews like this are critical, it's not only that you get to hear from me directly as I do the introduction here this morning. Also, you get to hear from our leaders, the people who are actually in the trenches running our business around the world each and every day. I've always believed that Johnson & Johnson, one of the most significant sources of competitive advantage that we have, frankly, it's our people. It's not only their talent, their experience, entrepreneurial spirit, but it's also their dedication to purpose and mission. Now, today, you're going to hear from a wide variety of leaders who truly embody the spirit.
I think what you're going to see is they've got a sense of urgency and innovative boldness that's going to accelerate our performance and going to continue to drive our performance for the next 132 years. I think the other thing that you're going to notice about this group of leaders today, they're diverse. Some have been with the company 30 years. Some have been with the company three years. They work cross-sector, cross-region. They bring a unique perspective to the table, and sometimes we debate it out, but always with the best interest, ultimately, of Johnson & Johnson in mind. In spite of the white carpet in some of the panels, another thing that I want to make clear today is that we're not here to have a Broadway production. We want to be fully transparent.
We're going to share with you some of the lessons that we've learned. We're going to show you how we're taking that knowledge and insight that we picked up along the way to better meet the needs of customers and patients going forward, and to ultimately improve our success as we look through the remainder of 2018 and beyond. Look, in this ever-evolving, more dynamic, competitive environment, certainly than I've seen in 30 years, that we're working in now, we've got to be smarter, we got to be faster, we've got to be more agile, more strategic, and execute better than ever before. Our teams, the leaders that you're going to be hearing from today, are committed to doing just that. The good news is we lead in many of the markets where we compete.
In fact, we've got $27 billion or more platforms across our portfolio. Fifteen of those are within the consumer and the medical device businesses, which we're going to be talking about today. In the areas where we need improvements, we are aggressively taking action to position ourselves for better growth. The collective leadership experience of the teams presenting today, they've demonstrated the ability to seize opportunities and execute with excellence, but also, they've demonstrated the ability to turn around declining businesses. In a broad business, over the long term, you're going to need to do that from time to time, and we've got those capabilities, and that's evidenced by what we did in OTC and consumer, in our contact lens business just a few years ago, and eye healthcare. We are very confident and committed in our ability to replicate the success going forward.
Let me make one point absolutely clear. Our number one priority is to drive superior performance within each one of our business segments. To do this, we benchmark, track, and hold every one of our Johnson & Johnson leaders accountable for metrics that focus on things like innovation, execution, customer satisfaction, financial performance, portfolio management, long-term sustainability, and very importantly, credo values and leadership. It's no secret that some of the changes that we're seeing in healthcare today, they do reflect, in essence, a new normal. As we talk about a lot among our leadership team, get used to it. This is the way we're going to have to function. It's constant. It never stops. It's global. Challenges, opportunities are happening every day with breathtaking speed. We've got to ensure that we actually thrive in this environment, that it inspires us to do even better.
We feel, after a lot of debate, discussion, that our broad base in healthcare is a source of competitive advantage and also a source of true strength. By being positioned across three vital aspects of healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Consumer, and Medical Devices, we've got a unique line of sight across the entire healthcare system. Our broad base, well, it's not just about heritage, but it's a strategic choice. It's grounded in long-term performance, and we believe in understanding of healthcare in the future. If you think about it, our broad base, well, it enables us to first create and access growth opportunities across multiple sectors of the healthcare market all at once.
It also positions us better to be the strategic partner of choice for technology companies and innovative startups, for scientists, for entrepreneurs who benefit from the deep healthcare expertise that only Johnson & Johnson can provide across so many different sectors. Additionally, we're able to work with local governments, public health organizations, where we're collaborating more than ever to address the world's most pressing healthcare challenges. We're doing all this while providing our customers with a broader range of products and solutions and the opportunity to partner with us, particularly in large healthcare systems on attracting patients, improving patient outcomes, ultimately reducing the costs for episodes of care. Finally, we can realize significant advantages in scale that give us the ability to achieve more efficiencies, better effectiveness across all the sectors, that also allow us to invest in growth for the future.
When we operate under this manner, we continue to do so into the future, we think it's produced significant long-term results. It's important to recognize there are market ebbs and flows. We're seeing that today. However, we've got a long-term proven track record of strong shareholder returns, which we believe is a result of managing our business for the long term, having that relentless drive for innovation, a passion around execution, strong customer focus, and disciplined portfolio management, which continually allows us to invest and drive future performance. Our capital allocation priorities, well, they remain consistent, and we believe that the recent tax reform, it actually provides us with even greater flexibility. We regularly review and discuss these priorities as part of an ongoing strategic dialogue and planning with our senior leadership team, but also with our entire board of directors.
As you know, our first priority is investing in organic growth through R&D and commercial activities, and driving operational efficiencies through other investments in our business, and you're going to see many, many examples as we go through the discussions today. Our next priority is delivering strong dividends to our shareholders. As we recently announced in April, we increased our dividend by 7.1%, which I'm proud to say represents the 56th consecutive year that we've increased our dividend. Then we target value-creating M&A and licensing deals. In fact, we've executed over 20 deals, and we've invested more than $40 billion over the last two years. This includes companies like Actelion, which added a sixth therapeutic area to our pharmaceutical business, Medical Optics, which allows us to expand into new areas in the eye healthcare space, and Vogue, which we believe provides a compelling beauty growth opportunity.
When you combine all these acquisitions, we think they're contributing in a very meaningful way to our growth. Lastly, we also consider other prudent ways to return value to shareholders, such as stock repurchase programs. As we've demonstrated, our financial strength, well, it gives us the ability to do all of these things simultaneously. Now what I'd like to do is take just a few moments to highlight the strengths and the opportunities for each of our different business segments. First, I think it's important to emphasize what we're going to be talking about today is a 132-year-old company that we're very proud of, but that's got a sense of urgency, is not complacent, that it's not looking back, but moving forward as fast as the change happening around us. You just think about all the global technological, economic, political, and healthcare industry fronts.
In fact, we think of ourselves much more as a 132-year-old startup that's innovating, executing each and every day to win our customers' and shareholders' trust, your confidence, and support. Look, we're not afraid to acknowledge areas that we need to fix. We want to talk about them, learn from them to make us better going forward. We firmly believe that Johnson & Johnson is strongly positioned for continued and future growth. Let me start with our pharmaceutical business. It's been an industry leader in just about all performance measures, including things like R&D productivity, commercial capabilities. The group continues to deliver strong top-line growth, while also increasing investment to further develop our incredibly strong pipeline of innovative new medicines. I'll also tell you, we are far from finished.
Despite the current pressures from biosimilars and generic entrants into the market, we are confident the continued growth of our marketed products, the expected launches from the robust pipeline, all these things position us to continue to grow well ahead of the market. We also continue to submit regulatory applications for new molecular entities, and we expect to file for the approval of up to eight new compounds by 2021, each with more than $1 billion of peak revenue potential. Our key components for growth include things like growing markets, increased patient penetration, new indications and line extensions, including more than 10, each of which represent more than a half a billion dollars of opportunity. Finally, an exciting new entrant into the pulmonary arterial hypertension market with Actelion. We're confident that all these factors pulled together should drive above-market growth well into the future.
Today, well, today we're here to talk about our medical device and consumer businesses. Let me highlight what you can expect from these leaders. First, with our consumer segment. It is very important to Johnson & Johnson. In addition to its strong reputational value, it's this business that provides us with the capabilities to gain a deep understanding of consumer and patient insights, particularly as these audiences become much more active in their decisions impacting their overall healthcare and treatment regimens. We see rapid transformations happening all around the world due to demographic, socioeconomic, and technology shifts. This has resulted in a growing global consumer class that are interested in things like natural health, beauty products and services that more and more incorporate concepts of total health and wellbeing.
Look, they want all this, and they want it on their own terms, and they want it on a touch of a button or a screen. The rising income in emerging markets, well, it's also fueling the demand for health products. This rapidly changing landscape in the consumer market, we believe creates significant opportunity for a company like Johnson & Johnson. I'm confident in our strategies to move quickly, address new market needs, work with customers from the individual consumer to the large box retailers, as well as the e-commerce channels and everything in between. In today's presentations, you're going to hear about the strong plans that we have to have sustainable above-market growth in 2018 and beyond from many of our dynamic and science-based iconic brands and franchises. Many of which you know and love, and I hope that you use every day.
You'll look even better, feel better. From JOHNSON'S® Baby, to LISTERINE, to OGX, to Neutrogena. You'll see them right outside. Look, when you see what we're doing, you'll have a much better understanding of how we're leveraging consumer insights, preferences to design, tailor, and deliver ultimately superior products. What you're going to hear a lot about today is how we're doing that with the revitalization of Baby Care and our Oral Care franchises. We're going to be implementing an omni-channel approach to ensure that these products are available whenever and wherever consumers are shopping. We believe that the top-line growth I just referenced will be met with even greater bottom-line growth as we continue to improve our productivity and margins. Let's now transition to Medical Devices. We've got powerful opportunities for growth across our orthopedics, surgery, interventional solutions, and our vision business.
If we reflect on it for just a moment, more than a century ago, Johnson & Johnson pioneered the concept of sterile surgery. Over the decades, we've led the way with many significant steps forward. It's estimated that almost 90% of people living today in developing countries don't have access to safe and affordable surgery, and millions of lives have been lost over the last several years from conditions needing surgical care, well, that just wasn't available where they live. I can't emphasize enough the enormity of the opportunity in surgery and Medical Devices to deliver better outcomes and ultimately help people live healthier lives. We're committed to closing this gap through our solutions and our innovations. In Medical Devices, we have businesses displaying great strength, businesses such as vision, electrophysiology, biosurgery, endocutters, hips, trauma.
We also fully recognize that our progress has not been uniform across the entire portfolio. There are areas where we must and we will improve, such as our weaknesses in knees and our spine businesses. We've taken strategic actions to refine our portfolio through our 20-plus acquisitions, the pending divestitures of certain businesses, and a thoughtful deployment of resources. We've also increased investments in critical capabilities, technologies, and solutions, frankly, that our customers are more and more demanding. Additionally, we're improving our cadence of innovation with 15-20 major product launches planned for 2018. Our robust pipeline includes a truly differentiated orthopedics robotic solution in Orthotaxy, as well as our Verb Surgical Platform, where we are creating the next generation and frontier of digital surgery.
We're simplifying our operations, developing new commercial models with a focus on execution to meet the needs of customers and patients when, where, and how they want their needs to be met. Another important factor is technology. It's profoundly transforming the space, we are actively assessing, developing, and implementing technology and strategies across all of our platforms. We believe these drivers will deliver sustainable above-market growth across the entire breadth of our Medical Device businesses starting today, we are committed to delivering across the portfolio in 2020. In closing, first and foremost, I want to thank you for being here today and investing your time in Johnson & Johnson. You know, we are certainly proud of our historical performance. I'll be very clear, we have an even stronger sense of urgency and excitement about our future.
Your trust and confidence in us is something that we never take for granted and recognize that we need to earn it each and every day through innovation, execution, customer focus, and last but never least, near and long-term performance. You've got our absolute commitment that we'll hold ourselves accountable and execute on the strategic plans that you're going to hear about today and fulfill all of our Credo responsibilities where we always keep the customer and patients at the center of everything we do, and ultimately profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity. Before I turn the stage over, just a couple more logistics. You're going to have a chance to hear from each of our sectors on their own. We're going to do multiple panels where you'll get a chance to engage directly with the leaders responsible for those particular business.
By the way, we've used the survey information that you provided from past meetings to try to improve our performance, as I told you, feedback is a gift, along the way, and very importantly, myself, Dominic, and Joe will be here throughout the day. As you probably remember from previous meetings, from time to time, we may chime in as we go along, but we will also, Dominic and I and Joe, will be up here for a panel at the end of the day. If there are questions that have not been answered, that are specific to the particular businesses, but are perhaps more at a corporate level or regarding some of our strategies, we'll be here.
Also during the breaks in between, if there's any questions you have, we are here for you, and we want to make sure you walk away today, as I mentioned earlier, with a very clear understanding and excitement for our future. With that, it's now my turn to hand it over to the Consumer team to walk you through our Consumer business in detail. Thank you very much, everybody.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Executive Vice President, Worldwide Chairman, Johnson & Johnson Consumer, Jorge Mesquita.
Good morning. It's great to be back here with you to talk about our global consumer business. I hope you saw in the video we just shared with you how proud we are of our longstanding tradition of game-changing transformational innovation. Our business has been built by innovation that truly invented new categories or reset the standards for the categories in which we play. That will always be at the core of our success and something that we're committed to continue to drive as we go forward. The key messages I want to get across to you today is that we are well-positioned to drive above-market, sustained top-line growth starting in 2018 and beyond. We'll do so by embracing the new omni-channel where consumers are shopping in, whether it's in brick-and-mortar stores or online in e-commerce, which represents a massive opportunity for us.
Indeed we have a powerful innovation pipeline, one of the strongest in our history, and we will reinvent, in particular, the baby care and the oral care categories. That we are committed to continue to improve our operating margin, even as we invest in the business to sustain our top-line growth. As way of background, we play in six broad categories, OTC and beauty being the largest of which, baby care and oral care, and we also play selectively in wound care and in women's health. OTC and beauty each represent a little over 30% of our turnover. Combined, they're over more than 60% of our sales. We have strong leadership positions in baby care and oral care as well. We have a large global footprint, and more than 50% of our turnover is outside of North America.
We have very strong operations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and in Asia Pacific. We play in large and attractive categories that are very profitable. Combined, they represent over $500 billion in turnover. These categories are growing faster on average than the broader FMCG industry. If you look at consumer trends, they bode well to ensure these categories will continue to enjoy above FMCG growth as we go forward. We see consumers taking a much more educated and proactive stance in caring for their health, which bodes well for our OTC business. Consumers want to pursue beauty through health, a beauty that comes from wellbeing and wellness, which again, paves the way for brands like Neutrogena and Aveeno. We're seeing an aging population trend across both the developed and the developing world, and with it comes a number of healthcare issues we can address.
Unfortunately, we're seeing a sedentary lifestyle trend across the entire world, now migrating also to the developing world. With it come a series of obesity and healthcare issues that, again, we're well-positioned to address. Every year, 135 million new babies are born, and we're here to meet their needs as well. We're well-positioned, and we're playing in attractive, profitable, and fast-growing categories. Now, about our performance. We had a great run between 2014 and 2016. We grew about 3.5% ahead of the market, and we gained market share in that period. We made significant improvement in our profitability. We grew operating profit 20% annually in that timeframe. In fact, we doubled our operating income from $1 billion to $2 billion in that timeframe and significantly expanded our before-tax margin. However, last year we hit a speed bump.
Our top-line growth slowed down, and we grew very modestly. This reflected a couple of major factors. One, we saw a temporary slowdown in the categories in which we compete in that timeframe, and we also saw inventory reductions across our customers, both in developing and developed markets. That led to the slowdown in our top line. We were able to hold our market share, and we improved our margin modestly in 2018. In addition to these results, we're very pleased with the fact that the six acquisitions we made in 2016 collectively were ahead of plan, both in terms of top-line and bottom-line performance. We accomplished a lot in 2017, but it clearly wasn't our best year. It was a very valuable year for us because we learned a great deal.
What we learned is that the pace of change in the consumer industry is accelerating. In fact, we learned that our industry is being disrupted. What we're seeing is that the competitive advantages upon which the FMCG industry has been built are not as relevant today as they once were. For example, it used to be that large companies like J&J had a competitive advantage in terms of attracting the best talent. What we're seeing today is that for students joining the workforce, joining a smaller company, a startup enterprise that is more entrepreneurial, has certain appeal to them. It used to be that building and nurturing brands was something expensive that only large companies like ours could do. The reality is that it's relatively affordable now for you to build a brand online and to create an active community of loyal users very efficiently.
It used to be that manufacturing assets, large plants, was a moat, a barrier for entry. Again, you see today across the world that small companies, new entrants, can access excellent contract manufacturing in just about every region. Retailer relationships are very important, and we're very proud of them. If you're a newcomer to this industry, you can sell directly to your consumers online efficiently. Innovation, as I said, has been and will continue to be an important source of differentiation. These small entrants that join our industry can do so as well by outsourcing some of those elements of innovation. Lastly, financial firepower, a great strength of Johnson & Johnson, is not an impediment for a new entrant to come to this industry.
Given this relatively low interest rate environment, abundant VC capital, even crowd financing, it's relatively easy to raise the money you need to start a new business. What we're seeing as a result of all this is that there's a digital disruption that is changing the face of the consumer industry, lowering the barriers for entry, and paving the way to this new class of startup entrepreneurial entrants. At the heart of this digital disruption is a new consumer-centric paradigm that is challenging the traditional value of scale as we have defined it and is forcing a disruption in the retail and media landscape. What we're seeing is the emergence of a new how-to-win playbook, which is characterized by an asset-light infrastructure and the creation of highly personalized, on-demand consumer experiences, which is what consumers want today.
Owning that consumer relationship and its related ecosystem has now become the greatest source of competitive advantage. The question is: What are the strengths of these new entrants? What is it that they do uniquely well? We think we have that figured out because, among other things, we have the privilege of having acquired a great company, a startup in its own right, that for many years has been winning against large established players in the haircare space, Vogue, the makers of OGX. What we see in that unit is they are single-mindedly focused on breakthrough, game-changing innovation by staying externally focused and very close to their consumers, their shoppers, their customers, and overall trends. They focus on building digital-first, purpose-led brands, very important for young millennial consumers. They capitalize on the rise of emerging markets and emerging channels. They see where the shopper evolution goes.
They see changes in consumer shopping behavior, they position themselves to intercept that for their advantage. They are very lean, they're very cost-efficient, hyper-efficient, they move very fast. Speed is an important source of competitive advantage. Now, as a result of this change, we are competing in two worlds. We have to compete against the large multinational companies that have been our traditional peer set for many years, we also have to compete against these startups. As Alex said, we have to become a giant startup. We have to play to our strengths of scale and science-based superiority and differentiation, we have to become more nimble, we have to become more entrepreneurial. In order to compete in these two worlds, we have a strong strategy that has been guiding us for the last few years. We have 12 mega brands.
When I met with you two years ago, that represented 60% of our sales. They're now representing 70% of our sales, we're focused on continuing to drive disproportionate growth with these mega brands. We play in the large categories that I described before, 6 broad categories, we have a very clear set of how to win choices around game-changing brand-building capabilities, transformational innovation, a systemic approach to driving P&L improvements and productivity, a transformational commercial strategy and route to market, building a world-class organization. In addition, we have very clear where to play geographical choices designed to, in sum, maximize our overall global competitiveness and value creation. In addition to this, we have identified 5 principles we need to embrace as we execute those strategies in order to compete against this new landscape. The first principle is to broaden the scope of our innovation model.
It's not enough to have great product and packaging innovation. We have to innovate to create a digital ecosystem around those products, something these small entrants do very well. An ecosystem that creates loyalty and an opportunity to iterate and engage with our consumers. It's not enough to have big game-changing global platforms. We have to have locally relevant, fast speed innovation as well. We call this two-speed innovation. We have to build our brands to be relevant in these two new worlds. We have to communicate the superiority of our products and our benefits, we have to also communicate what's the purpose of our brands. Something that, again, these small companies do very well. They articulate well what they stand for, and we must do the same.
Again, even as we drive global campaigns for these 12 mega brands that have the best possible ideas around the world, we have to amplify and execute those campaigns in a way that feels intensely locally relevant. These small entrants tend to be single-country operators, they make their brands feel like they belong to that market and nowhere else. Global multinational brands need to be locally relevant. As I said before, we need to win in the traditional channels, also in these new emerging markets and emerging channels, particularly e-commerce, something where we see disproportionate growth from these new entrants. We have to go beyond productivity and efficiency and cost reduction. We have to become more flexible and more responsive to meet consumer needs.
Lastly, we have to evolve our work processes, we have to evolve our culture so we can become more entrepreneurial, as I said before, be a giant startup. What you're going to hear for the rest of this presentation is how we're actually bringing these principles to life. To do that, I'd like to invite to the stage two of my colleagues. Alison Lewis is our chief marketing officer, Josh Ghaim, who is our chief technology officer.
Thank you, Jorge. Good morning. Alison and I are going to take you through the first two principles that Jorge just highlighted. The first, how we're broadening the scope of our innovation model, at the same time, how we're building brands to compete in this two world of small startups and large multinational players. I think it's important, as we broaden the scope of our innovation model, we continue to look at both in terms of what we're doing globally, both as big companies, small startups. First, building breakthrough innovation, at the same time, implementing fast cycle, locally relevant innovation. Second, we're continuing to create superior product and packaging innovations, build the connected digital ecosystem that's needed in order to engage with our consumers much closely. Breakthrough global innovation platforms require deep expertise in science, robust clinical efficacy, strong regulatory know-how globally.
