Okay. Welcome to the first day of our JP Morgan Industrial Conference. We're pleased to have Kaiser Aluminum here today. President CEO Keith Harvey is gonna walk us through a little presentation, then we'll move to Q&A. I certainly have some questions, but certainly, willing to, you know, raise your hand. We'll let you guys ask some questions too. Thanks for joining our conference.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good morning, everyone. Okay, President, CEO of Kaiser Aluminum, about 43 years with the company. Started as an engineer in one of our plants. Thank you very much for your interest in our company. I'll do a little run-through on what we're about and how we operate, and as Bill said, we'll entertain some questions. I'll go through the usual forward-looking statements. These are on our website if you care to look at any of these. Okay. Company overview. We're a North American producer, highly engineered fabricated products. We've got a diversified portfolio. We focus on four specific markets in general that all demonstrate strong secular growth trends in place. Our business philosophy is one of integral passthrough on the business model.
We pass through metal, and we work on Conversion Revenue for our profits in the business. We've got longstanding relationships with our customer base. This is our 76th year in operation, so we've been operating with a number of our customers since our inception. We've got a disciplined approach to management of liquidity and debt leverage, and we'll get into some more details about what that's about, especially in days like today. Then we focus on strong operating leverage and manufacturing efficiency to ensure that we have a low cost position to operate in the markets that we entertain. We have 14 facilities around the country. We have one facility in Canada, but we're a North American-based company.
The products we focus on are sheet, plate, and coil products in the various markets we participate, as well as extrusions, high strength, and what we refer to as soft alloy extrusions. We also have a bevy of drawn products which we offer in the marketplace. Our strategy has been consistent over the last 16+ years. We focus on demanding applications where there are significant barriers to entry. For instance, we've been in the aerospace business since our inception for 76 years. We focus on differentiation of our product, so as well as quality, but also product preferences with machinability and so forth for our customers. We focus on differentiating in those manners, we create value with operating leverage and with manufacturing efficiencies in our ops.
In markets that we service, well, the aerospace, commercial, defense, and business jet and space included in that, in that space, automotive, general engineering, and most recently, we reengaged back into the packaging markets with the acquisition of a large rolling mill asset in Evansville, Indiana, our Warrick operation. In the focus that we also, with the diversified products that we focus in the specific markets, it's a small niche area in which we find those attributes and where we want to get paid for what we do. If you look to the chart on the left, you'll see that the global market for sheet and plate products is roughly greater, a little around 65 billion products. We operate in less than 15% of those markets.
We have operated as a company in all of those over our, over our history, but we're focused on the heat treat non-auto type products for our flat roll products. Then we're back into the can business. We focus on can in North America only. Then you move to the right side of the chart, our long products, which are our drawn high strength and soft alloy extrusion products. We focus on less than 20% of the North America market, which is roughly about a 5 billion pound market. Looking at our portfolio, there's a mix of from a Conversion Revenue. Conversion Revenue from our perspective is just taking out all the metal, all the alloying costs. Conversion Revenue is the area we potentially focus on and our opportunity to make profits. Our philosophy is to pass through metal.
We don't try to necessarily judge the market or time the market, if you will. Ours is to focus on the Conversion Revenue. The pie chart on the left shows at the end of the year, I'll get into some of the reasons for that. We're a little heavier in packaging through through 2022 just because some of our markets are rebounding from the COVID post-pandemic timing. Demand drivers for our products. If you look at our packaging, we focus on beverage and the food can markets. we're finding a strong growth potential there due to the sustainability efforts that are underway from plastic. On the aerospace, it's really a focus on global passenger air travel.
Obviously, to have a segment of our business on defense, we see we're not only on the current program, the F-35, but also on all the legacy and the rotary aircraft. This jet is a large part of what we focus on. There's a big resurgence take underway since the pandemic on business jet development, and then we focus on space development as well. On automotive extrusion, light weighting of vehicles for the ICE especially, has been underway for a number of years. As we pivot toward the EV vehicles, we're seeing a larger content opportunity for extrusions in our business as you look at construction of battery boxes, still structural components, and we still focus on the legacy products, which are like anti-lock braking systems, of which we have a significant position.