Big ideas that step change the categories that we play in. Now we're complementing that with fast cycle innovation focused on local insights that continues to enable us to engage with our consumers regardless of where they live. We have a long history of building robust, science-based global platforms that transcend geographies. In fact, this year in 2018, we will be launching over 150 new products globally, including some of the breakthrough innovation platforms, such as the first mouthwash to prevent sensitivity as a Class II medical device, so that you can have your coffee in the morning without the pain that you feel in the morning when you have sensitivity. A new standard in anti-aging. Retinol has been an incredible standard for anti-aging. This year, we're launching a retinol and neoglucosamine combination through our NeoStrata business in order to drive new standard in terms of anti-aging skincare.
We're continuing to expand some of our newest platforms, such as Hydro Boost light therapy to new benefits, just to name a few. To demonstrate how we're living into these two principles that Jorge highlighted, Alison and I will dive and give you some examples of how our core brands are living into this. First, we'll start with LISTERINE. We're driving category growth through big global platforms around the world. At the same time, continue to bring this fast cycle, locally relevant innovation. LISTERINE has a long history of safety and clinical efficacy, 50 years of research and clinical data, over 100 years of safe and effective use, making it the most widely used, extensively researched, and most effective mouthwash. What is even more differentiating about LISTERINE is its superiority to all other mouthwashes, as demonstrated with American Dental Association's Seal of Acceptance for fighting plaque and gingivitis.
It is our mission to drive category growth. Attracting new users was a goal to grow household penetration from 37% to 50%, basically bringing the global penetration to make it equal to that of the U.S. At the same time, we continue to drive more uses of LISTERINE, more daily uses of LISTERINE globally. These two initiatives add up to 350 million new households, $25 billion in incremental sales related to in terms of market potential, creating a great opportunity to continue to drive the category growth for mouthwash. I'll turn it over to Alison to talk about a few examples of what we're doing in this business.
Thanks, Josh. LISTERINE, clearly one of our crown jewels, one of our billion-dollar-plus brands with strong sales and share growth over the last five years. Also, as Josh highlighted, still enormous growth potential when you think about expanding household penetration. When we think about global platform innovation on LISTERINE this year, it starts with a complete brand refresh that's rolling out now. This includes new packaging graphics, which have clear variant segmentation, clear highlighting of the benefits and claims, and then also better pricing architectures and structures. This all makes it easier to shop and easier for consumers to get the benefit that they need, all built around the iconic barbell bottle while adding elements that modernize the brand. This is launching now, as I said, in over 90 countries. It's amplified with powerful in-store and e-commerce support with science-based claims in all communications.
Let's take a look at how we're bringing this to life.
We are Listerine, the global leader in mouthwash, a brand that's been fearlessly innovating for over 130 years. We've always been bold, today, Listerine will look bolder than ever. We built upon the classic barbell shape to create a new modernized design. We added bold new claims so our consumers can easily identify the right Listerine for them. Also, for those who desire all the benefits with a less intense experience, we've added improved zero alcohol designs. We didn't stop there. Our easy-to-shop system allows the consumer to navigate and select their favorite product from three distinct tiers. The core tier provides the benefit of clean for everyone. The mid tier is where you get the classic freshness and bolded with extra benefits. The third, premium tier. Why choose between benefits when you can have this all in one?
Listerine is making the world a bolder place with customized launches in over 90 markets around the globe, all featuring the new bold design. The boldly modernized Listerine is impossible to miss, thanks to our bold in-store presence and engaging content on your every screen, from your phone, to your car, to your TV. Listerine, bring out the bold.
A great example of commercial innovation, which is proven to drive growth in our categories. We have these big global platforms like the refresh, we also need to balance that with fast cycle, locally relevant innovation. We've seen significant success in bringing locally relevant flavors combined with plus one benefits. Examples would be green tea for strong teeth in China, salt and lemon for whitening in Indonesia, and miswak for gum health in the Middle East. We recognize through this success the opportunity for true kitchen logic ingredients, so those ingredients that are very familiar in local markets to deliver against unmet needs. These ingredients have easy-to-understand benefits and are combined to make something like what we're launching now, our new gum care product with ginger that's launching in Asia and before being rolled out globally.
Let's take a look at the fun way we're bringing this brand to life.
Nine out of 10 adults have gum problems. Which can cause other problems. Like ruining a big moment. Help solve gum problems with new Listerine Gum Therapy. Flavored with ginger, it goes beyond brushing, killing germs above and below the gumline for noticeably healthier gums in two weeks. You're bold enough to take on your big moment. New Listerine Gum Therapy. Bring out the bold.
A global brand refresh combined with locally relevant innovation, a formula for winning in the market. Josh?
Great. Thank you, Alison. Another great example for one of our brands is JOHNSON'S®. It has a very long history of innovation. The first gentle wash for a newborn baby, the first shampoo with no more tears for your toddler. These are just a few examples of what JOHNSON'S® has done over the past century. This has made JOHNSON'S® by far the number one brand in the world. Superior science, differentiated products, professionally endorsed, gentle, mild, and safe. As many of you are aware, our baby business has been challenged. Consumption and expectations change. We were making incremental improvements. Connectivity with millennial moms was lacking. All of this resulting in share losses. We're very excited to tell you today that we have a complete end-to-end relaunch and restage of our JOHNSON'S® brand globally starting later this year. It is to completely transform our baby business.
We have shared it with some babies, I thought I would show you what one baby thought about the whole idea. This is also true for new moms. We shared the ideas and the products with new moms, whether they're current JOHNSON'S® users or new to JOHNSON'S®, consistently loved the transformation of our formulations, packaging, digital first communication. We have reengineered and simplified our supply chain network and our whole operating model, all of this to address the needs of millennial moms, increase our responsiveness to market dynamics, and making JOHNSON'S® a true 21st-century brand. We've designed JOHNSON'S® with everything a mom wants for 100% gentle new classics. While our ingredients have always been safe, our new formulations contain no unwanted ingredients. To meet the needs of new moms today, more than 90% of the ingredients in our formulations are natural.
We have built superior experience with no residue formulas, professional reassurance through dermatologists and pediatrician testing, all with unique claims based on our body of baby skin science. Over the past few years, the JOHNSON'S® reinvention has also focused on portfolio simplification and massive reduction of our operational complexity. All of this means simplicity, efficiency, and speed to market for better responsiveness, better profitability, and accelerated growth. Alison?
Thanks, Josh. Ages and stages, this has always been a really important part of our business. We enter with newborn, we retain that baby through 6-18 months, expand with toddler, always addressing baby and mom's needs. Our newborn products that are gentle enough for a newborn's skin, sleep time products for 6-month-plus babies, clinically proven to give baby and mom a better night's sleep, haircare for toddler, where there was nothing in the market for kids that was comparable to adult products, and we brought the mildness and safety of JOHNSON'S® with ingredients like silk proteins and argan oil that allow for toddler hair shine and smoothing. The restage lays the foundation to accelerate this pioneering ages and stages model. In addition to the ages and stages, we'll launch a new hero line.
A hero line is something that becomes a new line that halos the entire portfolio of JOHNSON'S® brands. JOHNSON'S® CottonTouch™ cleanser and lotion for newborns to accelerate recruitment, as I just spoke about, the more we recruit, the more we move households through the model. It's an ingredient-focused product with cotton at the core, as you can imagine, there's nothing softer or more intuitive for a baby's skin to a mother. It's also a superior product in that it's formulated to not have any residue and no stickiness, it's proven, therefore, to reduce anxiety, and the product performs perfectly with that skin-to-skin touch during bath time. This is a significant part of the relaunch, again, that halos the whole line and allows us to stay number 1 in the world in baby care. Also accompanying the relaunch is a strong digital-first mindset.
Moms have always taken their job very seriously. They want the best for their baby. Today's moms have more information than ever, and as many of you know, digital is at the heart of how they get their information, how they research brands, and how they choose what brands they are going to use for their baby. We have BabyCenter. BabyCenter is the world's largest online parenting community. Seven out of 10 moms around the world sign up for BabyCenter to get information on their pregnancy and their baby at five weeks of pregnancy. BabyCenter exists in 14 countries around the world, and those 14 countries actually represent 70% of our JOHNSON'S® business. What we are doing is building a complete ecosystem around BabyCenter with digital assets and using BabyCenter as the engine.
We will be able to give parents what they want, when they want, and this is something that no one else can do. A huge competitive advantage for us. All of this is brought to life at point of purchase with creative in-store theater and accelerated e-commerce presence, all supported with brilliant claims, and brought to life with an idea around the JOHNSON'S® brand that reclaims our safe, mild, gentle heritage and point of difference with powerful purpose and promise-based communication. I will share a video in a moment that gives you a taste of how we believe in helping every baby thrive, all around the idea that if we limit our conversation only to the amazing things that are in our bottle, we miss the opportunity to share what is in our heart.
Everything we make, everything we do, and everything we stand for at JOHNSON'S® is as gentle as we want the world to be. Roll the video, please.
There is a force in the world so powerful it started movements, ended wars, melted the coldest hearts. Gentle. Gentle is something the world can't ever have too much of, because it makes us kinder, better people. Gentle is a sign of strength, not weakness, and in a harsh world, it's the bravest, boldest way forward for the life you live, the path you walk, and the legacy you leave.
A little taste of the powerful global platform innovation we have on JOHNSON'S® that will allow us to retain our number 1 position and expand that position in the marketplace. Just as important as big global platform innovation is, we need fast cycle, locally relevant innovation. I'd be remiss in not talking about the premium segment for baby, where we continue on our premium platforms to see double-digit growth. Premium as a category actually outpaces the mass category by two times, and two-thirds of the premium business actually sits in China. We at JOHNSON'S® already actually have the number 2 baby premium brand in the world with Aveeno® Baby, and we've seen amazing success as we've rolled that out in China in the last year. In fact, China now represents our second-largest Aveeno® Baby market behind the U.S. We'll bring new innovation to China.
Petit Planet from JOHNSON'S®, which will be the first extension into premium under the JOHNSON'S® name, launching in the back half of this year. This is a globally curated baby skincare collection inspired by the wisdom of mothers' traditions from all over the world. Each product in the collection is inspired by a unique local ingredient with strong baby care rituals. Nordic berry, Japanese lotus, African karite, just as a few examples. This will allow us to strengthen our leadership position in premium baby and uniquely deliver against the China needs for continuous premium innovation. Josh?
Thank you. The second area of focus in broadening the scope of our innovation model is all about creating superior product and packaging innovations and adding services via digital ecosystem that can create even more meaningful experiences and engagement with our consumers. With Neutrogena, let me take you through two examples of how our superior scientific and clinical rigor drives our commitment to addressing the unmet needs and, at the same time, how we're innovating in the digital and connected world. Skin cancer is growing rapidly, yet one of the most preventable. One in three cancers diagnosed globally is actually skin cancer. A person dies every 57 minutes here in the U.S. Our ambition is to continue to reduce cancer around the world, specifically skin cancer around the world.
Promote sun care compliance by understanding consumer behaviors and the barriers that they face, but more importantly, educating our consumers in breakthrough ways that is truly going to cut through the clutter that exists in the market. Neutrogena is the number 1 dermatologist-recommended sunscreen. Our broad educational initiatives match with products that have strong focus on science, but also equally important on aesthetics of the product so that we can encourage more compliance. Today, I'm excited to share the results of a recent study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. The randomized double-blind study evaluated SPF 100 versus SPF 50 under natural sunlight conditions. The results were very clear. After one day use, SPF 100 protected two times better than SPF 50, regardless of the reapplication frequency and regardless of the skin type.
Demonstrating the importance of sun protection with the right SPF, contrary to the belief that SPF 50 is actually enough protection. All of you that are planning summer vacations, don't forget your SPF 100 Neutrogena product. We also believe that superior products must be matched with superior packaging. Our new proprietary packaging innovation is quick and easy application that allows you to reach the hard-to-reach spots. You'll get a chance to see it when you visit the Neutrogena booth right outside the hall. As I mentioned earlier, we're taking our biggest strength of creating superior product and packaging innovation and adding services via digital ecosystem. We're innovating in the digital and connected world to drive personalization. We unveiled the Neutrogena Skin360 at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It is the first dermatologist-grade at-home skin analysis tool for your smartphone.
It provides real-time Neutrogena product recommendations and ability to buy product and track progress you're making over time directly from the app. This is where our decades of skin research and clinical efficacy data with digital diagnostic tools bring superior products and better outcomes for our consumers. We have enhanced the smartphone camera with high accuracy, high magnification lens, and controlled LED lighting, custom-built mobile app with J&J algorithms to detect and quantify skin features such as hydration, lines and wrinkles, pore sizes within the skin. This highlights our vision of internal scientific and clinical rigor complemented with external partnerships to bring innovation faster to the market. Let's take a look at the technology and how it works.
A great example of taking existing products and combining services through technology and science, and I encourage you all to try it outside at the Neutrogena booth. Now let's talk about the second principle, build our brands to compete in two worlds. Again, there's two ways that we do this. It starts with ensuring that we have global ideas and campaigns against our brands. This allows us to ensure that the brand is the brand is the brand around the world. We amplify those global campaigns with local insights, making sure the brand feels like it was made just for you wherever you live. Let's talk about Zyrtec, which is a great example of a global campaign in Muddle No More. Muddle No More is based on a universal human insight that allergies create a wedge between the allergy sufferer and the people around them.
It makes people feel isolated, lonely. They find suboptimal ways to cope. What Zyrtec does, it shows through its advertising that it really understands you as an allergy sufferer. It pokes a little fun at you and ultimately provides Zyrtec as the solution. This campaign was launched in the U.S. and has continuously driven share growth. We've now rolled it out across Canada, Australia, Philippines, Europe, and later this year in China, and seen similar results. Global scale is really important, for allergies are actually very local, only Texans know the misery of cedar fever, and North Carolinians can appreciate the intensity of pine pollen. We needed to go beyond just the global campaigns and bring local activation. What the team did was created a proprietary sneeze trigger. This sneeze trigger uses local data to predict when allergies will hit.
It's highly efficient because we only activate the brand when allergies are in season, and that in-season differs by market and by country. It's highly effective in that it shows that the brand truly understands you because it understands the problem that you're suffering in that market at that time. It's personalized marketing at its best. Josh?
Thank you. Finally, the second way we're building brands to compete in these two worlds of large multinational players and small startups is all around our heritage, and our unique differentiator of superior science-based benefits with professional endorsement and our core purpose. Our relentless focus on scientific excellence and clinical efficacy is a true differentiator in our innovation model. Our consumer R&D has published more fundamental and skin clinical research than any other global consumer company. In fact, 90% of all baby skin research publications is the result of our research or our collaborations. Our scientific, regulatory, and clinical excellence has enabled us to accelerate our global development in markets such as Japan, Russia, and China, and drive strong professional endorsement across many of our brands. TYLENOL is a great example of how we bring superior science, a long history of clinical efficacy, and our purpose together.
It started over 60 years ago as a children's product. It was the first product that was safe to use for children versus aspirin. Today, TYLENOL is the most recommended analgesic and offers products across many benefits. Our launch of Rapid Release in 2017 shows our R&D brilliance. These gel caps have laser-drilled holes in order to release drugs more quickly for faster pain relief. It helped TYLENOL gain 1.6 share since its launch in 2017. This is just the first of many innovations we plan to bring into this category over the next few years. Alison?
Thanks, Josh. Science is a fantastic point of difference for us at Johnson & Johnson, but it's not enough. We must balance that with purpose-inspired brands, which today is what millennials are looking for. What we believe for TYLENOL is that love and medicine is better than medicine alone. The brand connects on a deeper emotional level with a point of view. In the U.S., we've done this by celebrating the diversity of families today. In China, I'm about to share with you a sweet story of a father and son giving back to a mom what she has always given to them. Let's take a look. Once again, here, we show that purpose is as important as superiority, a real competitive advantage for our brands, and what those founder-based startup brands do so well.
We have just as rich and just as deep purposes for our Johnson & Johnson brands. We share them. I'll now turn it back to Jorge.
Thank you very much, Alison and Josh. I hope you saw with these examples that we are really reinventing how we build our brands and how we innovate at Johnson & Johnson in order to meet the needs of current consumers and to compete in this new landscape. The third principle I'd like to talk about is, again, how do we win in the existing channels, but also in the new emerging ones? Our business with our brick-and-mortar customers is very sizable, and we are focused on winning with great sales fundamentals and joint value creating plans with them. We're seeing clearly that a new omnichannel is really created. Consumers, even if they shop in brick-and-mortars, often are browsing online to decide which brands they're going to select.
Of course, we're seeing that increasingly, more and more of our brands are purchased online. We have to evolve with that shopper and meet her needs. We're very proud of the strength and the accelerated growth of our e-commerce business. Last year, our e-commerce business grew 50%, well ahead of the market, which is growing around 30%, and we're gaining market share. Our aspiration is to increase this business sixfold over a three-year period. How are we doing that is by embracing a model we call scanner, which is really all about excellence in online sales fundamentals. It starts with search. When the consumer searches for a benefit or a category or a question, our brand has to be there first. It all begins with that. We need to have excellent content.
We have evidence that shows that when we have video-rich, in-depth, depth-of-sale content, consumers are more likely to purchase your brand. We have to have the right assortment, the right SKUs, the right power SKUs that will drive preference. We have to make navigation easy as the consumer browses online, make it easy for her to both select what she wants and then to purchase our brand. Lastly, ratings and reviews. What other consumers think of your brand and what they say online is more important to a future shopper than any message we can convey to them. Focus on these sales fundamentals is key for us to continue winning. We know this can be done. China, for example, we're gaining market share online significantly. To date, 20% of our business in China is online.
In fact, 30% of our beauty business last year was online. We expect this year, 35% of our business will be online in China in the beauty category. We have a great example with Aveeno Baby, which is also the number 1 brand online in that market. We see the future in China. We believe the rest of the world is going to go there as well. The last principle I'd like to talk to you today is it's not enough to be efficient and to drive productivity and to eliminate cost and waste. We have to be more agile, more responsive, more flexible to meet customer needs much faster.
We're very proud of the fact that over the last 4 years, we've taken $1.7 billion out of our system in terms of wasted cost and created value through strategic pricing. That enabled the margin expansion I referred to before. Again, this is not enough. We have to become more responsive, more agile to meet consumer needs faster, just like these startups do. We're starting to do that. I'll give you an example. Last year, we launched a new light therapy line from Neutrogena, light therapy masks that provide consumers with a benefit that ranges from anti-aging, tone, and acne. We believe this platform can disrupt the beauty industry. If you go to a dermatologist's office today, the gold standard of care you can get is about $400 worth of light therapy.
We are democratizing that. The consumer now can get that same treatment for 10 minutes for a few dollars. We're very excited about the opportunity this presents for us to meet consumer needs. Particularly in the acne space, what we learned is that consumers like the benefit that we were offering, but they needed something that would help them with more acute lesions for acne. In only eight months, we designed and launched a new light therapy pen, which consumers affectionately call the Zit Zapper. It's really putting a lot of additional wind in our sails in this category. A great example, I think, of responsiveness to meet consumer needs. In summary, we are already a solid contributor, an important contributor to Johnson & Johnson. We have turnover of $13.6 billion and margins that are now in line with our peer set.
Our aspiration as we go forward is to continue to grow consistently ahead of the market year in and year out, starting in 2018. To grow our margin ahead of our sales. We're confident that we have the right strategies, that we are facing the reality of the changing landscape and making the necessary adjustments to compete in this new world. In summary, we believe that we will start winning again, starting in 2018, above the market. We will do so by embracing this omni-channel and drive disproportionate growth online. We will do so by continuing to embrace our commitment to innovation and to leverage our powerful pipeline, which include the reinvention of our oral care and baby care businesses. We'll continue to drive our operating margin even as we invest, continue to sustain our growth as we go forward. Thank you.
What we'd like to do next is just have a dialogue with you to answer any questions you may have. For that, I'd like to invite Alison and Josh back on stage, along with Joe Wolk, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. I hope you enjoyed the consumer overview, and thanks for your continued interest in Johnson & Johnson here today. To ask a question, you'll have two options. Certainly, for those here in the room, you can raise your hand. We simply ask that you wait for a microphone so that folks that are participating via the webcast can also follow the discussion. We also have the opportunity for you to ask a question through our event app. With that, I'll open the floor up to somebody who may have a question. David Lewis from Morgan Stanley. Obviously, given Alex's introduction, I have to give you the first question. The trials and tribulations you took to come here.
Thanks, Joe. David Lewis, Morgan Stanley. I wouldn't miss it for the world. A couple of quick questions here. The presentation was very helpful in understanding how you're redeploying. Personalization of the products is obviously what stuck out to me, but the one thing that wasn't addressed as acutely was your big box customers are feeling a lot of acute pricing pressure from large retailers. What specifically do you do? How does that impact your business? Is it diversifying away from big box distribution channels into e-commerce? How do you take cost out of your system to sort of meet demand as those big box customers are coming under pressure?
Yeah, we work strategically with our big customers, whether they are brick and mortar retailers or online retailers, on what we call joint value creating plans. Think about a three year horizon plan where we together look at efficientizing our business, including the supply chain and eliminating waste in our integrated operations, then how do we innovate together to meet the needs of their shoppers? As we do so, as we innovate, we do customize differently to meet the different needs of shoppers from the different channels. If you go to a dollar store, consumers are looking for the same benefits, but offered in a different price point and a different format than a person who shops online.
What you'll see as we innovate, Dave, is we will continue to try to differentiate, not only from a pricing standpoint, but from a product offering and proposition standpoint focused on understanding the shopper needs, which are different from channel to channel.
Oh, go ahead.
I'd also just build on that. I think you heard me talk a little bit about premiumization of baby. I think that's a great way through both innovation. I talked about Petit Planet, but also I talked about Aveeno, and it's seeing strong double digit growth. These premium brands also help with bringing the pricing up in the category and ensuring that we have a brand that competes against every segment, which also helps to manage against any pricing pressure.
Just two quick follows from me, Jorge. The first is, you talked about growing above market. Can you just define for us again what growth rate is market growth? You have a whole bunch of different brands in a lot of different markets, so what is market growth so you can grow faster than that? The second thing is a lot of things that came out in this presentation were you're competing with local players, smaller players that are doing better or are more nimble, more innovative. Are you as convinced today as you were three years ago that being big in a lot of these categories is an advantage? Is there a suggestion that maybe Consumer needs to get smaller and more focused, maybe be very dedicated to health, beauty, or wellness or something like that? Thank you.
No, I would say, starting with your second question, we do believe that we have enormous strengths that come with scale, and we believe it's very important we continue to embrace that. Our science-based superiority, the relationships we have with our customers, our insights in the category are something we need to continue to leverage. However, as we shared with you across this whole morning, we need to make our brands feel more personable, more intimate, more local, and less global in terms of how they come across to consumers. That impacts everything we do. It impacts how we innovate, impacts how we design our products. That's the key challenge that we're focused on.
We believe that every category in which we compete can become one that feels to consumers as being more personal, more intimate, a brand that is more purposeful and more differentiated from an innovation standpoint, just as dynamic and fresh and unexpected as some of these local brands are. That's what we need to do. We do believe that scale is not something that is a hindrance for our success, quite to the contrary, but it needs to be complemented by these more entrepreneurial qualities.
Okay.
I guess two things to add to that is, one, when we talk about small companies without the scale or without the science. We showed you the personalization, for example, for Neutrogena Skin360. It's a small company that actually came up with the idea. When it first came, they said we can magnify skin images by 30X basically. Our first reaction was, "So what?" If you don't have the science, the clinical data to actually match that and make specific recommendations. I think you will see us that we're doing a lot more collaboration. 50% of our pipeline is actually through those collaborations with small startups. That's a big part of the pipeline that we're building.
Jorge, would you like to address the second question that David had regarding market growth and what we assume that is going forward?
Yeah. David, as I said before, the categories in which we play have been very healthy and robust, growing about 4%-5% over the last four years. We saw a slowdown in 2017 to something less than that. We expect the markets will continue to go back to grow around 4% as we go forward here. That's what we've seen in the last few years.
That's great.
Is that Joanne Wuensch from BMO? Hi, Joanne.
Thank you. Joanne Wuensch from BMO. I'm a MedTech girl, so this is all sort of new to me. I hear you talking about personalization and new branding, but how long does that really take to gain traction? If you move from we had a tough 2017 to we're going to grow above market growth in 2018, how do we think about that trajectory, and then looking forward into 2019 and beyond. Thank you.
Sure. The reality is the pace of change in our industry is accelerating at a rate that is unprecedented. We've been, of course, monitoring all these events, and we kind of consolidated our thinking around what needed to be done differently so that we can compete in this new landscape throughout last year. We put in motion already the interventions that were required for us to restore the kind of growth that we've enjoyed in the past. As I said before, we're confident that we're getting back to growing ahead of the market starting this year, and sustain that kind of above-market performance as we go forward.
As a follow-up, are there any brands within your categories that you feel like you don't have, or anything after your evaluation over the last year that you sort of think about minimizing in a more significant way?
Yeah, I think it's a good question. What I would say is we are blessed with a full portfolio of brands, and frankly, our presence globally with these brands is not as uniform as it should be, and it needs to be. We still see a lot of runway for us to globalize what brands we do have. That said, as you know, we have a very robust M&A process in the company, where we are very disciplined about assessing within each one of the categories where we compete, and adjacencies around them, are there opportunities for us to create value and further accelerate our growth? Opportunities like, for example, Vogue, that we acquired two years ago. We continue to canvass the market for that, and also to continue to look at ways to prune the tail of our portfolio.
That's an ongoing strategic process that we review with Alex and Dominic regularly. The one thing I'd say, though, we're not only focused at acquiring and looking at brands themselves, but often there's new capabilities that some of these startup companies have that could accelerate our ability to compete in this new landscape. We're looking for that as well, in addition to brands themselves.
Okay. Yes, Glenn Novarro, RBC.
Thanks. Two questions. Jorge, you talked about 2017 being a challenging year. First quarter was also a little challenging, your competitors are reporting the same challenges. I get it, there's the online competition, there's the local competition, I just want to make sure that there's nothing else out there that we're missing. That's question number 1. The second question is, J&J, in a negative way, has been in the headlines with the baby powder, and I'm wondering, has that had any negative impact on the brand? Have you done any focus groups with consumers to make sure that the brand is still fine in the eyes of consumers? Thanks.
Sure. It's a fair question, Glenn. The reality is what we spent this morning sharing with you is all the things we believe we need to do different so that we can strengthen our relevance and get back to winning above the market. As I said before, we are confident that throughout this year we will do so. One of the things that has been holding our performance back has been our baby care business. If you look at our performance in beauty care, in OTC, and oral care, it's been strong over the years. Of course, we've been working hard to reinvent the baby care business, and we're confident that that's going to swing from being a drag in our performance to being a driver of growth.
I think the combination of all the changes we described to you today and a healthy and vibrant baby care business is going to get us back to sustainable growth. Sorry, I missed it. Remind me of your second question, if you would.
Talc.
Oh, yeah. In regard to talc. Sorry. What I can assure you is we've been through this extensively, and we are 100% sure that our talc product is safe, and we will continue to defend our brand, we will continue to defend our product. Talc is only a very small portion of our business. It's like 0.3% of our total sales. It's more relevant in emerging markets of the world where some of the news that have been in the headlines because of these lawsuits have been less relevant. What I would say, in general, is we have not seen a significant impact from the talc issues on overall performance of the business.
Yes, Robbie Marcus from J.P. Morgan.
Hi, Robbie Marcus, J.P. Morgan. I was hoping you could give us some early insights into the change that's taking in the consumer business. Are there any things you could point to early on or that we'll see throughout the first half or the rest of 2018 that really demonstrates the change that's taking hold?
Sure. I think you'll see it in a number of ways, some more visible than others. One thing is that our innovation pipeline, we're not at liberty to share with you all the things that we're launching this year. In this industry, things move very fast, it's something we're not at liberty to share to you today. You'll see that in addition to what you heard today, there's a lot more transformational innovation coming in the back half of this year that we're very excited about. The other thing that we didn't cover here today, but I'd like to share with you, just to dimensionalize the transformation that we're driving inside our company is we're evolving our organizational design to a more agile entrepreneurial model.
For example, in the U.S., we have a $5 billion business, and we have divided that now in 10 working squads of about half a billion dollar in turnover each. A squad, think about it as a multidisciplinary end-to-end group of leaders, co-located, empowered to make decisions, and to run more entrepreneurially to compete in the market. In which they're responsible for. What we envision is that these squads will exist around the world in critical country category combinations, all rowing together to execute the global strategy that we have identified for that category. We're driving real change in how we are organized, how we go about our work, to become more like a giant startup that I discussed.
The other thing I'll just mention is we continue to invest a lot in data and analytics, and we get better and better and better at using the data analytics to basically leverage that against our digital marketing to make sure we get better return from every dollar we invest, and drive greater personalization in the messaging, which is super important when you think about our categories and the brands that we have, where they're very unique problem solutions. You want to reach that person with precision. I talked a little bit about it with Zyrtec and the sneeze trigger. That's a great example of data analytics fueling a more personalized message and a better return, which is part of our productivity agenda. It doesn't mean we're cutting marketing dollars, but it means every marketing dollar is working that much harder.
Those are the types of things, and these are the things those small companies and small startups do that we're doing very well now, and we're really excited about the success we're seeing there.
You mentioned this in different parts across the presentations, but maybe you could give us some more insight into what changes you're making internally to attract the personnel that could help drive these changes.
Well, I think what a student that joins the workforce wants today is a dynamic, entrepreneurial place, a place where they can make a personal difference, and they feel that they kind of own the shop somewhat. That sense of ownership, that sense of being able to make an early impact, is what people want more than ever today. By evolving our model to become more agile, more entrepreneurial like that, and by innovating in a way that is more discontinuous, more relevant to consumers, we can create the kind of atmosphere, the kind of growth opportunity that will make us a very attractive place for a young person joining the workforce.
I think we're adding positions like data scientists. We're adding positions like content manager. We're bringing people in from different companies, different businesses. We're putting people in charge of incubator brands. Go figure out how to restage or relaunch this. Go figure out how you create a brand through social media data. Those are the types of things we're doing, which are super exciting. Because we have the scale and resources, that actually is exciting to the people that sit outside, because they look at us and they say, "You can do more." We have what those small brands want, the scale and resources. They have the speed and agility. Jorge talked about how we're driving the speed and agility. We're bringing the scale and resources to them.
The only thing to add to that is the partnerships that we're building across around the world with small startups, with new innovators around the world. That's also another way. The people don't have to be at J&J all the time. I think it's the partnerships, the work that we do with them is also extremely relevant.
Alex, you wanted to add something?
Am I on?
No.
Can you turn this?
Yep.
Hey, Rob, if I could just maybe add a little bit of a corporate overlay to that relates to consumer, but also more broadly across all of Johnson & Johnson. I said earlier, I probably couldn't resist doing this from time to time, so I hope it's okay with everybody. As we look at talent across J&J, we actually feel very confident in our ability to continue to attract and retain across all of our different segments. Look, a lot of it, we believe, and we've actually validated this through some of the research that we've done, gets back to this culture and credo. Number one, I might go out on a limb here, I think there's this sense here that the millennial today is going to work 85 different jobs, change jobs every six months. Our surveys don't support that.
Our surveys show that when you provide them a purpose-driven place where you're not going to go to a company that maybe has a cool technology, zap it name, but basically you're going to be making clickbait or a headline versus actually making a difference in patients' lives, that we constantly emphasize in all of our recruiting, makes a big difference. If we look at our attraction rates from schools, frankly from other industries, it's very strong. If we look at millennial turnover rate, doesn't differ significantly than any one of our other segments. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we provide, for example, 17 weeks for the millennial mom, if she's going to have a baby, and the father, that they can have that kind of maternity leave.
Another very interesting fact, when we survey our millennials, the number one reason they say to be at J&J, number one and number two, is purpose, our credo, and number two, our pension. Who would've thought? Again, there's a lot of misnomers out there. Well, pension's not important to me. No, I say just the opposite. If you go back to 2008 and 2009 when a lot of them were getting in the workforce, they got burned. I think doing all those things that we found is actually our attention. Finally, they can join J&J, and they can have a career like many of the executives you see today, where you can rotate across region, cross sector, and you don't have to change company and do that trade-off. We don't take any of it for granted. We fight for it every day.
What I'd encourage you to do is ask some of the employees outside in the exhibits who you can hear from firsthand to maybe reinforce some of those things. Thank you.
Great. Tony Butler, Guggenheim.
Thanks, Joe. Jorge, you alluded to taking $1.7 billion of cost out. I'm respectful of that. I'm also respectful of 20% op margins. The key question is 20% the peak? If not, what could be the peak? Thank you.
Sure, it's a fair question. Well, as you point out, we do feel good about the fact that we've come a long way, now we are slightly below our peer set average, and clearly that's not a place where we need to be. Our goal is to continue to improve our margins, but in a sustainable way, which allows us to reinvest to continue to drive top-line growth ahead of the market. We think there's still opportunity for us to drive margin, but again, we need to balance that with our desire to invest, to capitalize on all the opportunities you heard about today.
Tony, maybe just to elaborate, that's just not for consumer business, that's for our pharmaceutical and med device business as well, that idea of growing the bottom line faster than the top line. Even though pharmaceuticals and medical devices operate at higher margins compared to the peer set, we still strive to improve that each and every year. Okay, I think we have time for one more question. Yes, over here.
Thanks. Jayson Bedford from Raymond James. There wasn't much mention of emerging markets. A couple of years ago, I think you talked about 60% of the expected growth coming from emerging markets. I guess the questions are, one, have emerging markets lived up to your expectation? Two, should we still view it as a key growth driver?
It's a good question, I do believe that the emerging markets will continue to drive about 60% of our growth going forward. That remains our assumption in the strat plan. I will say last year was a bit of an exception to the rule for very unique reasons. You take India, for example. There's been very disruptive efforts to transform, to modernize the Indian economy, which are going to pay huge dividends mid to long term, but created a real shock in the economy and the consumption and liquidity with our customers in the time frame itself. Brazil, we still are very bullish on long term, but you saw that last year, the country went through this very cathartic process of ridding itself of corruption, which again created a short-term impact. Russia suffered a bit from low oil prices and the liquidity issues that came with that.
The exception was really China, where we continue to see terrific growth. Whether you look at BRIC or the MINT markets, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, we still see tremendous growth opportunities as we go forward. We remain just as bullish as we were, and we see last year as more of an exception to the rule for emerging markets.
Okay, great. That concludes our consumer panel. I want to thank Jorge, Alison, and Josh. I know the audience found the presentation and the resulting conversation informative and valuable, so thank you. We'll now take a quick break. I would encourage you to visit our exhibits. They are open and they'll be open again at lunchtime. It really gives you a great opportunity to hear from additional business leaders in our consumer and medical device units. It really features the exciting products and technology that is discussed in today's presentations. We will return here and begin our program promptly at 10:40 A.M. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Group Worldwide Chair, Johnson & Johnson, Sandi Peterson.
Good morning. I hope you guys were as excited as I was listening to Jorge, Josh, and Alison talk about all the amazing things that we're doing in our consumer business, how they have really lived into understanding and owning the consumer, understanding the changed market environment, clearly living into the science base of everything that we do. I hope you share my conviction that we are making the right choices to be relevant for consumers in the future the way we have been for over 130 years. We clearly have built on a legacy of deep consumer understanding and science-based differentiation in our consumer business. Our team is demonstrating flexibility and creativity in not only responding to the disruption in the marketplace, but more importantly, they're actually capitalizing on it to ensure that we restore above-market growth for J&J Consumer.
Both our consumer and medical device businesses are competing in industries that are undergoing profound shifts. As Jorge said, it is just as relevant in medical devices. The old playbooks are being rewritten. New players are entering the market, harnessing data to create new customer-centric business models and disrupting traditional value chains. Two years ago in this setting, I spoke about the shifts taking place at the intersection of science, technology, and health. I remember saying then that the business of health and wellbeing was changing at a pace that I have never seen before in my career. Let me tell you, in the last two years, it surely isn't slowing down. In a few moments, you will hear from some of our key medical device business leaders. Some of them you have met before, some of them, this will be your first experience seeing them in action.
The four markets that make up our medical device portfolio are unique, they have unique attributes, and each business is in a very different stage. Like all of our businesses at Johnson & Johnson, they are all focused on delivering sustainable above-market growth. Across medical devices, we are executing robust, holistic innovation and growth strategies. As Alex said, we are relentlessly focused on execution, driving quality, simplifying operations, and delivering new commercial models in response to changing customer needs. In each business, we are leveraging science, technology, scale, and expertise to meet the evolving expectations of health systems and people around the world. Let us be clear, healthcare is one of the world's greatest challenges, and it also represents a great market with many new opportunities for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices.
Global healthcare spend is growing faster than GDP, as we all know, it is disproportionately concentrated in developed markets. The industry landscape is being reshaped, creating new challenges, we see them as new opportunities. Around the world, the 60 and over population is growing faster than all other age groups, in emerging markets, the middle class is growing at an unprecedented rate of speed. Did you know that it is adding five people to the middle class a second? That is 1 million people a day. Actually, it is the equivalent of a small city that is going to be created in the middle class in emerging markets as we are sitting here today. Economic development, especially in these emerging markets, is increasing healthcare access and demand enormously.
While that is happening, we are also seeing consolidation and globalization among our customers, the increased influence of the consumer as patient, and the migration of care outside of the hospital. The advances in science, technology, and data analytics create immense opportunities for J&J to provide new types of care that it can extend and improve lives in new places and delivered in very new ways. We believe that J&J is uniquely positioned to respond to these forces. We are the market leader in surgery, in orthopedics, and in contact lenses. Our products are in nearly every OR in the world and are used in over 75 million procedures a year. We have a specific strength in emerging markets, where much of the procedural growth will occur. The global medical device market is attractive, it is growing.
We estimate by 2022, the markets we compete in will grow to over $120 billion. The total medical device market will top about $490 billion. The markets we compete in are projected to grow faster than the average of the medical device market. We expect the overall growth rate in emerging markets, where we have a particular strength, to grow by approximately 7%. From our earliest days, Johnson & Johnson identified unmet needs and created new markets in medical devices. We made surgery safer, we increased access to surgical care, and we helped people recover from accidents. We've trained literally hundreds of thousands of surgeons around the world. We became the leader in minimally invasive surgery. We have played a key role in restoring mobility and sight. We also have been at the forefront of controlling surgical bleeding and infection around the world.
In recent years, our track record has been uneven. At the 2016 analyst meeting, we had recently announced a major restructuring, and at that meeting, we projected above-market growth across the sector. We are on track to deliver on our commitment of $800 million-$1 billion in savings by 2020. However, we've grown above market in only some of our businesses. Quite honestly, we had some missteps. Our innovation cadence in some areas was not what it should have been. Many of our resources were still tied up in completing remediation and integration work rather than in innovation. We also fell short in much of our commercial execution, which was compounded by the restructuring disruption and sales force attrition. We're clearly not satisfied with this performance, and we are laser-focused on delivering consistent and above-market growth going forward.
I hope you will see throughout the rest of the day the progress that we have made and why we're convinced we will change this trajectory. Over the past 12 months, we have made significant progress resetting the foundation in medical devices. We're reshaping the portfolio and making major strides in improving quality, growth, and execution. We have filled critical portfolio gaps, accelerated our deal pace, and divested businesses with lower growth or which were no longer a strategic fit for us. We've built new platforms in stroke and surgical vision. By the end of the year, we expect to have completed the diabetes divestiture, which will improve our overall growth rate by one full point. In 2017 alone, we doubled the number of new product launches, and we launched them on time.
This year, as you've already heard, and you'll hear more about for the rest of the day, we will launch between 15-20 major new products this year. Last year, we simplified our R&D organization. We shifted investments from incremental programs into programs with much higher potential and transformative impact. We have increased our pipeline value and expanded our innovation focus beyond the product. In 2017, we invested over $5 billion with more than 30 acquisitions, investments, and partnerships. We will continue to manage our portfolio with discipline, aggressively seeking out opportunities to acquire products and solutions that will make a difference to the patients and customers we serve and bring new capabilities to strengthen our ability to compete and grow. We are improving execution across all dimensions of the business. Number one, we're improving quality and reducing the complexity of our operations.
Number two, we're enhancing our commercial capabilities. Number three, we are learning to collaborate with our customers in new ways. The lifting of the Synthes warning letter on February 1st of this year was a major quality milestone. We have designed strong quality systems, and we are focused on innovation and execution in addition to sustaining that strong quality. We have simplified our product portfolio, eliminating more than 26,000 SKUs, which equates to about 11% of our SKU count. We continue to focus on optimizing every aspect of our supply chain, work that's improving our gross profit, and equally importantly, our customer responsiveness. We are also investing in sales force training, increasing both clinical and commercial sales coverage, and we are building critical new commercial capabilities in analytics, in pricing, and strategic account management. These investments and this focus is beginning to drive growth and profitability.