On general engineering, mainly focus on North American industrial products. Part of our drivers are Industrial Production rates and GDP. We have seen a reshoring trend take place since the pandemic, as a lot of our end customers were caught short due to the supply chain issues that were as a result of that period of time, and we're seeing that sustained going forward, that's a positive for our position there. We also have a large position in general engineering because we have that broad bevy of products. We sell mainly through a North American distribution base, and that broad product offering is something that we utilize with our distributors. Resilience and growth through the various cycles. As you know, in our industry, we have a significant amount of cyclicality to our business, up and downs.
You'll see at the bottom some of the events that take place within the markets that have a potential to impact the business, either positively or negatively. Selling through that. Our Conversion Revenue, you'll see, look in the 2020 timeframe. I'll focus you on the red portion of that graph. Aerospace type products were at one time 60% of the company's Conversion Revenue. The pandemic had a significant impact. We saw a 40% decline in that business. Those are relatively high margin type products. We're seeing that rebound, have been calling that out since really the first of 2021. We've seen continued growth, and that continues. I'll also point to the light blue in the 2021/2022 period.
We made an acquisition back into the packaging industry of the Warrick Rolling Mill facility from Alcoa. Significant growth opportunity, we felt, and an opportunity for us to move into very specific higher-margin products within that category. That mill we bought at a period of time, we were really pleased with the acquisition price that we paid for that and with the long-term outlook, and we'll go a little bit more into that in a minute. We've demonstrated the ability to deliver results even in those cycles. You know, we focus on the left part of the growth, but you'll focus on the last three years.
Those last three years, with the impact on our market with COVID, with the challenges that we had, with some supply chain issues, labor challenges over that period of time, we've continued to be at the lower levels of our output. We're starting to see things hopefully more normalized as we go forward into 2023. We had challenges with things such as labor. Labor, we ended up hiring 900 people last year, and roughly 100 of those folks stayed. That's just a little microcosm of what we've been dealing with when the labor markets and some of the challenges that we've had. I'll really not focus on this. We had a lot of supply chain challenges with the acquisition that we made last year.
A lot of unusual costs that impacted the business. This is typically some of the things that we've done. We've started to recover here. We started to put some of our assets in place in the business. We have long-term contracts of which we're currently renegotiating going through. We have a major investment that's following on the heels of this acquisition for this business, which will give us significant margin enhancement on roughly 25% of the business that we currently have. That's halfway through. The operation's supposed to be up and running early to mid next year. Our end market outlook, we talked about the demand drivers, but for packaging, and these are really focused off of the 2021 period of time. We see a 5%-7% growth in this market.
This market is being heavily subsidized right now with over 1 billion pounds of imports, mainly from Asia. We see significant opportunity to enhance margin. This business allows us to pass through cost. So we have alloy cost, energy, freight, a number of other costs or pass-throughs that we do. We see significant growth continuing there as from a sustainability effort, as consumers really focus on moving from plastic-type products to highly sustainable products such as aluminum. We're seeing that growth not only in beverage, but also in the food can industry. On the aerospace high strength, again, significantly impacted in 2020 due to COVID and that change. I noticed there's a lot of aerospace companies attending the JPMorgan today.
What we're seeing is a really strong rebound, in the commercial market, which is the largest driver on that side. It's really driven by passenger airline growth miles. What we're seeing there is the return to the recovery rate. We were seeing 3%-4% CAGR growth on that up through 2019, actually the first quarter of 2020. As we moved into that, we saw our business drop roughly 40%. We're still about 30% below the historic high of what we saw in 2019. As we've been saying for roughly eight quarters now, we expect that to rebound back to where it was in 2019 at roughly the rates that, and return back to the growth rate that we experienced.
With the aircraft backlog that's beginning to go back and the build rate starting to recover, we feel that's pretty much on track. On the automotive, we've got a 5% CAGR. That's a fairly conservative number over the years. We've seen 5%-20% anytime a recovery that's been higher even in the teens on that growth. That's really being driven by growth in North America, conversion to EV, but light weighting continues. We're heavily on trucks and SUVs for our products. That's roughly 80% of North American sales. We're in good position there, but as you know, that industry's been impacted over the last number of few years due to the COVID and supply chain challenges as well.