We are also evolving our go-to-market models and entering new channels in response to changing customer needs and dynamics. As part of the world's most broadly based healthcare company, we bring unrivaled knowledge, resources, and experience to bear for our customers. We're actually actively co-creating with health systems around the world to improve outcomes, to increase patient satisfaction, but equally important for them to reduce costs. We are introducing digitally enabled services and tools, and these are designed first to optimize surgery and OR efficiently, second to strengthen surgical skill sets, and third to help patients better prepare for surgery and recover more quickly. Last year, we launched 26 global Johnson & Johnson Institute sites, reasserting our leadership in professional education. We are investing in new capabilities and reimagining what surgical training can be.
Bringing this all together, with our strengthened foundation, we expect and are committed to accelerating growth sequentially in 2018 and achieving above-market growth across our total portfolio by 2020. At Johnson & Johnson, we are focused on four medical device markets, all very attractive with areas of significant unmet need. We are the world's largest orthopedics business. We continue to be the leader in global surgery. We are a strong player in high growth interventional solutions market, and we are the number one in the contact lens category. We have also, during this time frame, made significant investments in future areas where we can build new markets and new forms of care. These include surgical robotics, oncology and ablation, neurovascular, and orthopedic robotics.
As you will hear from the team through the rest of the day, we believe that we are well-positioned in most of the categories in which we compete. Our performance is very strong in wound closure, in biosurgery, in endomechanical, in trauma, in hips, in eye health, and in electrophysiology. You'll also hear about the work that we're doing to address the challenges we have in three of our businesses, in energy, in knees, and in spine, and why we are confident, and I'm hopeful by the end of today, you will also be confident that we're going to improve the trajectory of these three businesses. Two years ago, we told you that the competitive advantage at J&J was our breadth and scale that will increase as the external environment evolves. Our customers are very diverse, and they need very different kinds of support and engagement from us.
Our recreation of our commercial model, quite honestly, took us longer than we expected, but I'm delighted to tell you that it's actually now paying off. In 2018 alone, we racked up more than 50 cross-category, multi-year customer wins. That's double the number in the fourth quarter of 2017, and we clearly expect that upward trajectory to continue. It's actually really exciting to see how our business model innovation with our customers and co-creating things that they really need is leading to tangible wins. Let me just give you a couple of examples. In the U.S., we deployed CareAdvantage programs in 132 health systems in 2017.
CareAdvantage is what we call our holistic approach to helping customers improve care and actually increase efficiency and outcomes by bringing a very broad range of capabilities to work with our customers that go beyond the product to help them meet their specific unique needs. 132 in 2017 alone. Let me give you another example. In the Middle East, in response to changes in our customers' needs in Saudi Arabia, we took a very different approach. We evolved our go-to-market model. We announced a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, which allows us to work with healthcare providers and partners to develop solutions that not only reduce costs, but they deliver better outcomes and ensure patient satisfaction across many disease states, including obesity and orthopedics.
We expect to see the impact of these wins and others as the year progresses, not only in 2018, but beyond as this momentum grows and we continue to co-create with our customers and meet them where they need help. We also believe that our refreshed approach to professional education will drive competitive advantage and growth for J&J. As many of you know, Johnson & Johnson has been at the forefront of providing comprehensive disease state and procedural education for healthcare professionals around the world for decades. We are very, very proud of that work. The demand is increasing, especially in emerging markets where there is an insufficient number of qualified surgeons. Training more surgeons creates access for patients and increases procedural volume while it also improves patient experience and measured outcomes.
To meet these challenges, we've rethought how we do this. We've built an omni-channel education system designed to support surgical innovation and improve surgeon and care team skills. Our training technologies can help deliver better patient outcomes, improve OR efficiency, and transform the way care is delivered. My simple analogy is it's like the way pilots and athletes are trained today. By combining the best features of virtual and lab training, we can drive the best outcome for patients, physicians, and health systems. I hope at one of the breaks you will get a chance to see some of that work in action. It's really exciting. It's having a huge impact in training surgeons around the world. At J&J, we are innovating at the forefront of science and technology. We are developing connected products and solutions across the entire patient journey, not just in the OR.
We're leveraging data and insights to lower costs, increase access, and improve outcomes. Not surprisingly, we're doing all of this with an incredible focus on disciplined commercial execution. I am convinced that after hearing from our team today, you will get the sense of the intensity of our commitment and actually, equally importantly, the enthusiasm we have for the future and what we can do to help patients around the globe. We are increasing our innovation cadence. We are optimizing our portfolio, making sure that we're targeting high-growth categories and unmet needs while exiting slower-growth businesses. We are relentlessly focused on execution in all of its dimension across our whole business, and we will accelerate growth sequentially in 2018 and are absolutely committed to achieving above-market growth across all of our businesses in 2020 and beyond.
Now it's really my pleasure to introduce to you the talented, committed people who lead our medical device businesses. You'll hear from our leaders in interventional orthopedics, surgery, and eye health. Together, this may surprise you, but they actually represent about a century worth of experience and knowledge and expertise in this business. I must tell you, I am very pleased, honored, and privileged to have the opportunity to work with this team every single day. They're wonderful people who are doing amazing things to help people live better, healthier lives. Shlomi Nachman, Sjoerd Romme, and Michael del Prado will next take you through the work we are doing to grow and shape the industry in interventional solutions, in orthopedics, and in surgery.
Peter Shen and Euan Thomson will then share with you an exciting update about our pipeline of innovation and our approach to transforming digital surgery and robotics. Finally, Ashley McEvoy and Xiao-Yu Song will share the compelling story of vision care and the transformation that we have made in this business, our contact lens business, as well as creating a comprehensive eye health business over the last few years. It's my pleasure to turn the discussion over to Shlomi Nachman, who will lead the Interventional and Specialty Solutions business. Shlomi?
Thank you, Sandi. Good morning, everybody.
Good morning, Shlomi.
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here today to share our strategy to serve the millions of patients around the world who can benefit from our solution to treating both atrial fibrillation and stroke. Let me start with introducing the platforms and the market. Interventional solution is a $2.3 billion portfolio in medical devices. It includes Biosense Webster, focusing on electrophysiology, and Cerenovus, focused on neurovascular. Both markets are very attractive, growing double digits. The EP market is about a $4.4 billion market, with a very strong CAGR estimated at around 11%. Biosense Webster is the undisputed market leader across all regions with over 46% share and about $2 billion in revenue. We are very, very proud in our performance, delivering strong double-digit growth over the last 9-plus years and taking share every year, each and every year.
On the neurovascular side, the worldwide market is about $2 billion with a CAGR of roughly 10%. Currently, we are number 4 in the market with revenues of about $200 million. As you know, we made a series of portfolio decisions last year. When we divested Codman Neurosurgery, we elected to focus on neurovascular. We acquired Neuravi and Pulsar Vascular. We formed Cerenovus, we have started a new chapter in neuro intervention, a new exciting chapter in neuro intervention. I will go into details first on atrial fibrillation in Biosense Webster, then I will cover stroke and Cerenovus. What is AFib? AFib is a rapid, irregular heart rate that causes poor blood flow. Patient symptoms typically include heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and fatigue. Some patients describe it like being hit by a truck.
Patient quality of life is significantly impaired, not to mention the 5 times higher risk of stroke associated with atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is truly becoming one of the world's most significant public health issues. It is estimated that about 33 million individuals around the world are living with atrial fibrillation, with 5 million patients diagnosed each year, placing a critical burden on the healthcare system. In fact, based on statistics, probably one out of six of us in this room will experience AFib in their lifetime. What are the treatment options for patients with atrial fibrillation? One option is medication, namely blood thinners such as Xarelto and of course, antiarrhythmic drugs. These primarily address symptoms, we know that about half of the patients don't respond well to antiarrhythmic drugs. The only potential curative option is interventional procedure known as ablation.
However, while ablation is becoming more common procedure, penetration is still less than 10%. This represents incredible opportunity for both Biosense Webster and of course, Johnson & Johnson. With this in mind, let me talk about our innovation strategy. We all know hospital systems are under pressure to increase productivity while managing cost and improving patient care. This challenge is further compounded due to the AFib population expected to double between now and 2030. This means our customers need to increase lab efficiency with safe and effective procedure for both paroxysmal and persistent atrial fibrillation. To address our customers' unmet needs, our innovation strategy is focused on three areas. First, locate where to ablate with high-density mapping solutions. Second, deliver better lesion with high-power, short-duration procedure. Third, simplify the procedure with single-shot device.
With those innovations, we know physicians can now increase their success rates from about 60%-70% to about 90%. They reduce their fluoroscopy from about one hour in the past to less than five minutes today. They're reducing the procedure time from roughly four to six hours to less than two hours today. Personally, I'm very excited with our strong innovation pipeline. Biosense Webster is clearly leading the way. Now, let me share with you some other steps that we are taking to continue fueling our growth momentum. First, we're expanding our unique commercial model. Our clinical account specialists support customers at every case. In the U.S., for example, we have more than 90% of the navigation cases covered, meaning we are there providing support to our customers and gaining valuable insights.
Second, we are taking steps to expand our indication to include persistent atrial fibrillation and establishing ablation as a first-line therapy. We have made significant progress in our clinical pipeline. We just recently finished our enrollment in our PRECEPT study for persistent AF indication. As you might know, we are one of the key sponsors for CABANA, designed to establish AF as a first-line therapy. Third, we continue to invest in adjacent interventional solution beyond ablation. I mentioned earlier the higher stroke risk associated with atrial fibrillation. Our acquisition of Coherex and the commercialization of the WaveCrest left atrial appendage device expand our capabilities to address this stroke risk. Let me switch now from the heart to the brain. I'm sure you're familiar with the devastating nature of stroke. Stroke is one of the most feared diseases, robbing millions of their independence and their quality of life.
It is truly a worldwide public health issue. Strokes claim a life every six seconds and has far-reaching implications in terms of disability and of course, an extraordinarily high burden on the healthcare system. Let's understand better what is stroke. Stroke is basically a brain attack, and it can happen to anyone at any time, at any age. There are two types of stroke. Ischemic, caused by a clot, accounts for roughly 90% of the worldwide stroke cases. Hemorrhagic, which is caused by a rupture in the vessel, accounts for the remaining 10%. Treatment for hemorrhagic stroke is primarily preventative, with the use of stents and coils to prevent rupture. Treatment for ischemic stroke is acute, with either mechanical thrombectomy or aspiration device.
With the strong clinical evidence established over the last few years, the ischemic stroke market is booming and presents a very exciting opportunity to make a difference. You know, they say time is brain. Every second matters in stroke treatment. Therefore, our innovation strategy is designed to address unmet needs in restoring oxygen to the brain. We are doubling down in ischemic stroke with the introduction of EmboTrap, our stent retriever device, and focusing investment on solutions designed to remove the clot quickly. On the hemorrhagic side, we just introduced the GALAXY G3 MINI device, as well as the PulseRider, the only device on the market to treat bifurcated aneurysm. To accelerate our growth, we are excited about entering two new segments that are significant in the field of neuro intervention. First, as I just mentioned, we enter the ischemic stroke market with EmboTrap, the next-generation stent retriever.
The technology is currently in Europe showing great momentum, and I am excited to share with you that just last week we received FDA clearance, and we are gearing up for commercialization next month. I hope that you will take the time to see this great technology in our innovation display. Second, in the hemorrhagic market, we will be entering the flow diverter segments by launching our BRAVO device in Europe later this year. In order to drive overall adoption and clinical differentiation, we are investing heavily in evidence generation, and we are expanding our field presence all over the world. I am very excited about progress in neurovascular space. I believe that we are very well positioned to take share and be a strong contender in this space.
In summary, I am really excited, extremely excited about the future of interventional solution, and I am confident we will continue delivering strong double-digit growth fueled by innovation and commercial execution. Our sense of urgency is stronger than ever before. Literally, millions of patients are waiting for us, and we are committed to addressing their needs. Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to your questions later. Let me introduce my colleague and friend, Sjoerd Romme, who leads Orthopaedics. Thank you.
Good morning. Thank you, Shlomi. Good morning again. My name is Sjoerd Romme, and it is a pleasure to be here with you today to, first of all, share the Orthopaedics market's perspective, update you on our progress, but more importantly, present how we are positioned to win in this dynamic but very exciting environment. Movement is a fundamental aspect of our lives. Yet for millions of people, movement is compromised. Approximately 110 million people suffer from symptomatic hip and knee osteoarthritis, and 250 million people suffer from osteoporosis worldwide. This leads to approximately 1.6 million hip replacements, 2.2 million knee replacements, and 6.4 million operatively treated fractures every year. Additionally, only 40% of certain spine surgeries are successful using today's available technologies. As the largest and most comprehensive Orthopaedics business in the world, Johnson & Johnson has a critical role to play in tackling this challenge.
Let's talk about the position that we have in the market. DePuy Synthes is the world's largest and most comprehensive business in a $45 billion market. We're operating from a position of strength. We're established broadly across orthopedics with significant market share across our platforms. We're either a number 1 or a number 2 in 3 out of 5 platforms. Growth is forecasted to be around a 3% worldwide CAGR through 2022. As Sandi mentioned, we're experiencing good performance with our trauma, hips, and sport platforms. We expect that with our differentiated portfolio and pipeline, we will lead to above-market growth this year and beyond for those platforms. We still have work to do in our spine and knees business, and I will address this as we deep dive in our platforms.
We're, however, very confident that as we complete our portfolio and address the spine sales force situation, we will stabilize our performance in spine and knees this year and anticipate to grow above markets by 2020. We're very proud of the substantial progress we have made since the last time we were in front of you. We are very confident that this will fuel our future growth. We have significantly reinvested in innovation, and as we are increasing our launch cadence, expect to gain market momentum. We launched 8 major products in 2017 and plan another 7 to 10 in 2018. We've also filled key portfolio gaps through external innovation with 11 deals in 2017 alone. We've also been increasing our presence in the important digitally-enabled solutions area. You will hear more about that later in my presentation, but also from our R&D leader, Euan Thomson.
As Sandi mentioned, we have also completed critical quality and regulatory mediation, and we have successfully passed 21 FDA inspections. Early this year, the FDA lifted the warning letter issued to Synthes in 2012 prior to the company's acquisition. Last but not least, we have stabilized our commercial organization and evolved our go-to-market model, which I'll get to later. Orthopedics is important for Johnson & Johnson, and we're building the orthopedics company of the future. Starting from a leadership position, our business strategy is to transform procedures through personalization, automation, and providing complete solutions for surgeons and their patients throughout the entire continuum of care. Over the last decades, we have mainly improved outcomes focusing on better materials, better implant designs, and better operating techniques, all of that combined with professional education.
Moving forward, we plan to not only deliver differentiated implants but drive better clinical outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. Now let's take a deep dive in our platforms, starting with knees. I've read some of your reports where you mention tibia loosening, specifically in relation to the ATTUNE system. Let me address this. Tibia loosening is an industry challenge. It's the number 1 cause of knee revision two years after the primary knee replacement. The ATTUNE Knee performance is consistent with the total knee arthroplasty class for survivorship based on 4 independent registries, namely the National Joint Registry in the U.K., the Australian and New Zealand Joint Registries, and finally, the Michigan Registry data. U.K. National Joint data provides reasons for revision, and it shows ATTUNE performing within class for tibial loosening.
You may have access to this data in the Events app, but also printouts are available at our demo for your disposal. By the way, these results are also consistent with our own internal data for more than half a million patients who have benefited from the ATTUNE in 43 countries. Important is also that compared to leading total knee arthroplasty products, one-year patient-reported outcomes measure favorably for the ATTUNE across a broad range of outcomes. I felt it was important to address this first to now go to our plan to return our knee business to growth. We're a number three player globally and a number two player outside the U.S., with a portfolio position to win as the market evolves. The ATTUNE Knee System is the foundation of this portfolio, and we're building upon it.
It's a comprehensive knee system that is designed to work in harmony with the patient's anatomy and deliver for what they want for that procedure, and that is stability in motion during daily activities. Patients with the ATTUNE Knee showed statistically significant improvement in knee physical function at six months and were discharged sooner from the hospital than those with competitive implants, according to study data presented at the Second World Arthroscopy Congress. We are very excited to have launched also the ATTUNE Revision Knee System. We anticipate that this launch will extend our leadership in the revision segment and help also convert primary total knee customers. In the fastest-growing subsegment of knees, namely the cementless total knee with approximately 10% growth, we anticipate full launch of the ATTUNE Cementless System in early 2019, giving us entry in this very attractive segment.
Finally, as you probably have heard, we have recently acquired Orthotaxy, which will allow us to tackle the next frontier in orthopedics. The potential of digitally-enabled technologies is significant, but we believe that existing solutions are not optimal, especially in the area of robotics. Now, current robotics are large and complicated. They slow the procedure down without improving accuracy. They require very often dedicated support, intensive training, and cannot easily be shared between ORs and surgeons. We have waited to engage until we found the right technology. With Orthotaxy, we will have a portable, low-cost system that is designed to be easy to use and improve accuracy. Very importantly, it maintains the surgeon's involvement, requires minimal training and technical support, and can easily be shared between ORs and surgeons. Now, we're working very hard and plan to launch it in 2020.
Today, you will have the opportunity to learn more about it during the R&D presentation and experience the prototype in the demo space, and I really hope that you get as excited as the surgeon who has seen it. We're entering a new era with the acquisition of Orthotaxy. It's another example how we, as a company, are moving beyond the implant to focus on a complete software-enabled solution with the single goal to move from better implants to better outcomes. We're very confident that we will enhance our competitiveness and accelerate growth in our knee platform. Now let's move to spine. In spine, while we have made progress with the cadence of launches, alliances, and acquisitions to help fill some of our portfolio gaps, we're not satisfied with our current performance of the business.
Besides the slowdown of the spine market, especially in the U.S., the main reasons for our mixed performance are, first, remaining product portfolio gaps that we are now closing, and second, sales force attrition, which we have stabilized. Let's not forget, spine is a large and attractive market. We continue to maintain a number 2 position globally and a number 1 position in key markets such as China and EMEA. There are also still many opportunities to address unmet needs. Bottom line is that technologies are not delivering satisfactory results today. Our plan is to focus our investment both internally and externally on segments where we see the most growth, mainly the minimal invasive solutions, deformity, complex cervical pathology, and the aging spine.
We're very excited about the progress we have made, specifically in the minimal invasive space with the recent launch of the UNLEASH platform, which supports every step of the procedure, combining the CONDUIT LIFT expandable cage, the VIPER PRIME Pedicle Screw System and the CONCORDE Clear MIS Discectomy Device. This complete solution is designed to reduce surgical steps, enhance efficiency, and simplify spinal fusion surgery. Besides these product launches in the U.S., we have just announced an agreement with Prosidyan to promote their line of synthetic bone materials designed for ease of use, and have been engineered for optimal resorption and clinical use during spine fusion surgery.
In the interbody segment, which is growing at more than double the rate for the overall spinal fusion procedures, we have just launched the PROTI 360° family of interbody devices to help broaden our portfolio and better meet the needs of customers performing spinal surgery. Later this year, we also plan to launch SENTIO, the only software-enabled solution used for the nerve localization available in the marketplace. As I mentioned before, we're very committed to stabilizing our performance in spine this year and anticipate returning to above-market growth in 2020 and beyond. Let's move to hips. In hips, we have grown above the market for the last 5 years and have gained almost 3 points of share since 2011. We attribute this in part by developing, promoting, and educating the complete solution for the anterior approach.
7 out of 10 surgeons entering hip surgery will use the anterior approach, and we are clearly well-positioned to win in this attractive segment. The ACTIS Total Hip System was designed to be optimized with the anterior approach technique. The system is gaining a lot of traction with surgeons given its benefits, including initial implant stability and the potential for reduced pain and improved mobility. We've also been commercializing 2 enabling technologies, the first one being the ME Impactor and the second one is JointPoint. Earlier this week, we announced the agreement to acquire assets of Medical Enterprises, the developer of the ME Impactor, which is designed to automate bone preparation, implant assembly, and positioning. Following the close of this new deal, our plan is to build on the earlier exclusive agreement by further providing this technology to surgeons.