Then on General Engineering, which is important business for ours, we've been in some of our customers', one of our major, our largest customers, Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. There's about a 2% CAGR there. We saw demand really muted over the last few years, but as that reshoring has occurred, we're starting to see that recover. A 2% CAGR is actually pretty exciting for us to see the return for that business. Our business cycle strategy is to be prepared for adversity. What does that mean? Well, we're in highly cyclical markets, typically. Actually that was one of the drivers to move back to packaging, which isn't as cyclical in the past as our products. In the past, our products are highly cyclical.
We've known that there can be considerable high, considerable lows, and they happen very quickly in our industry. It really focuses us on sustaining our position with long-term customers to be able to weather through those. Our costs, we consider fairly flexible, variable cost. We demonstrated that in the beginning of COVID. We took out close to $100 million within a two or three-month period. Cycling back up has been a challenge from a labor perspective, but we're still in a position if for instance, we're ready to hit in a recession, we have highly variable costs which we can flex fairly quickly. Retain strong liquidity as a safety net. We finished the year roughly $600 million of liquidity on the balance sheet.
It not only is good for a safety net in the downturns, but it also provided us the opportunity to acquire the Warrick facility in the middle of COVID, during a period of time when others were more focused on whether or not they were gonna be able to go through COVID. Finally, the focus on business on the management team is to really maintain a conservative debt leverage. We really focus on the 2 and 2.5 x. We knew that as we moved after the acquisition, that's accelerated. It's higher than that. Management has a strong focus on returning that to a 2 and 2.5 x within a very short period of time. We talked about metal price neutrality.
Our focus is to have provisions in place to pass through these highly volatile costs that we associated. Last year was a perfect example of having the ability to pass through costs. Costs basically ramped from $1- $2 a pound and back to $1.20 within almost a 13-month time period. We have to have the ability to pass through and manage through that. Over 95% of our shipments have that type of metal pass-through provision associated with those. The remainder we're able to pass through in roughly a two to three month time period, depending on the lag in the markets. That's a focus that the business has had for the long term and serves us well in these volatile markets. Our capital allocation priorities on the left, these have been longstanding for us.
Our number one priority is to invest in organic investments. We've had a number of those that have transpired over the last, especially the last decade and a half for the company. We've invested back more than 2 x appreciation on this, and we have including sustaining CapEx, a significant amount of that on growth over the last number of years. We've put back roughly $3 billion investment in this business since 2006 time period. Second priority is inorganic growth. We focus, it's such as we fill white spaces. We've had a number of small investments we've made, or it was by far our largest investment for over 30 years. That's our largest acquisition that has taken place.
Third, we've had a very strong commitment to our dividend, a little different in our space, as we since a period of time, and that's a focus on we basically stated that we won't sit on the cash in the company if there are no other investments. The top two priorities, you know, we basically have maturized for a period of time. We will move dividends back on a fairly regular basis to our shareholders. Beyond that, if there's excess cash, we have a history of returning that cash back to the shareholders in the form of repurchasing of shares. Here's a little documentation of what we've done on organic investment. You can see over $1 billion, more than 2 x depreciation that have taken place back into the business.
Just after the major acquisition, we had a strong investment that took place last year toward the furthering that growth. Majority of that was on growth. We have a strong, we've talked about a $170 million-$190 million investment that management's gonna assume this year for continuation of that growth. On the inorganic investments, you can see a number of smaller investments we've done over the years for to really fill in on white spaces around aerospace or other than major markets that we serve. Certainly, the largest move we've made was to get back into packaging with the Alcoa Warrick facility company. We paid a roughly $670 million in cash for that operation. , and that to satisfy that growth that we talked about earlier.
These two charts show how we've been disciplined on the return to shareholders. You can see the strong and improving dividend back through the 2007 time period. The chart on the right are the share repurchases we've made. We think, as a management team, we have more growth investment opportunities in front of us now than we've had ever in the last 20, 30 years. That's solid outlook for us, but a balanced approach to how we look at capital. Talk about the end market outlook and our growth potential, and we've looked at this, we've talked about the end market demand drivers on the left. We've talked about on the portion on the right of what we feel needs to take place to position ourselves from that.
Currently, we're under an investment at the packaging facility to substantiate the growth for packaging. We have a phase seven expansion planned at our other major rolling mill at Trentwood in Spokane, focused on aerospace and GE growth. We've pulled six of those expansions over the last 10 + years, as the aeros market continues to rebound, GE is strong. We see we've already got that on the blueprints to pull that trigger when that's ready. We've got other investments ready to support the automotive growth when we see that happening. you know, we feel we have a strong balance sheet of which we can affect those changes.
Long-term outlook for this business, we believe we can deliver with that on the right and with the market demands on the left, we believe this business will be able to deliver roughly $2 billion Conversion Revenue with margins back into the mid-to-high 20s%. Certainly different than where we're at today, but we've got the market positioning and investment plan to get us back there. Finally, from a sustainability perspective, we feel we're part of the carbon solution. Aluminum is used a lot by our customers, and to affect their Scope 3 challenges, we're light weighting. We provide an opportunity for them to continue to use our Kaiser Select products.
Kaiser Select products basically are products that we believe are industry-leading from a performance perspective on how fast people can machine and utilize our products and reduce the cost in doing so. Our focus on it we have strong focus for Excuse me, 2030 to basically reduce the intensity of carbon outlook in our facilities by over 30%. Those plans are in place. Finally, the use of recyclable material in our products, as our customers use and lightweight their products, that's a continuation of the use for the low carbon content for the products. Okay. With that.
Yeah. Thanks, Keith. That was a great overview.
Sit down. Thank you.
Yeah, why don't I kick off with a couple end market questions, but again, you know, if you guys wanna also ask some questions, please, you know, please let me know. Let's start off with end markets. You provided, you know, the longer-term sort of outlook across these end markets, and then in the, in the fourth quarter earnings, you provided some very near-term sort of shipment guidance. Kinda low mid-single digits for packaging, aero, and auto here in the first quarter, offset by general engineering down, you know, sort of mid high single digits versus this longer-term outlook. I guess, you know, if we sort of bracket that, how should we think about the growth through the progression of this year and in the next year?
What are the areas you see the most growth potential, maybe looking at again, like, second half of the year and into next year?
Certainly. I'll take them by products because they certainly have their own dynamics. We'll focus first on the aerospace market. Aerospace market, as I said, have, if you go back and look at our quarters, we've had continual improvement back to that 2019 high water mark. That market is continuing to pick up speed. We're getting some great signs for both Airbus, Boeing looking to really accelerate build rates over the month as supply chain basically will allow a very strong backlog. We're back to an 8-10 year backlog on those products, and we certainly see defense, business jet really helping to also throw some steady demand.
Probably our strongest growth potential from this point is on the aerospace and a return not only to the levels we were, but back on that 3% or 4% CAGR rate. You move back down to packaging. Packaging is on a little bit of a. Everything is cyclical. This isn't as. We've seen a short slowdown in the fourth quarter and slightly in the first quarter. Mainly, this is an inventory rebalance as some of the consumer traits change. You know, as people get back out in the marketplace, restaurants, and all this, we're seeing a transition from some of the packages that we dealt with and others. Some packages or products like food products are continuing to accelerate. Within the class itself, we're seeing some variation. We don't think that's a long-term scenario.
Our customers tell us this is a short-term rebalance of products. You move on to the automotive side of the business. Automotive is prepped. We typically, on SAAR, we would see a 16 to 18 million passenger vehicle build rate in any given year, and we've been stuck at roughly the 13 million build rate, vehicle build rate for the last three or four years. There's pent-up demand out there. However, there's a few clouds with interest rates and so forth that are out there. I think that business will start to recover. Our business has been flat for three years. We're showing less than 5%. Actually, a little bit of 2%-3% growth. On the Conversion Revenue, we're seeing a little better with prices and new programs that we're launching.
We're seeing some better passes, pass-through of costs and a little higher margins on those products. Finally, on the general engineering product, which is mainly the, you know, the IP of the country, and we focus on North America. We saw that we were such a torrid pace for the previous six to seven quarters, we felt that those weren't sustainable. We started to see our distributor inventory rates start to rise, and we saw a slight hesitation in the fourth quarter. That continued into the first quarter. You know, it really all focuses on they're our canary in a coal mine, so if we have a hard landing or a soft landing or any landing at all, they'll generally be the product where we'll see a greater slowdown.