In the near future, we plan to develop and broaden the surgical impactor technology for a range of orthopedic surgery procedures, including the knee. We also have the ME Impactor available for you to experience in our demo space. JointPoint provides a non-invasive computer navigation, pre-surgical, digital templating, and feedback for surgeons doing hip surgery. With the implants, the automation, digital solutions, and instruments, we provide a complete solution to surgeons, which is key for better outcomes and at the center of our strategy to continue to gain market share in hips. Moving forward, we're going to continue to expand our anterior approach leadership. We're going to drive CORAIL and PINNACLE. We will enter the dual mobility market in 2018 through the recently announced agreement with SERF. Last but not least, globally launch JointPoint and the ME Impactor. Let's move to sports shoulders and early intervention.
The market total is approximately $8 billion, with growth rates more than 1.5 points higher than the overall orthopedics market. Our strategy is to gain momentum by rounding out our portfolio. In shoulder reconstruction, we are seeing solid growth for the GLOBAL ICON, our anatomic stemless, both in Europe but also in Canada. This year, we plan to expand our GLOBAL UNITE platform with the launch of a shoulder reverse system designed specifically for the treatment of complex fractures in the upper arm. Within surgical sports medicine, we increased our launch cadence over the last year, introducing five new knee products in 2017 that grow faster than market growth in knees for the first time in several years. We also launched PUREVUE, a high-definition and 4K imaging platform for the minimal invasive endoscopic surgery.
Additionally, we're substantially refreshing our capital equipment portfolio with the goal of bringing more comprehensive arthroscopy solutions to the market by the end of 2018. In sports medicine, where rotator cuff surgical interventions come with a more than 20% failure rate, we anticipate launching DYNACORD in the third quarter of this year. This is a new, innovative suture designed specifically to secure the knot tension to improve outcomes in the rotator cuff repair. We're additionally also launching our TRUMATCH shoulder preoperative planning. In early intervention, DePuy Synthes is growing the market with MONOVISC and ORTHOVISC and has become market leader in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2018. Let's move to trauma. In trauma, as you know, we're the clear market leader with the broadest and most comprehensive portfolio in the world. Every 12 seconds, a patient gets the DePuy Synthes implant around the world.
In 2017, we launched the first and only cement augmented nailing system in the U.S. to enhance implant fixation. We have seen double-digit growth with this product portfolio. It has also benefited the healthcare system. The combination of the TFNA and the geriatric fracture program has reduced clinical complications, decreasing the hospital length of stay for elderly hip fracture patients. In the hip and femur fracture space, we provide the broadest portfolio of what we believe are best-in-class products and services, unparalleled expertise, and the broadest resources in the industry. This year, we plan to add the Femoral Neck System and the Femoral Recon Nail System to this comprehensive portfolio, building on our history of leadership. We've also launched MAXFRAME, the first significant advancement in 20 years in the orthopedic external circular fixation.
It gradually corrects bone or soft tissue deformities in the upper and lower extremities in patients with limb deformities. Its unique 3D planning software helps improve accuracy of the deformity correction plan through product enhancements and digital tools. Finally, we have broadened the portfolio with token deals such as BioMedical Enterprises and distribution deals like LifeNet Health and Tyber Medical to increase our portfolio and presence in the fast-growing extremity market. Let's have a look on how we evolved our go-to-market model. As Sandi mentioned, across the world, we have launched CareAdvantage with the goal of helping healthcare systems deliver value-based care by reducing cost, improving outcomes, and advancing patient satisfaction.
In the U.K., we have announced a 15-year strategic partnership with the Guy's and St Thomas to deliver improved standard of care for patients through state-of-the-art facilities, supply chain streamlining, patient pathway redesign, and introduction of innovative new technology. In quarter one in Germany, we signed a five-year exclusive agreement with the Asklepios Hospital Group for the delivery of hip and knee replacements. This is, by the way, the largest commercial deal in the history of DePuy Synthes. These are only some of the many initiatives we have implemented around the world, which we believe will help us drive market share and growth. We have moved through a lot of information today. I think importantly is that we believe that we have a robust plan in place to realize above-market growth across orthopedics in 2020.
We, first of all, have, very importantly, a strong cadence of product launches, laser-focused commercial and supply chain execution, new go-to-market models that will improve sustainability of healthcare system, and last but not least, digitally enabled solutions that will evolve and disrupt the market. I want to thank you very much for your time, and I really invite you to go and see the innovations we're bringing to the market in our demos. I think you will be impressed by the cadence of launches. With that, I would now like to invite my colleague, Michael del Prado, to the stage to talk about our surgery business. Michael?
Well, good morning. My name is Michael del Prado. I'm responsible for Ethicon, the surgery business of the Johnson & Johnson Medical Device Group. I'm pleased to be here today to share with you how we continue to shape the future of surgery and its impact on our customers and the patients we're privileged to serve. To set the scene, significant unmet needs still exist around the world in surgery. 32% of the global disease burden could be attributed to surgically treatable conditions. There are five billion patients globally who are unable to access good surgical care, and there are about 10 million new surgically relevant patients every single year. As a leader in surgery, it is our responsibility to ensure that our patients globally have access to safe and effective surgery to the best of our ability and to focus on diseases with the highest unmet needs.
We are committed to addressing the increasing clinical and economic burden across surgical specialties globally, with a specific focus on general surgery, on obesity, and cancers. Unnecessary complications in surgery, including bleeding, leaks, surgical site infections, lead to significant additional healthcare costs and is a tremendous burden to the system. There are about 211 million obese adults globally who are eligible for surgery, but fewer than 1% actually get surgery. Cancer surgery continues to be aggravated by very high complication rates, leading to high morbidity and high mortality. Colorectal cancer, for example, is associated with high readmission rates after surgery. Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with China contributing the largest proportion of these cases.
With our leading innovation and unmatched global reach. We are very well positioned to make a meaningful impact in all of these areas to dramatically improve patient outcomes, reduce unnecessary healthcare costs, and deliver significant returns. We are the global leader in surgery. We're number one in endo cutters, we're number one in biosurgery, we're number one in wound closure, and number two in energy with ambitious plans to ensure leadership in the very near future. This market is large at $23 billion globally, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of about 6%. Growth is driven by acceleration in robotics, and you'll hear more about that later, and continued adoption of minimally invasive procedures over the next five years. We also anticipate that expansion in emerging markets will continue to drive double-digit growth.
We expect more than 70% of our growth to be driven from the international markets over this very same time. In fact, this year, we anticipate Ethicon sales in China will exceed $1 billion. As you will see, we have very clear plans to sustain our leadership across our key segments and enter new attractive and high-growth categories. Let me tell you the main areas that we are accelerating our growth today. We are delivering consistent sales growth improvements. Through discipline and focus, we are sequentially adding about a point of growth every year over the past three years. We grew more than 4% in 2017, with strong sales growth and share gains in all of our key platforms.
Other parts of our business, our core surgery business, which is less than 20% of our business, such as general endoscopic and mechanical platforms, have been growing slower, and I will show you how we plan to accelerate the growth in these areas. We've launched 18 new products and line extensions over the past three years. Six of these key products delivered meaningful innovation and growth, including ENSEAL X1 large jaw, which set the new standard for sealing performance for advanced energy in open procedures. Powered ECHELON FLEX with gripping surface technology delivered exceptional stapling performance and clinical evidence. SURGICEL Powder, allowing us to enter the broad surface bleeding category, and an expansion of our STRATAFIX knotless tissue control devices, continuing our long tradition of leading the evolution in wound closure technology.
Our strategic acquisitions contributed about a point of growth in 2017, our disciplined approach to portfolio optimization allowed us to double down on digital surgery, build a leading advanced surgery portfolio with the very best evidence, refresh our open surgery portfolio while at the same time rationalizing our slower growth businesses. Building on Sandi's discussion earlier this morning, our focus on shaping the future of healthcare, and specifically surgery, will drive our growth into the future. We are achieving this in four ways. We're already winning in open and laparoscopic surgery. This is very relevant, as I shared with you statistics on people who needed surgery and couldn't get it. We're improving our broad-based access to safe and efficient surgery, especially in emerging markets, and building an advanced surgery portfolio with the strongest evidence, particularly in cancer and obesity.
We are entering the high-growth area of digital surgery with a differentiated and compelling offering. At the same time, we are creating the next frontier of surgery, including new, less invasive modalities that are designed to produce better clinical and economic outcomes. Lastly, we're delivering solutions designed to maximize customer value that leverage our global scale and capabilities, drive flawless execution, and increase customer satisfaction. Let's start with open surgery. That's where it all started about 130 years ago. Despite advances in minimally invasive surgery, most complex surgery still is being performed open. We continue to be the leaders in this very important space. We provide surgeons the most advanced tools to improve procedural efficiency and enhance outcomes. Here are a few examples.
First, to address the slower-growing core surgery space, we have begun refreshing our open stapling portfolio by applying the advanced stapling technologies that have transformed minimally invasive surgery to open procedures. This year, we expect to launch the very first product as part of this refresh. ECHELON CIRCULAR Powered Stapler, which has been shown to reduce leaks at the staple line by 61% in bench testing as compared to the competition. Second, we are driving the first systematic approach to bleeding management to improve the use of adjunctive hemostats in the operating room and optimize surgical outcomes and reduce cost. We are the only medical device company that can provide both primary and adjunctive hemostats that will help surgeons stop bleeding.
We're expanding our category leadership in biosurgery with our unparalleled mix of category insights Evidence, the innovation that we're bringing, including the newest addition to our biosurgery portfolio, SURGICEL Powder. Third, we are setting the standard of care in wound closure, which we believe only Ethicon can truly provide. As you know, we have unrivaled leadership in wound closure. Seven out of 10 surgeons globally use Ethicon sutures every single day. Our Ethicon antibacterial sutures are the only triclosan-coated sutures available worldwide. With triclosan-coated sutures now being recommended by the WHO, the CDC for the prevention of surgical site infections, we are uniquely positioned to ensure surgeons have the right tools to improve outcomes. By combining the comprehensive portfolio of antibacterial sutures and our DERMABOND PRINEO technology, we are reducing surgical site infections, very important in areas like total knee procedures.
Let's now turn to minimally invasive surgery, where our innovation is truly addressing a lot of unmet needs. With the acquisition of Megadyne last year and our recent energy launches, including HARMONIC HD 1000i and our sustainable reprocess solutions, the Ethicon Energy platform has returned to global share growth and delivering best-in-class products across all energy modalities. Secondly, our advanced stapling technology and exceptional power devices are associated with delivering quantifiable better outcomes. Very, very important in this cost-constrained environment, including reducing hemostasis complications and significantly reducing total surgical cost in bariatric and thoracic surgeries. These unique technologies and evidence have secured our leadership position in laparoscopic stapling. Third, growth is also coming from our new technologies such as LINX, a novel, minimally invasive solution designed to control gastroesophageal reflux disease, or better known as GERD.
Maybe in this room, out of the 150 or so, there are about 30 to 35 who are suffering from GERD, a very important disease. Continued growth from clinical evidence, extending reimbursement coverage and global expansion is key to making LINX the new standard of care in GERD procedures. Let's now talk about robotics, I'm pretty sure all of you are excited to hear about our robotics program. While open and laparoscopic surgery have evolved, we see robotic surgery within the early stage of the bigger S-curve, as shown on the screen. At that intersection point that's shown, we are committed to addressing the current limitations to robotic surgery, such as access and reach, footprint and cost, workflow, and advanced instrumentation. I'm pretty sure all of you who cover the robotic space have heard those limitations. We're not stopping there.
We intend to transform robotic surgery into digital surgery. We are architecting to pave the way for the exciting future of digital surgery. If I only have one analogy for you, I would say it's like going from the mainframe computer to mobile digital devices. We're going from simply enabling surgical jobs to building an intelligent, connected operating room environment. We are poised to disrupt the fast-growing robotics market. The Verb platform represents a true quantum leap in surgery, and we have approached robotics in a very different and novel way. Capitalizing on the unique strengths of Johnson & Johnson, of Alphabet and Verb, we are designing a best-in-class differentiated at launch, and we are on track to be in market by 2020. We have received resounding validation of our value proposition from many surgeons and non-clinical stakeholders all over the world.
You'll hear some of the feedback as Peter delivers his talk, you will hear just how excited these surgeons are with the testimonials that will be presented later on. We are absolutely pleased with our progress and have begun engaging J&J commercial, professional education, supply chain, information technology, and digital capabilities that Sandi just talked about, to deliver a best-in-class end-to-end experience at launch. We have a 130-year legacy of shaping the future of surgery. As we've done in open and minimally invasive surgery, we intend to prevail as the market leader in digital surgery and accelerate our growth in 2020. We are eager to give you a glimpse of what we're working on, in just a few minutes, Peter and Euan will share more about our exciting work that we're doing in digital surgery. Let's look at creating the next frontier of surgery.
By this, we mean emerging technologies that augment or in some places replace and create new markets and segments. Thermal ablation is an important emerging technology. Our recent acquisition of NeuWave, which has proprietary precision-controlled ablation probes that produce larger and more predictable and more consistent ablations. NeuWave's ablation confirmation software, which we just launched recently, helps physicians identify ablation targets and, for the very first time, allows real-time confirmation of the probe placement and procedural technical success, including margin measurement. In addition, the NeuWave flexible microwave ablation system is the only FDA-cleared flexible microwave ablation probe. Throughout the next five years, we expect NeuWave to grow two to three times faster than the market. We also have access to new and exciting technology through our collaborations and our investments.
You may just have heard yesterday, fresh out of the wires, that Auris Health announced a co-development and commercialization agreement with Ethicon and our NeuWave team, especially our NeuWave flexible microwave ablation, flexible ablation system. This is an exciting collaboration with the goal of enabling robotic bronchoscopic ablation of lesions in the lung. Bronchoscopes, as many of you know, provide real-time visualization of airways of the lung for the purpose of diagnosing and treating lung disease. We will work with Auris to integrate our NeuWave flexible ablation system with their MONARCH platform, the first FDA-cleared robotic platform for diagnostic and therapeutic bronchoscopic procedures. Together, we are well-positioned to design innovation to diagnose and treat hard-to-reach lung lesions with more precision than ever before. We also made an investment in RefleXion Medical, which combines the power of biologic imaging and radiotherapy to treat both primary and metastatic cancer.
We also are developing advanced imaging modalities designed to provide sensory augmentation to allow surgeons to identify critical structures and fully view the extent of the disease. We believe this will facilitate better surgical planning and execution and eventually improve surgical outcomes. These are all exciting opportunities that truly demonstrate the next frontier in surgery, where we intend to lead and drive growth. Lastly, we are focused on delivering solutions that maximize customer value and ultimately benefit the patients. Let me share with you a few examples. By utilizing the supply chain optimization solution offered through CareAdvantage, Intermountain Health, which is one of the largest health systems in the U.S., experienced superior supply chain improvements. As a result, and we're very proud of this, Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices was presented with the Intermountain Healthcare 2017 Supply Chain Excellence Award.
Because of this great work, we are seen as an important strategic partner, and we've been able to grow our business with this major health system. This is one of many examples of how we are engaging customers in very different ways to drive growth and ultimately realize better patient care. Next, evidence, and you'll be seeing a lot of that in our booth. As an organization, we are committed to using clinical and real-world evidence to demonstrate that our devices, our innovation, do in fact make a difference in clinical and economic outcomes. We have some of the strongest evidence in advanced stapling and in wound closure. Finally, I'll briefly echo Sandi's commentary around training with the creation of the omni-channel, very similar to what consumer is doing, applied to training and education, where we are meeting our customers wherever they are.
The combination of live and digital training conducted through the J&J Institute enabled Ethicon to educate about 158,000 healthcare professionals globally in 2017. The recent acquisition of C-SATS allows us to deepen our engagement with customers and healthcare systems through our leadership in professional education. We are the undisputed leader in open surgery and also minimally invasive surgery. I expect nothing less as we aim to disrupt the robotic space with our novel digital surgery approach and as we enter new modalities and create the new frontier of surgery. I want to underscore my confidence in our ability to execute on our initiatives and to capitalize on the significant market opportunity and drive sustainable value. In short, we are accelerating sequential growth, we are increasing our global reach, important to touch those patients without access to good surgical care, and continue our legacy of shaping the future of surgery.
I know you will all agree that this is an exciting time to be in Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices. Thank you so much, and it's now my pleasure to welcome on stage our partners in R&D, Peter Shen and Euan Thomson, who will talk more about our innovation. Thank you.
Good morning. Good morning. Let's talk about innovation. Thank you, Michael. I'm Peter Shen, and together with my colleague, Euan Thomson, sitting there, we co-lead the research and development for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices. While I lead the R&D teams for the surgery and interventional solutions business, Ewen leads the R&D for our orthopedics and digital technology for the entire medical devices. We and more than 3,500 talented R&D associates know that growth depends on our ability to bring innovative products and solutions to surgeons and their patients. Today, we will provide an overview of our innovation pipeline, also highlight our work in the development of the state-of-the-art digital surgery technologies, we believe will reinvent medical devices industry, and also fundamentally change the healthcare as we know it today. This is our pipeline for our interventional solutions, our surgery, our orthopedics, and our eye health.
I hope you see it as a pretty amazing innovation pipeline, we are confident we are going to transform patient care through innovation into the future. As Sandy mentioned, we had a stronger innovation year in 2017, with a renewed focus on launch excellence. We expect to continue this strong launch cadence into the future. We're on track to launch 15 to 20 new products this year, 20 to 25 in 2019, next year. In our pipeline, we have 40 to 50 planned launches for 2020 and beyond, excluding acquisitions. In our interventional solutions pipeline, our team is going to continue to advance the science and technology in our electrophysiology platform and invest aggressively in our neurovascular innovation for stroke treatment.
In our surgery pipeline, our team continue to innovate the next generation hemostat for challenging bleeding management, also making our surgical devices smart, advance our development in digital surgery. In our orthopedics pipeline, our team is transforming the orthopedics industry through technologies such as 3D printing, sensors, and digital technologies. In our eye health pipeline, which I spent the last five years in that business, our team expanding our market-leading innovation in contact lens, now broadening into broad eye health innovation. We're truly excited. As you can see, we have a robust pipeline of meaningful innovation that we believe will improve clinical outcomes for increased patient, customer, and consumer satisfaction. Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices innovation pipeline from 2018 and beyond, excluding acquisitions, is expected to drive close to $7 billion in new product sales in 2022.
This is a reflection of more than 20% increase in R&D productivity. Through this, you can see that would take hours to cover all the products. Today, Yung and I were going to provide just some examples for you. I think one of Johnson & Johnson's most distinctive features and one of our greatest advantage is that we are truly agnostic to the source of great innovation. We seek the best ideas and technologies wherever they are. In addition to our internal innovation efforts, we look at the external innovation ecosystem to enrich our portfolio, add new capabilities, and gain early access to cutting-edge innovation. As Sandy mentioned, last year, we invested more than $5 billion in acquisition and strategic partnership, with over 30 transactions in 2017 alone.
Also last year, we opened the Center for Device Innovation at Texas Medical Center in Houston, creating a brand-new way to develop breakthrough medical devices through close collaboration with early-stage innovators and physicians. As Michael shared, how we intend to disrupt the robotics market with our Verb Surgical Platform in partnership with Verily. We believe this is possible because of our deep understanding of the market needs and that we're bringing new benefits to customers across the globe. As the largest surgery business in the world, with our unique smaller footprint, more flexible design than systems on the market, we aim to drive greater global access to hospital operating rooms. We're also working to transform the learning process using virtual reality personalize the training based on the individual's user experiences, and integrate the best practice sharing by design.
Our platform is designed to deliver a better user experience with a unique console and a connection through an open design principle to allow the surgeon to work with the entire operating room team. We treat patient access and workflow optimization as significant unmet needs. Our team is working to optimize the technology through a holistic solution to really raise the bar. Besides that, our system is being designed to provide multi-quadrant access to enable a broader range of surgical procedures, beyond prostate surgery to colon, gastric, thoracic surgeries. Finally, with our proven capability in advanced instruments, in combination with 3D HD visualization, our system is being designed with the aim of increasing surgical efficiency and confidence across surgical procedures. We believe this is going to be a highly differentiated platform with a design that is intended to create a new category of digital surgery.
Here's a little bit more information on elements of our platform we have in development, and what surgeons who have used the latest prototype are saying. Please roll the video.
Johnson & Johnson and Verily have come together to revolutionize healthcare. The result is the Verb Surgical Platform, a quantum leap forward in surgery. The Verb Surgical Platform blends advanced visualization, leading-edge instrumentation, state-of-the-art robotics, data analytics, and connectivity to improve both the access to the latest in minimally invasive surgery and the quality of surgery. This digital surgery platform will seamlessly integrate into the Johnson & Johnson digital ecosystem, paving the way to better access for surgeons, hospitals, and patients, producing better results across the healthcare continuum. Here's what surgeons who've experienced this platform hands-on are saying.
Verb has chosen a pretty sensational concept, very different from what is available today, and I tested it, and I tried it, and I'm confident that I will be using it even better than what is available today. I'm sure that there's no one at this point in time that even comes close to that.
The bridge for the Verb system, it's a proper way of treating the surgeon. You're harnessing a very capable piece of technology. During the operation, you're not hunched over as the slave of this device.
I've spent significant amount of time on the system, it's kind of amazing to me. I could do whatever I needed to do at a more comfortable ergonomic position.
J&J, specifically Ethicon, knows my world. It knows the world of surgeons, what surgeons really need in the operating room to do their job better. It will guide us into the digital world, where information is going to help me to perform better instead of just hardware.
It just makes sense. It's a perfect marriage to take the best instruments, to marry that with the best data analytics to give you the judgment part.
I think for every individual surgeon who wants to improve and do better, if you can constantly improve that surgeon through the use of data and being able to process it, that's a win for everybody.
That is something radically new. In the 10 years to come, this will be a revolution of the same size, from going from open to laparoscopic to robotic to digital. This is truly the next revolution in surgery.
The Verb Surgical Platform. Real change to transform healthcare.
You can see our surgeon customers are truly excited. I hope you are, too. The question, where are we? What you see is just a small glimpse of the overwhelming positive response we have been receiving from surgeons. Our team is very busy achieving project milestones, and we have built multiple working prototypes. Our team is conducting procedure development in pre-clinical settings, and also have had multiple pre-submission meetings with the global regulatory agencies. As Michael mentioned, we're scaling our capabilities in commercial, service, supply chain, and education to support a global launch. Our plan is to commercialize the Verb platform in 2020. We believe the Verb platform will redefine how surgery is performed, the same way we redefined laparoscopic surgery more than 20 years ago. Our Verb Surgical Platform is a part of a much bigger vision for digital surgery.
I'd like to hand this over to Euan to update you on our orthopaedics robotic strategy, and also share our broader digital surgery vision. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. I think I'm the first one to say good afternoon. I'd like to start by bringing in an external perspective. Here's Dr. Charles DeCook, an orthopedic surgeon, sharing some of his thoughts on the real needs of surgeons.
My name is Charlie DeCook. I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I've performed over 9,000 joint surgeries. I'm most excited as an orthopedic surgeon today to really change orthopedic surgery. We are craving for automation in orthopedics. We need things that are going to make us faster, better, and more efficient. The largest problem we have to solve in orthopedics today is surgeon inconsistency. Survivorship is linked not so much to the implant anymore, but to the surgeon. If we can't change how well surgeons operate in the operating room, we won't be able to move the needle. If we embrace the idea of surgical inconsistency, we're going to realize that we're going to have to automate this industry. What we've found with robotics of today is that it slows surgeons down. It's not better for the patients, and that's frustrating for surgeons. We crave automation in the operating room.
We crave the ability to do better for patients through faster, more efficient ways of delivering that care. I think there's no question that big data and artificial intelligence is going to change our concepts of disease and patient care. We need to move to automation. That's amplifying surgeons' abilities. Technologies need to make me faster, more efficient, and better for patients.
At Johnson & Johnson, we are listening to surgeons, partnering closely with them to evolve the OR and revolutionize surgery. Together, our aim is to increase patient satisfaction, improve outcomes, and increase efficiency, fundamentally transforming healthcare as we know it.
As you heard from Dr. DeCook, surgeons are craving automation in orthopedics. They need tools that are going to make them faster, more precise, and more efficient. Healthcare providers and surgeons are shifting from volume to value-based healthcare. They need technologies and solutions tailored to each patient that improve outcomes, enhance patient satisfaction, minimize variability in patient care, and reduce costs, and that's exactly what we've been working on. I'll start by describing the Orthotaxy system. As Sjoerd mentioned, orthopedic and robotic surgery is a huge area of opportunity to standardize and amplify surgeons' abilities, improve clinical outcomes, and drive overall patient satisfaction. The existing orthopedics robots present challenges. They're large, disruptive to workflow, and really complicated for the surgeon to use. The training requirement is considerable.
They often require dedicated technical support in the operating room for every procedure, and they generally slow procedures down without significantly improving accuracy. As I hope you've had the chance to see in the demo area, the Orthotaxy system is designed to be radically different. Just a different kind of technology. It's so compact that it can be picked up and held by the surgeon. Once it's located in the operating field, it becomes a self-guiding autonomous system that aims to deliver the same optimized results regardless of surgeon skill set or experience, and it's extremely easy to use. The autonomous nature of the guidance system removes a lot of the complexity associated with other robotic systems. The robot literally guides the surgeon and helps them to achieve the best possible result.
The small size and convenience of the system means that the interruption to workflow is minimal, and the time of a procedure is reduced rather than increased as with other robotic systems. We see great potential in the Orthotaxy technology. We have an aggressive schedule for development of the system, and we're targeting commercialization in 2020. We believe it will be an orthopedic robotic solution that delivers improved patient outcomes in knees, spine, and hips while adding value by standardizing procedures and reducing OR times. The Orthotaxy system is not the only way we're driving efficiency in surgery. We're going beyond robotics. For example, with the help of SPI's Surgical Process Institute that we recently acquired, best-in-class surgical standards can be provided across the whole surgical team. This is achieved through use of digital checklists that guide every team member through a procedure.
This not only leads to better operating room efficiency but also to a more consistent outcome and a better patient experience. As Sjoerd mentioned, we've acquired Medical Enterprises, the developer of the ME Impacter system. This is designed to replace the conventional handheld mallet used to drive implants into bone. It's a handheld battery-powered device that automates bone preparation, implant assembly, and positioning. The impactor also speeds up the implant process. If you've not already had an opportunity, you can stop by to see the ME Impacter in action. As an example of what we can achieve when we combine SPI's automation software, the Orthotaxy robotic solution, with the IMPACTA technology, we estimate that we can reduce a 90-minute knee procedure by approximately 30%. Clearly better for the patient while providing the potential for huge value to our customers and a strong reason to select our implants.
System-based automation and standardization are at the heart of our entire medical devices digital surgery strategy. The way we're embracing digital solutions will have significant impact on outcomes. We're leveraging our knowledge, experience, and breadth to disrupt and improve patient and physician experiences. We're developing intelligent, personalized products and solutions that guide the physician to improve best medical practice and the patient to optimal recovery, redefining success following surgery. We're building a digital ecosystem where technologies that enhance surgical performance and help guide patients through to full recovery are connected pre, intra, and post-operatively. We expect this connected environment to enable us to gather insights about key drivers of outcomes. It guides us in new ways to engage with customers through services and solutions that bring value to patients, providers, and payers.
To bring that to life, I'm going to use another orthopaedics example, but the strategy I'll describe is targeted at all of the surgical procedures that we support. Our approach is to use a string of technologies to engage across the continuum of care. These technologies are designed to directly engage with patients using apps and wearables to assess and prepare patients for surgery and guide them through rehabilitation after surgery. They engage with the surgeon in the operating room and aim to ensure best practice. In this example, our commercially available Health Partner system is used as the patient engagement platform. Our also commercially available TRUMATCH software planning system is used to prepare a personalized surgical plan. We plan for this information to be automatically transferred to the Orthotaxy robotic system that will be designed to seamlessly move to the correct cutting angles for that patient.
Meanwhile, SPI guides the surgeon and the surgical team through the recommended implant procedure. When ME Impacter is available for knee procedures, we'll be adding further automation and time reduction to this process. After the procedure, we can give the surgeon educational feedback using C-SATS, our recently acquired digital education system. The Health Partner platform then engages again with the patient to foster adherence to the prescribed rehabilitation service. It's this strategy to engage beyond robotics that defines digital surgery. We're building an ecosystem of connected digital solutions that guide the surgeon, their team, and the patient toward efficient practice and optimized outcomes. Today you've heard about the progress we've made with our innovation agenda in the past 24 months. You've had visibility of our pipeline and learned about our vision for digital surgery. Before you go, I'd like to highlight three main takeaway points.
First, we've increased our launch cadence and aim to continue that path moving forward, fueling our growth and revenue across all our businesses. The innovation we've brought and will bring to market is expected to drive meaningful clinical and patient value. Our vision of digital surgery goes beyond robotics to the entire continuum of care and has the potential to change healthcare as we know it. Finally, we are confident in our plans for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices to continue to lead the way in innovation that improves patient outcomes, fuels our growth, creates new markets, and reduces healthcare costs through comprehensive and transformative innovation. Thank you for your attention, and I'd like to hand you back to Joe.
Thank you, Euan. Thank you, Peter. Very exciting stuff. I hope you take the next couple of minutes as we break for lunch to get a chance and look at some of the digital solutions that we have in surgery, as well as other products that have been referenced here throughout the course of the day. We will return at 1:00, and it'll be a review of our Eye Health business. Thank you.
For every step, every achievement, every curveball, and every unforgettable moment of life, we rely on our sight to illuminate the journey. That's why, over the past year, Johnson & Johnson Vision has committed to making an even bigger impact on the lifelong health of patient vision worldwide. In just one year, Johnson & Johnson Vision has evolved, transforming from the global leader in contact lenses to a comprehensive eye health company, addressing a full range of patient needs for all stages of life through a leading portfolio of brands. We're innovating in new ways and touching more lives than ever before for every step of the journey. We're just getting started.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Company Group Chairman, Johnson & Johnson Vision, Ashley McEvoy.
Good afternoon. Two years ago, I was here talking a bit about our ACUVUE brand and some of our growth strategies to grow the contact lens category. As you can see in the video, I'm very pleased to share that we are evolving into an eye health company with a broad array of solutions really to meet a patient's lifetime of eye health needs. You see, we at Vision think sight is precious. It's our most precious sight, and it matters. 80% of what we learn, we learn through our eyes. Actually, sight is the sense that people fear losing most. They fear losing it more than losing their memory, losing a limb, and even HIV. The good news is that 80% of serious vision loss is treatable if discovered early.
There's oodles of unmet need in eye health, and this is what drives us every day. Let me reacquaint you with the eye health category. It's large, and it's growing. You'll see that it's about an $80 billion category comprised of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. It's growing north of 5%, yet it still has woefully low penetration rates. These are the four areas in which we compete. I'll refresh our memory on cataract. It's around a $5 billion category growing 4%. Cataract surgery is the most commonly performed surgery done around the world, and it's the number one cause of preventable blindness. I'll then direct your attention to contact lens, an area that we command market leadership, $8 billion category growing 5%, but once again, very low penetration rates, under 10% globally. Another treatment for refractive is refractive surgery, LASIK surgery. We actually enjoy market leadership.
It's around a $700 million business growing in low single digits. Very strong outcomes. A growing segment is in dry eye. It's around a $4 billion segment growing 6%. Around 350 million people around the world experience dry eye. For those, if you're one of them, it feels like you have sand in your eyes on a 24/7 basis. It's predominantly treated with pharmaceuticals, but some of the newer technologies in med tech are on their way. Let me share with you our grounding in this market, this $80 billion market of eye health. We enjoy a very strong foundation in contact lens, where we have earned market leadership over 30 years, really fueled by the iconic nature of ACUVUE. We acquired three different companies in 2017.
The first and the largest was what was commonly referred to as Abbott Medical Optics, and that gave us a very strong foundation in surgical ophthalmology. We are the number two player in cataract surgery, and we're number one in LASIK surgery. We acquired a small startup company called TearScience, and they are the first FDA-cleared imaging and treatment for meibomian gland dysfunction, which is actually the leading cause of dry eye. We bolstered our very strong, ever-changing ACUVUE experience platform, which has connected commerce with the acquisition of Sightbox, which is a startup company in Portland, Oregon. You could probably call it an eye health concierge service that really helps people with their eye care needs on their terms. Collectively, we are now Johnson & Johnson Vision, backed by the strong capabilities, the enterprise capabilities of J&J.
I'm very pleased to share that in our first year together as Johnson & Johnson Vision, we have delivered. We delivered in 2017 above-market performance, a 6.5% revenue growth, surpassing $4.3 billion. Very nice balanced growth between our contact lens portfolio, which achieved its 11th consecutive quarter of above-market performance through balanced growth in developed markets like the U.S. and Germany, as well as strong double-digit growth in emerging markets in our contact lens. I am pleased to share that in our first year of surgical vision, we achieved 10% growth year-over-year. Our cataract business achieved a very important milestone. Alex shared that chart around the billion-dollar platforms. Well, cataract is now a member of the billion-dollar club, surpassing a billion dollars, grew 13% in 2017. Let me give you a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. Many great companies get humbled.
You saw us several years stand before you around contact lens and how we had lost our way. How did we turn that around? Really, I'll start to share with you, it starts with the brand. ACUVUE is endorsed by doctors, trusted by doctors, and beloved by consumers. Over 50 million consumers rely on ACUVUE every year. I mentioned two years ago around having a balanced portfolio on the core business, on our sphere reusable and our sphere daily disposables, while at the same time riding some of those fast-growing adjacencies. Those adjacencies are areas like presbyopia or areas like astigmatism, where your eyeball is like a football, in the shape of a football versus a basketball. Areas like beauty, where people are looking for refractive, but also a little bit of cosmetic.
Well, those businesses, those adjacencies have been delivering double-digit growth for our portfolio and now represent more than 30% of our revenue. Clearly innovation has had a say. We've had seven new product launches of it since 2015. You'll hear we'll have two over the next five years, all of these launches have had very strong market acceptance, both with doctors as well as with patients. One of our largest additions last year was the Abbott Medical Optics acquisition, and as I mentioned, it gave us a very strong footprint in surgical ophthalmology. We gained very strong material science and optical engineering capability. We gained a world-class intraocular lens platform, really powered through the brand of TECNIS Symfony for extended depth of focus. TECNIS Symfony was the fastest-growing premium intraocular lens in the category last year.
It really helped us garner number 1 positions in market share, whether it be in Canada or the U.K. or Germany or Korea. Importantly, we welcome 5,000 colleagues to our franchise in 37 different countries, I can tell you it was large, it was super complicated, we're 14 months into this, we've had very minimal customer disruption, and our value capture efforts are tracking well above our deal model expectations. One of the newest additions is this company, TearScience, for dry eye. You may have experienced it in the booth. As I mentioned, they were the first FDA-cleared for imaging and treatment of meibomian gland dysfunction, which is the leading cause of dry eye. The thing is, all of us are born with 120 different meibomian glands. We have 30 on each eyelid.
The primary job of your meibomian gland is to really secrete oil to keep your eyes well-lubricated. When it's working, it feels pretty darn good. When those things get clogged up and can actually atrophy, they actually lose functionality, and that's when you start to feel sometimes that you have sand in your eye. I actually partook in this procedure about six months ago. It's a minimally invasive procedure. It's about 12 minutes where we apply heat and pressure to unclog the glands. It takes a couple of weeks. Evidently, meibomian glands have muscle memory, after it kicks in, I'm six months in, you land on a plane after 8:00 P.M., you feel pretty good.
The neat thing about this is both ophthalmologists as well as optometrists are using this novel technology to treat patients, as you know, this is a core customer base for us. Interestingly, it shows the synergistic effect because half of all cataract patients show up with dry eye, and it allows folks who are in contact lenses, many of you here today, to actually wear your lenses for four hours more. Two years ago, I spoke about the importance, really, of evolving our business model and moving with the market to really deliver a very modern customer experience, a modern eye health experience.
We heard a lot about today about the seismic shifts in technology, whether they be in AI or the plethora of data that's available and how affordable it is to storage and the power of computing right now and the billions of folks who are now connected. We harnessed a lot of those technological advancements and are now using this in our first use case in contact lenses to really modernize this eye health experience. You'll see examples up here of J&J Vision Pro, which is really a one-stop shopping for patient education, for modern, Michael del Prado shared, modern digital training, as well as one-stop shopping for the doctor. We also had a pilot case in Korea, as an example, to start to have a subscription business for ACUVUE through the launch of a CRM program called MyACUVUE.
We have over 3 million members enrolled in MyACUVUE. In fact, it was the fastest-growing app. It was the number 1 most downloaded health and fitness app, more than Nike in Korea. Again, we're just getting started. As I mentioned, 50 million people are waiting. Clearly, as what Jorge mentioned earlier, is that e-commerce is how people want to shop. We will service doctors wherever they practice care, and we will service consumers wherever they prefer to shop. Clearly, e-commerce is a growth engine for us. It's been growing double-digit. It grew 15%. I expect that trend to continue into 2018 and beyond. We have a very bold ambition to be a world leader in eye health. Now, to do that, we have to continue to outperform the market. There are four key strategies that we're going to continue to pay attention to.
The first is having a differentiated portfolio and making sure we have the right balance on our core as we perform some of those faster-growing adjacencies. The second, as you heard from Peter and Euan , it really is about accessing the world's best labs and venture companies. Actually, there's significant investment in ophthalmology in the venture community and making sure we continue that very strong cadence of innovation going forward. It's about moving with the market and evolving our model to deliver a better customer experience. Obviously, we have to have commercial execution and supply chain execution and having a blend of a keen focus on execution today as we really build for the future.
Of course, we can't do anything without people, and it's about making sure that we have access to top seasoned world-class, highly diverse leaders who represent our diverse patient population and who are really united to this noble cause of protecting and enhancing sight. I am pleased to introduce a colleague of mine. She does have some big shoes to fill. We heard a little bit about Peter, and that is Dr. Xiao-Yu Song. Dr. Xiao-Yu is a PhD and an MD. Xiao-Yu will be taking the reins of the Vision Care R&D team. Xiao-Yu spent her background, her early career in immunology, some time with the NIH. She actually joined Johnson & Johnson through our Centocor franchise in immunology, and then spent time in our surgical business that Michael del Prado was sharing earlier, really working on some of our drug device combinations.
Stay tuned on that. Let me welcome Xiao-Yu to the stage.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Ashley. I'm very pleased to be here today to share with you our approach to innovation. As you may remember what Peter shared two years ago, that we believe innovation is a company sport. Creating, developing, and commercializing new novel innovation product is my and our team's passion. It is the lifeblood of our business, and it will continue to be a key driver of growth for us. We aim to serve our patients all along their care continuum, whether it be slowing down the progression of high myopia, which is a really big problem in Asia right now, or to beauty needs, to vision correction needs, to dry eye, to presbyopia, to refractive cataract surgery, and eventually, to glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.
To do all of that, we have created a unique, repeatable innovation model that draws on deep customer insights, understanding of unmet patient needs, strong internal and external R&D capabilities and technologies, and the power of our iconic brands such as ACUVUE and TECNIS. Let's turn our attention to surgical business. We have five key programs driving acceleration. As Ashley mentioned earlier, our cataract business grew significantly in 2017 with strong momentum driven by our IOL portfolio. We have good track record innovating in all three segments, monofocal, toric, and presbyopia-correcting IOLs. We're well-positioned to continue this trend with innovation programs in all these spaces. Under-developed share in phacoemulsification is an obvious opportunity, and we have innovation programs in this space. We're collaborating strongly with our Ethicon Energy colleagues and others to leapfrog competition with new equipment.
We're also focused on dry eye and expanding our portfolio because that category is growing, especially in today's always-on multi-screen life. Our use of digital devices, for example, I will have my iWatch, iPhone, iPad, and a laptop computer all working at the same time. It is terrible for our eyes. Do you know that humans blink about 18 times a minute? Guess what that reduces to when you're looking at a digital device screen? Four. Without the natural cleaning motion across the ocular surface, we get into trouble. Our team is on the quest to look for ways to help solve the issue in order to help people all around the world who suffer from ocular surface diseases. Now let's look at contact lenses, where we have committed to launch two new products each year, every year through 2022.
Our pipeline fills base business with new family members, it also includes some innovation that will redefine the category beyond vision correction. In fact, we just filed regulatory application in Japan for our very first combination contact lenses with medicine. It is a drug-eluting contact lens to help patients with itchy eyes due to ocular allergies. It gives me goosebumps when I say very first combination contact lenses with medicine, not only because It does feel good to be the first, but more importantly, it's just awesome to feel the power when you bring the different expertise and skill sets existing in different parts of Johnson & Johnson together and innovating a first-of-its-kind new product. To serve our presbyopia patients, we are developing a self-powered smart lens that will dynamically change focus for people with presbyopia.
They don't, they don't need to extend their arms all the way in order to read the small font size on your iPhone. We have overcome many technical hurdles, including onboard battery technologies. We have over 150 patents granted in the space and additional 120-plus patent applications. We're working very closely with the FDA on the regulatory pathway for this novel innovation. You may have heard or seen or tried and saw the product demo out there. We are meeting the needs.