Generally, there's some price deceleration that'll take place if we're in a recession. We haven't seen any of that to this point. You know, it's a little bit all this uncertainty and then some of the challenges we had last year, which led us to just give the short outlook for just the first quarter.
Yeah. No, it makes sense. Maybe just following up on auto. you know, you talked about lightweighting for traditional vehicles. How does the content progression go from, you know, current ICE lightweighting ICE to EVs?
It's really an interesting trend. It's developing as we speak. Of course, on ICE vehicles, we were working on CAFE requirements, lightweighting of the vehicles to meet the CAFE standards to help them do that. Of course, there's a number of products we call legacy programs that we're on, such as anti-lock disc brakes and things like that, which we'll continue on even whether it's EV, because they still have to hit the safety mandates. Depending on where we end up on things like the battery tray. Right now, the industry is focused on which type of materials. Of course, it's all in parallel with what they're trying to get for extension on battery development. There's a certain mileage they're trying to meet on all of these.
Lightweighting will continue regardless of the development of the battery and the extension that the battery life can give on performance. If a number of the programs, and we're working with a number of folks that are looking on an aluminum extruded battery box, which not only serves to hold the batteries, it's also a conduit to remove heat from the vehicle, and we also use it as a substrate for wiring and so forth, like hydraulic lines or if they're available to maneuver through. There are also underway development with steel and stamp product and all this. If it moves the way of extruded, that's a potential 50% increase over an ICE vehicle use of extrusions. There's a tremendous opportunity on the upside there. It just depends on how the development works.
Of course, this will take place over a number of years. There are a number of programs that will go aluminum extrusions. There's some that will try steel. It's all based on the platform that it's being used on.
Yeah, thanks for that. Pivoting maybe more towards some of the strategic things you're working on, I guess related to, general engineering, you know, maybe further following auto, but also aerospace. What are you uniquely providing these markets that are unique? Maybe again, GE and aerospace, you kind of hit on the automotive side just now.
Yeah. On the aerospace, we're one of the few companies in the world that have been qualified and deliver products to the aerospace, especially on the commercial side, for over 70+ years. That market is a very demanding market to get into, really, difficult qualifications, obviously, the quality of your products and so forth. We've been on programs for multiple years, during a period of the early growth, a lot of new entrants to try to penetrate the market, we have a very strong position across the litany of programs that we've talked about earlier, we're maintaining. We're continuing to invest as the growth of that market occurs. I mentioned on our flat roll side, we've had six major expansions over the last 15, 16 years.
Phase 7, which we believe we'll need to pull within the next one to two years, that's on the shelf ready to go. That's going to add additional 20%-25% additional capacity for those markets. That investment will also support the general engineering side, which we think general engineering side is on a recovery basis here as reshoring takes place. Certain markets, as semiconductor, as that business gravitates back, we participate heavily with that. Currently, a lot of that end market use is in Asia, but we see a lot of that gravitating back to the U.S. We have a strong position there. On our other beverage products, as I mentioned, our distributors, we sell a lot of our product through that period. They like to buy a beverage product. Every product that we make, they sell.
We have the largest offering domestically of any other player, so we had a strong position. We've supplied Reliance Steel & Aluminum, for instance, for greater than 70 years. As they continue to grow, and they grow in the market, we participate in that growth. Our investments not only help us on things like aerospace, but it also for the GE type investments.
Makes sense. Wanted to see if there's any questions out there before moving on.
Greg, the long-term price tag, which is figure 2022 is a tough year. How much of that would you attribute to the overall volume Crown Cork head ton of 2022? How much is being integrated with Alcoa as much challenging than you thought, or is there 50% Kaiser accountability just been a bad year and something you wish you'd done differently?
Well, first of all, I'm still very excited about packaging and the opportunity it provides us. I did not anticipate a 2022. We had a number of challenges. We've called out, we had roughly $70 million + in unusual costs that occurred. A lot of those occurred at the Warrick facility. We have a short-term supply arrangement with Alcoa. Alcoa ran into some difficulties supplying that material for the first half of the year. They've gotten their act back together there. We also have been challenged with the supply position we had on magnesium. The use of these products, especially on coated products, of which we have a significant amount, we use a lot of magnesium.