Of our patients with light sensitivity with our very first light-adapting contact lens. This contact lens contains a photochromic that darkens when exposed to bright light. The product is FDA cleared, we're planning to launch in first half 2019. Let me show you a brief video to tell you a bit more about our ACUVUE OASYS with Transitions Light Intelligent Technology. Please roll the video. Thank you.
Light, it is all around you, and your eyes are constantly adjusting to it. What if there was an intelligent contact lens that could help your eyes adjust to the changing light around you? Introducing a contact lens like no other on the market, ACUVUE OASYS with Transitions. Developed in partnership with Transitions Optical, with light intelligent technology that is built into the proven ACUVUE OASYS platform. This first-of-its-kind contact lens goes beyond vision correction and continuously balances light that enters the eye, including filtering blue light, and it also blocks UV rays to act as another line of defense to support eye health. Whether you are indoors or out, at work or at play, ACUVUE OASYS with Transitions automatically adjusts to light, you do not have to adjust your life. Intelligent contact lens technology has finally arrived, and it is available only from Johnson & Johnson Vision.
Pretty cool. You can check it out. We have it in our booth. It is coming soon, early 2019 in the U.S. J&J clearly is a key source of competitive advantage for us, for Johnson & Johnson Vision. Let me just share a little bit of it about our supply chain as one example. We have a fully integrated, fully automated manufacturing process, which produces over 5 billion lenses per year. Now, clearly, this enables us to have superior cost of goods, but what it also enables us is to be able to scale innovation fast. An example of that is within two and a half years, we were able to launch our first in kind, now it is the fastest-growing ACUVUE OASYS 1-Day with its partner for astigmatism around the world in less than two and a half years, and it has garnered over $250 million in revenue.
It is also about accessing some of Johnson & Johnson's signature capabilities. You heard Sandi earlier talking about professional education at our core. It is part of our legacy. We are really working to modernize that experience as well using digital. Well, imagine how we can tap into that to really train the next generation of cataract surgeons around the world. What Jorge was mentioning around digital at its core and all of the new tools that help us engage consumers in a very fresh and modern and differentiating way, like the use of scanner. As I mentioned, ACUVUE is Johnson & Johnson's largest consumer-facing brand. We take full advantage of that capability. What Peter Shen was mentioning around energy and the use of ultrasound. We were somewhat of the godfathers of ultrasound.
We have our teams collaborating with our energy team to bring that into the OR suite in cataract really for next generation phacoemulsification. These are just a few examples around how I think really Johnson & Johnson brings differentiated capability. We have machine learning folks in R&D and in quality who have been able to use machine learning and actually take our development for prototyping a beauty contact lens and reduce it by 34 weeks. What used to take three days to quality control as a test method of beauty contact lens is now done in less than one hour. I do not know about that, but that is when Sandi talks about a science and a technology coming together, that is really what we are aiming to achieve. Let me be clear.
We have a very bold ambition to be a world leader in eye health. I expect us to continue to outperform the market. Again, 11 quarters in in contact lens, a good year underneath our belt in surgery, many more years to come. I expect us to continue to evolve our business model really to bring consumer and patient delight, to bring a very differentiated customer experience. I expect us to bring an innovation along the lifetime of patients' eye health needs. Absolutely, we intend fully to take advantage of the very best that J&J has available. Why don't I summarize a couple key themes that we talked about today? We clearly discussed the differentiation in Johnson & Johnson. We spoke about the strategic choice to be broad based in healthcare. We talked about the differential capabilities that J&J has.
I mentioned Vision accessed a lot of those differentiated capabilities to turn around a large multibillion-dollar platform. Clearly, you saw that we enjoy market leadership in many platforms, but there are a few platforms that we have been underperforming. Clearly, we're dissatisfied. I think you heard from many folks we're on it. I can tell you, I've been with J&J for 22 years. I know what J&J looks like on our very best day. It looks like when we are absolutely relentlessly focused on our customer. We are obsessed with innovation. We are constantly evolving our business model ahead of the curve. Most importantly, we are maniacal on execution. You know why we do all of this? Why all of the folks that you heard today, why we do all this, is because we know patients are waiting
We know countless millions and millions of patients are counting on us. This is what drives us. This is our purpose. Thank you for your time on eye health. At this time, I'm going to welcome Joe Wolk and my colleagues from the MD to have a little bit of a Q&A panel. Thank you.
Great. As we did with this morning's panel, you'll have two options to ask a question. Simply raise your hand. We ask that you wait for a microphone so the folks on the webcast can follow along. Then you can also submit a question through our event app. Let's see. Larry Biegelsen, Wells Fargo.
Thank you. Larry Biegelsen, Wells Fargo. One for Ashley, one for Ciro. Ashley, you said you expect to be a world leader in eye health, but you have a few gaps in your vision care portfolio, such as glaucoma devices and back-of-the-eye devices. My question is, how attractive are those spaces to you?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Larry. We look for areas, obviously, with big unmet need. We look for areas that we can scale, and we look for areas that we can really improve the patient outcome. As I mentioned, we want to really take care of their eye health needs throughout their lifetime. Glaucoma is clearly an attractive space. Back of the eye is clearly an attractive space. We're going to look for areas that we can have a differentiated capability. I mentioned as an example our access into our pharmaceutical company and how we tapped into that collaboration to be launching soon, within the next 24 months, the first drug-eluting contact lens, as one example.
Thanks. Ciro, you expect to be above market growth in spine and knees in 2020. Both businesses took a little bit of a step back in the first quarter in terms of the growth rate. Can you talk about the pathway to that above-market growth? Should we expect a meaningful improvement in 2018 in both businesses? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Larry. I think what is important is what we have really worked very hard on, is to increase the cadence of launches by really talking to customers and finding out what the clinical needs are that we need to solve. As we increase the cadence of launches, but also stabilize our go-to-market models, we feel very confident that we will stabilize the business in 2018 and '19 and start growing above market in 2020.
Okay. Joanne Wuensch, BMO.
Thank you. Joanne Wuensch from BMO Capital Markets. For clarification, your Verb and Orthotaxy platforms, you put up there 2020 for market introduction. Is that U.S., worldwide? The second half of that question is, do we think of that as the robotic launch, or is there a stage presence ahead of that?
Yeah. Well, thanks for asking that question, Joanne. Yeah, 2020 is we're going to be in a major market globally. As Peter shared, we're now in conversations with both the FDA and the notified bodies of Europe. We're also engaging the regulatory authorities of the major markets in Asia. We now understand what will it take from a clinical perspective, regulatory perspective to get there, and we will be in one of those markets by 2020. Probably Ciro, you could address Orthotaxy.
Yes. For Orthotaxy, we expect to be in the market by 2020. We will focus on launching the products in the major markets, we will focus on the U.S., where we feel there is the biggest need at the moment.
The second half of that question, is there a, quote, "big" robotic launch, or how do we think about staging between now and then?
What we're building is that we're building complete robotic systems for both orthopedics and surgery. We're also building a digital ecosystem, as Sandi spoke about, that would help connect our different digital systems and make it easier and make the customer experience more consistent, and that's what we're playing for, and we will leverage those capabilities not only in Orthotaxy or Verb, but the other digital offerings of J&J.
Yeah, Joanne, if I could just add a little bit to that, which is many of the things that Ewen mentioned that are pieces of this puzzle, Michael and Ciro also talked about, those are actually already commercialized products that are in the market. As we think about the launch of the robotic solutions in both orthopedics and in surgery, many of these other things that will connect to those robotic solutions are in the market, and we're launching and scaling them and connecting them, so once the robots are launched, our goal and plan is that this whole thing will connect together.
Just as my final question, big picture, I think investors are worried that Johnson & Johnson is minimizing medical technology, looking for you to do some form of more dramatic M&A. How would you respond to that?
I would hope that by the end of today, it'd be very clear to all of you that we are absolutely not minimizing medical devices or the importance of this part of our business in J&J, but also for healthcare systems around the world. As you remember, I talked about we did 30 transactions last year worth $5 billion. We're actually on pace to have a very similar cadence in 2018. We've done a handful already, both acquisitions and investments, and we will continue to always, as we always do across all of the J&J businesses, look at what's the right thing to do, whether it's a small, medium, or large transaction. It's got to make sense for us to do it.
It's got to be accretive to the business. It has to make sense for us to own that business, but clearly, it's got to actually drive shareholder value. We're sort of agnostic about size, but we've clearly demonstrated in this business that doing a lot of smaller tuck-in complementary acquisitions has been very valuable to this business, and we'll keep doing that and look at small, medium, and large things, Joanne.
Geoffrey Meacham, Barclays.
Thanks, Joe. Jeff Meacham from Barclays. I get the focus on connectivity and surgery in both Ortho and Vision just in terms of new products and innovation, but how do you guys feel like you could further implement technology in other segments across the portfolio to drive differentiation? How would you rate your internal capabilities in tech versus looking externally?
I'll start, and then I'll let my colleagues talk about that. I think the way we think about it's relevant to all of our businesses, not just consumer and orthopaedics. I think Michael talked about the importance of using technology to enable better surgical procedures, better connectivity in the management inside the OR. We don't talk about it that much, but if you think about our interventional portfolios, there's an immense amount of technology through navigation imaging systems that happens for us to actually do the procedures that we do or support the procedures that are being done. Technology sort of permeates all of our businesses, and it's a combination of our deep scientific expertise with the technology.
As it relates to your second question, maybe I'm a little bit biased here, but I would say that we believe that we have world-class technologists inside J&J, and we are able to recruit world-class technologists in the company, and that's something that we've been on a journey to do for the last five years. Just like every other aspect of innovation at J&J, we don't do this alone. We have partnerships with all of the big tech guys. We have partnerships and small equity investments with lots of the smaller technology companies. We're sort of agnostic of where it comes from, and we figure out what we need to own and what makes sense for us to do and other things that we should do in partnership with other tech companies. I mean, a very small example, 3D printing.
We have 50 strategic partnerships with 3D printing companies, as an example, because we believe we should do it with others to make it much more successful going forward. We feel like we're in a really good place as a healthcare company and probably a little bit ahead of most of our peers as it relates to our knowledge of technology, the breadth of our partnerships is what gives us that strength.
Just to follow up, and thanks for that, Sandi. Just when you look at the last segment in the Vision in the innovation side, can you give us a little bit more context for your drug combos with lenses? It seems like a pretty broad platform beyond just allergy.
Yeah. Ashley, you want to?
Yeah, sure. No. I mentioned Xiao-Yu's background, I think when we look at kind of the unmet needs in eye health, we do see a lot of combinations coming to solve some of those jobs to get done. Because of the poor compliance in medicines alone, the combination of a drug delivery device can actually get better compliance and potentially better outcomes. One example is in allergy whereby versus just allergy drops or a systemic, this is a locally applied antihistamine on your eye for eight hours of itch relief during the season when you need it, a daily disposable, a key reason why people fall out. We clearly see application for that in areas like dry eye, as an example, or other areas, potentially even in glaucoma.
Danielle Antalffy from Leerink.
Good afternoon. Danielle Antalffy, Leerink Partners. This is another robot question, both Michael and Ciro, I guess you talked about improving outcomes and reducing costs, I was wondering what sort of evidence base you're going to build prior to commercialization to prove that.
Yeah. That's why there's a big difference between robotics and digital surgery, right? Robotics was really an extension of your human arms to be able to perform tasks that you could not do because of the limited spaces. However, digital is all about capturing the information that goes on in the operating room, take advantage of the preoperative information to be able to guide the procedure more precisely, and be able to analyze information after the procedure and feed it back to make surgeons better, who are they on their best day, and within healthcare systems also improve that. Obviously at launch, there'll be limited clinical information. However, because of this digital ecosystem that we're building, our ability to capture information, be able to analyze that, do real-world evidence immediately will be harnessed and will move very rapidly.
Yeah, I think what I would like to add is when we talk to our customers, they told us a couple of things in regards to robotics. First of all, they told us, "Listen, we're going to have to do more procedures, so the robotic system is going to have to be faster than current technology." The other thing they told me is, "We need to have better outcomes." Last but not least, we need to have a sensitivity to cost. We believe that with Orthotaxy, we can address those three key demands from our customers, and we're starting to build technology, but also evidence around our value proposition that we will share with you during our journey.
Just one quick follow-up to both of you. As far as initial indications go, are you targeting one specific indication initially at 2020? Thanks.
Yeah. From our perspective in orthopedics, we will start in knees and then go to spine.
Yeah, we will launch with multiple procedures and expand them as we launch more tools into our robot.
Great. Vamil Divan from Credit Suisse.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. One, on the cardio side, you guys have talked in the past a lot about structural heart as an area of growth. Just your view on that market now, in terms of the strategic opportunities and when could we see J&J entering that market? I think it was orthopedics where you mentioned sales force attrition had been a challenge in the past. Maybe just looking back, what sort of drove that attrition, and what have you done to stabilize that situation?
I will take the cardiovascular side there. Definitely, we are very interested in structural heart. We talked about it two years ago, last year, this year. We continue making investment in that area. We just participated in another round of V-Wave. The market is very attractive. I think the mitral definitely is going to come, and will generate another episode of importance in that market. We stay very committed to that market.
Yes, in regards to sales force attrition, which I mentioned specifically for spine, I would say two things. First of all, every time you do a transformation or restructuring, there is some turbulence. I think more importantly, if you have a good cadence of innovation, that will certainly, first of all, help with sales force attrition. More importantly, entice other good sales consultants to have a wish to come and work for you as a company. We feel very confident, for example, in spine, where we have recently launched 10 new products in the last six months, that we have now filled the critical gaps in the portfolio and are already seeing very much excitement around the sales force with the new innovation that we're bringing and the critical gaps that we have closed.
We feel very confident that moving forward, we have the sales force attrition under control.
Let me just add one last point to Ciro's comment. I think one of the great early indicators of whether the market and the sales folks that work for competitors or ourselves, how they're feeling about our portfolio and our future, we look at what we sort of call net trade, meaning, are we losing or winning more from our competition? That has flipped. Now more people are joining J&J from our competitors than we are losing to our competitors in medical devices, and in particular, in our sales forces. I think that's a really good early indicator about their confidence in our portfolio and our business going forward.
Great. Yes, David.
David Lewis, Morgan Stanley. Sandie, just first for you, and then one follow-up for Shlomi. One of the themes we've seen the last several years has been pruning medical device assets to get much more focused in the MD&D business. Is it safe to say the pruning phase is over, or can we take it from some of the big businesses you have, or medium-sized businesses that were not a focus today, they are still candidates for further pruning to get focused?
What I would say to your question is, like all of our businesses, and I think there was a question earlier to Jorge about that, we always look at what's the best optimization of our portfolio. There were certain businesses we didn't have enough time, quite honestly today, to share with you how those businesses are doing, and we really wanted to focus on the four largest markets where we're making significant investments. We will always look at our portfolio and what we want to do with it to make the right optimal choices. As you know, the largest divestitures of our portfolio have already occurred.
Shlomi, for you, the AF market growth rate I think you gave was a 5-year projection of 11%. That market has actually accelerated here in the last 18-24 months. Your guidance sort of implies that market kind of slows in the out years to kind of upper single digits. I think about your pipeline, CABANA, and the impact of ILRs and patch monitors are having on your business. It's surprising for me to think about this business decelerating within three years. Kind of help me understand that 11% number in context to these drivers. Thank you.
First, I don't think it will decelerate. We'll see how the things will go over the world. We do see much more pressure, at least in pricing and reimbursement in different regions around the world. I do believe that price pressure is continuing to accelerate. You're reaching an area in which you have some kind of ceiling in terms of capacity. There is not enough EP physicians coming to the market in a timely manner. This is why we are focusing so much about improving the efficiency of the procedure. Going from four hours to two hours, from two hours potentially to one hour.
We do believe that once we're going to come with the new innovation into the market, starting by the end of next year, the procedure that today takes roughly 2 hours potentially will go down for sure one and a half, potentially going down to one hour, which means that you can double your capacity, which we, as 46% of the market, definitely will improve the market. My boss always tells me to under-commit, over-deliver. We'll continue doing that.
Glenn Novarro, RBC.
Thanks. Two questions, one for the group and one on robotics. When you're sitting in the audience and you see 40 to 50 new products, the number is impressive. When you hear the words cementless and 3D printing and MIS and robotics, the competition has all that already, and it seems like maybe you're just catching up. Can you help us understand what's in the portfolio that's really leapfrogging the competition? Leapfrogging the competition, that's what gets the surgeons excited, that's what gets your sales force excited, and that's what allows you to grow faster than the market. Just point to us as to what's really game-changing in that pipeline. The quick one on robotics, can you confirm to us that the general surgery Verb robot is bed-mounted? Thanks.
I'll try to give you some sense of it, I'll let my colleagues answer this a little bit. When we talk about robotics, I guess our view of it, and maybe we haven't convinced you yet, is it is a game-changing definition of robotics in both orthopedics and in surgery. It's not a me-too. I think that is what's going to make a significant difference. In many of our product categories and areas, as we readily admitted, there were portfolio gaps. We had to fill those.
We did a lot of that last year through acquisitions and product launches. Now we are much more focused on bigger transformational innovation, some of which you heard actually from all of the folks sitting on this panel, which they are really different and game-changing things like ablation, like some of the work we are doing in vision, the work we are doing in EP. Even in orthopedics, there is some new very different things that nobody else has in the marketplace.
Yeah, maybe I will add a few things. In our portfolio, both in Biosense and in Cerenovus, we will start with Biosense. First, we are the only company that can claim is an understatement, but that the fluoroscopy used in utilizing our products is substantially less than anyone else. I mentioned five minutes. There are physicians today that are using zero fluor, meaning they have no lead on themselves, zero. It is important for them for longevity of their life, obviously cancer and so on, critically important for patients. We are the only one, and we continue moving in that direction. We are just going to launch VISITAG, a sheet that is visualized by the CARTO system. Again, no need for fluor at all. Second, we are coming with, hopefully you saw it in the booth over there, the QDOT MICRO. Emitting ablation, high power, short duration.
We are talking about 90 watts, four seconds. Nobody is even close today by a mile. Third, to talk about Cerenovus. We are coming with EmboTrap. First time commercialization, substantially better by 20%-25% than any of our competition. All of that and more are leapfrogging in our minds of what we are going to have, and we are getting extremely good feedback from our customers. I can tell you customers are lining up to be the first to get these products, which is a great place to be.
Yeah, I would just add, I think it was like two years ago, Peter Shen was talking about vision, and I think he shared with you all four transformational programs. Again, in addition to those, I will call them steady lifecycle management, substantial two per year, which we have been doing. Three of those are progressing. We are going to be launching the first light adaptive contact lens within the next 12 months, within the next 24 months, the first drug-eluting allergy lens. We have a patent estate of 150 patents on our smart contact lens. Another 100 patents are pending. It is our intent, absolutely, to start to lead and create some of these new categories.
Yeah, I think in regards to orthopedics, what I'm most excited about is, first of all, completing the portfolio, which I don't think we underestimate how important that is. I think our journey from moving from the best implants in the industry to really focusing on better outcomes together with surgeons, together with institutions, and combining all the technology and the knowledge we have, not only in orthopedics, but across medical devices and Johnson & Johnson, that's the part that excites me. Quite frankly, when we talk to our surgeons, that gets the most excitement. For example, in hips, we're going to automate the last part of hip surgery. As you know, hip surgery has been done since 1940. The two critical steps that have been automated was the cutting of the femur head and the reaming of the acetabulum.
Now we're going to automate with the ME Impacter on the last part of the surgery. A tremendous excitement among orthopedic surgeons. Getting the best implants, working with the surgeon community and the hospitals to getting now the best outcomes, which is going to help everybody, is really what excites me.
Yeah. I'll respond to the first question first before responding to your specific question on robotics. Firstly, we need to do both, right? There's a lot of unmet needs that we need to continue to address within our current portfolio, and sometimes the adoption of advanced technology is hindered or hampered by the lack of evidence. By demonstrating that what we're producing, what we're delivering is really superior, just what you've seen in the booth with 40%-60% reduction in various serious complications. It's important in terms of driving the adoption of technology and hence focusing on evidence generation, filling our gaps is important. You also heard, and many of you have seen our partnership now with Auris, a very important partnership.
Some of you describe this as a marriage made in heaven because they do have the leading robotically enabled bronchoscopic system, and we do have the only therapeutic intervention tool that could be applied with their system. You can imagine that many of us avoid taking a scan of our lungs because if a lesion is discovered, what do you do? Watchful waiting is the standard of care today. This partnership really opens up this new segment, which is not there today, and we're very excited about that. More to come. On your second question, as you know, for competitive reasons, we will not discuss the specific embodiment of our system. We are filing more of the IP that you published in your report. A lot of that is coming because we're at that stage of development that we're now publishing what we have. We've got multiple embodiments.
You'll see more to come. Importantly, are we able to address the unmet needs that continue to persist in the current robotic system? Firstly, reach and access, very important. Multi-quadrant reach, being able to have the capability of reaching every part of the anatomy, we're going to deliver that. Footprint is a major impediment today because it's pretty large, right? Operating rooms are largely, what, 300 sq ft. We're going to address that. Workflow, there's still a lot of clashing. There's a lot of positioning of members of the team because of the clashing and the movement of the arms. Lastly, advanced instrumentation, because the magic moment is when an endocutter is fired or an energy device is fired, and you've heard from customers that they're making compromises today because of the lack of availability of advanced instrumentation. We're going to deliver those as well.
Great. Well, I'd like to thank not only these leaders here on the panel, but the other three R&D leaders, Xiao-Yu , Euan Thompson, and Peter, for your presentations this morning as well as into this afternoon. I know it was informative for the group. I had a chance to speak with many during the break, and they certainly appreciate your candor and your insights about our business moving forward. Thank you very much. As we set the stage and have Alex and Dominic make their way up here for our final panel of the day, I would just like to provide you with a reminder to complete the event survey.
As Alex mentioned in his opening, we certainly value your feedback, not only to make events like this a little bit more meaningful for you, but also to assess our business and challenge ourselves as to how we're going forward. Alex, Dominic, welcome. I'll open the floor to any questions that they may have. I'm sorry, I can't see you in the back, but I see a hand up. I need the Transitions lenses, Ashley. I may need those as well.
Anthony Petrone from Jefferies. Maybe just a question on the acquisition strategy in 2018 and beyond now that we have a new U.S. tax structure and your old U.S. cash has been somewhat freed up here. How do those two factors play into the aperture of your lens for M&A? Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you for your question. Why don't I start off, Dominic, and then you can dive in. Look, first, what I'd like to do is acknowledge the work that Dominic and his team did in working with a lot of legislators and other decision-makers in Washington to help bring about what we feel was very important tax reform. I mean, the fact that we were able to lower the rate to a much more competitive rate versus the rest of the world, the fact that we were able to go to a territorial structure, the fact that we're doing the one-time repatriation, we think the combination of those things, frankly, gets our country back on a much more competitive level.
Very importantly, it will help limit, if not completely remove, some of the other inversions and other things that were taking place, that frankly weren't always in the best strategic interests, but were being done because of an antiquated tax structure that was in place. For us, we think the major benefit of that tax reform is the fact that, frankly, it just gives us more flexibility now not to have that entrapped cash outside the U.S. I commend also our financial team, who over the years, I think, have done a pretty remarkable job of giving us access to some of that cash in an appropriate way, in a tax-efficient manner. Now, I think we're able to do that to an even greater degree. Fundamentally, we still need to make sure that it's the right strategy.
Fundamentally, we still need to make sure that it's value creating over the long term. Next, it needs to be actionable, something that we can confidently do and bring in. We think it creates a better overall environment for us to be competitive globally, in M&A, and to, I think, continue a pattern that we've set where we're going to look internally, we're going to look aggressively externally to continue a very solid growth rate and frankly, to access new technologies and therapeutics.
I would just add that the benefit of not having to repatriate cash
Pay a tax rate, a high tax rate on that is obviously, as Alex said, gives us more flexibility. The most important thing about doing an acquisition, in addition to the strategic fit and what we can do with it in our hands that the previous owner can't do, is whether we're generating enough return on that investment commensurate with the risk, so that we can compensate our shareholders appropriately for using that capital. Tax is one element of that calculation, so it'll be easier to achieve that level of return. The most important part of that calculation has to do with market growth, market penetration, technology adoption, regulatory challenges, et cetera. Those still exist, and we'll still use those as the primary filters to determine whether or not an acquisition is value creating.
Great. Yeah, Robbie?
Robbie Marcus, J.P. Morgan. When you think about investing in the different businesses, pharma has seen an outsized proportion of the investment from J&J. Going forward, do you think medical devices and consumer are going to see an outsized portion to help drive growth in those divisions? How should we be thinking about the investment going forward?
As you heard me say in the earlier comments, we are excited about all three of our sectors. We think that, and hopefully a message that you've taken away here today is our excitement, our enthusiasm, and I think our renewed confidence in our consumer and medical device spaces and the opportunities that we have ahead. As has been articulated in different ways today, we're always looking at a number of different factors on where we're going to invest across the portfolio. Frankly, part of that calculus is making sure that we've got healthy businesses where we're making that investment. Because what you find is regardless of your best projections, regardless of your best intentions, mid-size in particular, larger sizes, they're always more complicated than you usually predict.
If you're doing that in businesses that are already currently going through transformation, it can be a bit more challenging. I think what we've hopefully demonstrated to all of you today, that if you look at the fundamentals of both these businesses, if you look at the improvement that we have in our innovation pipeline, our plans for execution, I think they're very well situated. What I would say is, we remain very interested in adding onto those organically and inorganically with the caveat of it being value creating, a good strategic fit, and as something where we're going to minimize disruption and actually synergistically create growth going forward.
I think that over long periods of time, about 50% of our growth has been enabled by an acquisition strategy, and that applies across all three business sectors. I think it will still apply across all three business sectors going forward. About 50% of our growth has and will come no matter where it is in consumer, med device, or pharma from strategic M&A activity.
Just staying with the M&A theme, do you think there's an ability to go large on pharma versus smaller in medical devices and consumer? Do you think the hurdle or complication factor is higher or lower in one division versus the other? Is there one size that you're targeting for each of those businesses in M&A going forward?
Now look, what I would say as it relates to pharma, we in our study of the majority of deals that have been done in that space, the large deals have rarely been value creating over the long run. In many cases, it was done when companies were experiencing particular stress in one way or another. At J&J, we would much rather invest in growth and an opportunity to move the businesses forward. Look, ideally, we would love to find the next DARZALEX, the next IMBRUVICA in our pharmaceutical portfolio, identify it early, and then rapidly ramp up to be able to reach millions of patients and create billion-dollar platforms.
If we look at medical devices and consumer, in some ways, and I was having a conversation at lunch, sometimes we're in pharma because of the nature of the technology that you're purchasing early on, you can have more of a binary result, i.e., does the product work or does it not work? Where in consumer and medical devices, you're buying technology, but you're also buying capabilities, you're buying relationships that exist, a wide range of other factors, so that your result in some ways could be more predictable. We think of all those factors as we consider it. Would we go after large pharma? I think it would be a very high hurdle. Would we go after mid-size to larger medical device? It depends. If the opportunity is right and we feel that we can openly create value, yes, we would, just as we would in consumer.
Larry? How are you doing, Larry?
Hey, I'm good. Thanks, Alex.
Good.
Two for you. One, could you talk about-
Do I get one for you after this too?
Please.
Okay.
Definitely. How your thinking has evolved since you became the CEO towards the medical device space in general. Second, you've opened these innovation centers in places like Boston and Houston, I believe. You've hired some extremely bright and talented people. It didn't come up today, but I'm just curious, what's their mandate? Thanks.
Yeah. Great questions. If you allow me, Larry, maybe I'll take it above medical devices, though, because I think as a CEO, I've learned a lot of lessons across that. It's the old adage, I wish I knew then what I know now. I'm sure I still have a lot more learning going forward. I hope I never stop because that's one of the best parts of the job is the opportunity to learn new technologies, businesses, and situations. I think there's a few themes that if I reflect on candidly, or you might say lessons learned, I think one thing is just the remarkable transformation that we're seeing with technology.
Frankly, it would've been hard to predict, especially somebody who had spent so much of my career in pharma, where we were frequently criticized for incremental or me-too innovation. If you look at the explosion in cell-based therapies, gene-based therapies, where we're actually moving from chemotherapy to cures, was almost hard to realize even seven, 10 years ago. If you did, it was a significant bet that you were taking. By the way, I only see that accelerating. In medical device, I think it was a little different story. I think actually, if I go back six or seven years ago, we hit a bit of a low point technology-wise. There were some great pockets. There were things in TAVR, there were things in energy, there were things in EP.
As you well know, if you saw what was happening in the venture community at the time, we actually saw a decrease in investment, there was concern about the amount that would need to be invested in clinical development, reimbursement for those things. Frankly, what I've seen over the last several years now is a recognition that technology can make a significant. Think where robotics were seven years ago to where we think they could be today. Some of the other transformations that we're seeing across all of our businesses where technology can make a difference, technology can be rewarded. I think that. I think that the second issue is around business models.
I think if we look back honestly, five or six years ago, we were probably a bit over our skis in some of our transformation in Medical Devices of decision making and where to influence decision makers, perhaps leaving the surgeon too soon into other decision makers, hospital administrators. What we found in many cases, frankly, is hospital administrators are struggling within their own departments around some of that decision making and the criticality of not walking away from the surgeon, of having the right support systems there for them as well, I think is something that we see. That's why you heard a lot today, let's get that right balance of investment. What we would say is we're starting to see some of that shift, but it's probably taken a bit longer.
The counter to that in Consumer, where seven or 10 years ago, e-commerce was very low, and now in some markets like China, you can see it being 20% or 40%. It's still below 5% in the U.S., higher in some categories, for example, like beauty. I think that's another factor. I would say the third or a third lesson, because there's more, but a third one for me is emerging markets. If I think back six or seven years ago, we had been on almost a 10-year run in emerging market growth doing this. That was Brazil, Russia, India, China, and even others. In the last few years, we've seen it get a little choppier in many of those markets.
I still believe that that curve has a positive slope or long-term, but we shouldn't think that it's just going to be linear, that it could have a bit more volatility that we're seeing now. In our messaging, there was a comment earlier of, do you hear as much about emerging markets? We still remain very enthusiastic about emerging markets. It's about 25% of our business. BRICs about a little over half of that. We're still seeing growth rates greater, but we've seen a little bit more choppiness through that, but that doesn't take away from the secular trend that we're really excited about it. Innovation centers. It's a great question.
We just sat down, actually a couple of months ago and did a deeper dive because as many of you know, we made the decision about six years ago, starting at first in our Pharma group to actually reduce some of the in-house, you might say, scientists and bricks and mortar to more of an external focus, putting the Innovation Centers in place like Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, London. Since then, we opened in Texas, Canada. We do a lot in Israel as well, where we have teams of not only scientists, but business development people, in some cases IP groups. Their whole job is to work within the venture ecosystem. That can be with academic centers, the venture community, early startups. We have a few different derivatives.
While that's our innovation center, we also had JLABS and several of those, where it started out because we actually had some extra real estate space back in 2009 and 2010 out in La Jolla, that in the midst of the depression or recession, some might say depression, we couldn't get a very good return on. We said, "Well, what if we rent it out at a very reasonable price?" We had mass spectrometers that we weren't using. We had other equipment. Let's put it to use. How does it work? What we found is that there were a lot of customers, there were a lot of startups that were willing to do that. We've learned a lot of lessons as we've gone along the way.
I think what we would see now is we probably have about 300 to 400 active deals taking place, that we've been able to run through them. I think our throughput's getting better. We're learning more and more what works, what doesn't work. I think also from a reputational standpoint on the innovation side, it's positioned us much, much better as a partner, especially for a company our size and scale, that you'd actually be willing to take that kind of a risk with a new company and create that kind of environment. We are now starting what I'd call phase two or 2B, where we're tracking throughput on those in a much more systematic way. I think overall, what we're finding is I think we brought about 12 projects in-house now. I would say two-thirds of those in pharma, but several now in medical devices.
We're starting to see a more consistent cadence. Our teams now, I think, are working better together between our franchises, business development, and the innovation centers. They're seen more as a natural extension of what we do in R&D. We're very pleased and encouraged by what we're seeing. We still have more work to do. I think going forward to take a different approach, where you're just more internally focused versus having this balance wouldn't be the right move for J&J.
I think we've got time for one more question. David Lewis?
Sorry, Joe, I'll just sneak in two, but they're both for Alex, so I think it's okay.
Okay.
Alex.
Are you still awake, David?
I'm still awake.
Okay.
You're keeping me alive.
That's good.
A couple kind of related questions. There's been a lot of questions about this, Alex, in this session. I want to put a finer point on it. A lot of investors certainly came to know J&J as sort of the three-legged stool. In the old days, it was about, oh, are you going to add a fourth leg to that stool? That three-legged stool has always been relatively balanced. With the expansion of pharma and the contraction devices, the stool's a little less balanced today than it was maybe seven years ago. It doesn't sound like listening to your commentary today, in isolation, that's an urgent need that has to be addressed. Do you think about the balance of the stool, and does that need to be addressed?
Look, we're always looking at our business. What I would say is the imbalance of the stool over the last few years, frankly, has been done to a remarkable success, which I wouldn't apologize for, of our pharma group. It's not because there's not belief. I think what you've heard today is an actual increased belief and level of confidence in our other sectors. Yes, we are actively and on an ongoing basis involved in looking for those right opportunities. These two sectors are clearly a priority for that over the next several years.
Alex.
Can I just add to that, David? We don't really think that there is an appropriate balance. If you look at the pie, we don't really think that it's even appropriate for us to say it should be balanced in this manner. Each and every decision we make, David, is based on its own merit. Each investment decision we make is thoroughly evaluated regardless of which sector it's in. The shape of each piece of the pie, therefore, is an outcome of making the best decision in front of us at any particular time.
Great. Just a related question. Thank you, Dominic. A related question, Alex, is, if I think of the last 10 years, I can't think of a time where the three independent businesses had different structural things going on. In pharmaceuticals, it's about price to value and broad net and gross pricing. Medical devices.
I would just add underlying innovation.
Absolutely.
To pharma.
There's a lot going on in pharma, said very specifically. You mentioned medical devices from seven years ago to today, the innovation cycle is starting to turn.
Yeah.
Consumer, I think Jorge did an excellent job talking about some of the brand fragmentation and millennial risk and Amazon risk going on in that segment. The question very simply is, are you as committed today as you were when you began to become CEO of J&J, that these three businesses belong together, meaning these issues can be attacked more efficiently as a collective than they can be independently?
Absolutely. In fact, I feel much more confident sitting here today than I would have six years ago. It's for all the reasons that you heard today. I think in the end, it comes down to the items that we talked about having the right innovation portfolio, about having the right execution plan, having the right leaders in place to bring all that together, I think it's a very exciting time for us going forward.
Great. Alex, Dominic, I'd like to give you the opportunity to share any closing remarks with the audience.
Okay. Joe, yes.
Okay.
First of all, I just want to say a big thank you to all of you for hanging in here all day. Before we sign off, I also think it's important to acknowledge this guy sitting next to me. As you all know Dominic's going to be retiring in just a few months, and while we all knew it would happen sooner or later because there was this thing called age, I was always hoping it'd be a little bit later than sooner. Nothing against you, Joe.
No, I welcome that.
You had a great choice here. As the saying goes, there is a time for us. That time has come for Dominic. I think it's pretty remarkable. He made that decision. It's pretty remarkable that Dom has served longer than any other CFO in Johnson & Johnson history, for almost 12 years. During that time, I can say on both a professional but also a personal level, I couldn't think of a better partner to have. He epitomizes really what a Credo-based leader is about. His financial stewardship, if you look at the performance across so many other challenges and opportunities, economic highs and lows, he's been instrumental in every way of helping me, helping us, helping the company just deliver pretty remarkable returns over a long period of time. I also hope you'll agree that he's somebody that you could always trust.
That Dominic's credibility, being able to depend on what he said was, in fact, correct, and that having that kind of integrity and knowing his commitment around the promises that he was going to make is so important in a CFO, let alone to the company. Look, Dominic, first and foremost, I just want to thank you for everything that you've done for us, for Johnson & Johnson. You've touched so much of our business, so many of our people. You've been an inspiration and a great role model and just a fantastic business partner. You're going to be missed tremendously. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for being Dominic, for who you are, and for really being a great CFO for Johnson & Johnson. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Well, I didn't know where you were going there with the age early on, but I knew what you meant.
You're probably too young to retire.
Exactly. That's what I thought you meant. I really appreciate those kind words, Alex, and the well wishes and support. This is probably going to be my last public appearance as the CFO of Johnson & Johnson. I want to do a couple of things, take this opportunity to express sincere thanks to you, Alex, for your great leadership of Johnson & Johnson, for your support of me throughout my career, and quite frankly, for the valued friendship that we've developed over all these years. I'll always cherish that. I want to thank my colleagues at J&J. You saw many of them today. I've had the privilege of leading the finance organization at J&J for nearly 12 years. I can tell you they are the best in the business.
I can really say that, having talked to all my peers in different industries, and I think all the business leaders here will attest to that who have come from different companies. We really do have an outstanding finance organization. Thank you for supporting me in my career. The finance organization has been tremendous. Let me congratulate Joe.
Thank you, Dominic.
Joe will become CFO of our great company on July 1st. July 1st, Joe, you'll be sitting in this chair.
Okay.
Well, not this chair, the chair across the street in my office. Joe is a strong, collaborative, credo-based leader, long track record of success. Joe and I go back many, many years. I know Johnson & Johnson will be in great hands. When I think about my own tenure as CFO of Johnson & Johnson, it's just remarkable. To be associated with a company who's at the center of health and improving health for humanity is really just a privilege, quite frankly. Professionally, I've got a chance to do a lot of great things. One of the things I've had a chance to do is interact with all of you and represent our great company to you on some 46 quarterly conference calls, as an example. I'm really grateful for the relationship we've built over time.
I think it's a relationship built on trust, candor, transparency, and respect. I know, full confidence, that Joe will continue that kind of relationship with you. My time here has been humbling and amazing. I often tell everyone that I've had the best CFO job on the planet, and people say, "Well, of course. You're a AAA-rated company. You fringe a $50 billion market cap, 56 years of consecutively increasing the dividend, the financial stewardship. You're at the pinnacle of your career when you're the CFO of Johnson & Johnson." What I will really remember the most about my career is the honor of working alongside people who every day want to positively impact the world. I'll be watching with admiration and, quite frankly, enormous confidence in our future. Thank you, Alex.
Well, thank you, Dominic. Well, Dominic, thank you again. Look, the other person that I'd be remiss if I didn't thank is Debbie, his wife. They were actually grade school sweethearts. To go through that, and when you look at their children, their grandchildren, the father, the family, mother they have, it's pretty special, especially in today's world, to have that kind of a family at home, and let alone your Johnson & Johnson family is pretty darn special. Thanks again, Dominic. Look, as we wrap up today, I'd also be remiss if I didn't thank a few other people, and that is all the J&J leaders in this room.
While Dominic and I get to sit up here and conclude and kind of bring this as a wrap-up, I think what, as I said earlier today, was I think what makes J&J such a special place besides our credo is the quality of our leaders, and in fact, the people who are running the business, who are responsible for our people each and every day. There's no way that we could do our jobs without them. I would just like to publicly acknowledge them and ask you guys to stand for a second and join me giving them a big round of applause. Thank you. Look, as we wrap up today, I hope you got a lot of good information.
I hope you found it informative, interesting, and have a much better understanding how across all of Johnson & Johnson, but in particular these two business segments, our medical device and our consumer segment, that we are poised for future success and growth. If you think about what we have in our consumer business, in addition to great iconic brands, think about what we're doing around an omni-channel customer-centric approach, and brands that are scientifically differentiated, what we're going to be doing in baby and oral care, how we're financially managing the business, the top line, as well as our margins, above-market growth as we head through the rest of 2018 and beyond. When you think about our medical device businesses, enhancing our current leadership positions, that's critical to start there. Some areas we've got great performers. Vision care is a great example of that.
Electrophysiology is a great example of that. What we're going to be doing in stroke, that you heard from Shlomi, and clearly our commitment to taking on areas like spine and knees and the plans that we have in place to get those in the right place. The cadence of innovation, the string of launches, meaningful launches, that yes, in some cases are going to buttress what we have, but in other cases, I would strongly argue that it's going to fulfill unmet need, and allow us to reach more patients and differentiate ourselves further. We clearly will be accelerating growth across this segment to above-market growth by 2020. We think that's a realistic goal, aggressive, but one that we are absolutely committed to. We couldn't be more confident in the J&J of today.
We couldn't be more confident, though, in the future that we have ahead, and we just want to thank you very much for joining us today, and hope you enjoyed it. We look forward to seeing you again next year. Joe?
Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Dominic. Dominic, once again, congratulations on truly a distinguished career. That concludes today's event. Thanks to those who made the trip into New Brunswick and those who viewed us on the webcast. We look forward to engaging with all of you again in the near future, specifically July 17th for our second quarter earnings call. Thank you.