One of our major suppliers declared force majeure in September of 2021, and we kept being assured that that was continuing to improve. Well, it didn't improve. It got worse to the point where Kaiser had to declare force majeure mid-year and really impacted our shipments in the third quarter of the year. As a result of a lot of bad things happen, you do a number of things with which to really minimize the impact of those to your customers. What we did as a result, we had to bring in higher-priced metal. That was part of the cost that associated. We had to go out and pay magnesium prices that were considerably higher of what we had previously contracted to.
We have passed through on on areas of that nature, but there's a time of where that pass-through can take. It can take anywhere up to six months to one year to pass those costs through. That untold. Then on our other large rolling mill, we had a major outage in the 3rd quarter of last year. That had been long planned. We executed it very well, but there were a number of costs associated with that also impacted us last year. I would say 2022 was hopefully one of those anomaly years, one of those bad years you just go through. We're starting to normalize operations there. We've diversified all of our raw material alloys and usage since then. We're well covered through the balance of this year and partly into next.
We are getting alternatives to just running hot metal from the Alcoa smelter, and those will be in play. Long term, we're focused on moving highly recyclable type content, UBCs, additional scrap loop. That's really the play to really help suffice the sustainability. We're coming away from the coal-powered plant that exists there. We're getting onto the grid in Indiana with a lot more green type energy opportunity ahead of us. You have to remember, they've been a 50-year Alcoa company, and we're working in the middle of integration into a Kaiser Aluminum operating business. There was that distraction that took place. A lot of things happened in 1992. I mentioned earlier at the podium we had, we hired over 900 employees last year, and we kept around 100 of those.
Another major distraction as you get into when you look at efficiencies of running your operation. It was one of those challenging years. It's really why we have the liquidity that we have. We've seen that in spades back in the 2008 time period and so forth. We're prepared as a company. The good news is starting out through the year, we're seeing demand hold up pretty well. Pricing's holding up very well. You know, still a lot of uncertainty out there about whether or not we'll be in a recession or not, but the long-term secular growth expected in our markets gives us good comfort that we're at the markets that count, and we're in a good position to take advantage of those longer term. Thank you.
Hi. Can you talk about the supply-demand dynamics for aluminum in general, your views on that?
I actually think that we're in a period of resurgence to where there's gonna be significant pull on our products. One of the factors, I was around in the '90s as we actually exited packaging. As we looked at, we had looked at that for couple of years prior to reengaging and reemerging back into it. A lot of those demands that were taking place, the sustainability of moving away from plastics, moving into highly sustainable areas, looking at markets and customers in that space that were willing to look strategically with us. One of the reasons we got out in the first place is we weren't able to extract enough margin with the cost of, you know, a lot of cost demand and all this.
Those customers are looking strategically long term, so they're addressing us differently. They're like an aerospace. They consider us extremely important to the growth of their, of their growth. You know, the consumer's the one that's driving this. I apologize, I don't like looking through that. Packaging was really a good story for us and a reason for enough to reemerge. When you look at aerospace, at one time, we were worried about, you know, the composites coming back into the planes. As that has developed over time, all the new platforms continue to have a high rate of aluminum in there, certainly business jets, certainly space, everything. There's a big strong pull there. We actually bought a company to look at whether or not 3D manufacturing was going to offset it.
We were comfortable it's not going to happen. We see good, strong sustainability there. I think as the reshoring has taken place for GE products, it's continuing to give us upside potential here. Auto, eventually, when the supply chain issues work out, they're moving to lightweight. It really solves the equation for CAFE, but it also solves the equation for distance that they can travel under battery-type propulsion. When you look at the markets we're in, the drivers are pretty sustainable that we're in, and we think we're gonna continue to drive the growth.
On like supply, like smelters aren't that profitable or, you know, there's concerns about sort of starting to get where China, you know, what are they gonna do? Are they gonna cap their production? I'm just curious also about your views on that.
Well, from a metals perspective, so P1020 and so forth of that, of course, we divested our upstream back in the early 2000 side, and we were at a cost structure and the ability to buy on the open market. We still have those long-standing relationships, so that's really important too. We have, well-diverse. You know, we're more than four or five , up to 10 different suppliers of product there. None from, Someone asked about Russia, and that had no impact on us at all. There was some that we were buying high purity that goes into aerospace, which we were able to replicate with re-relationships we had. Really no concern there. We buy, well-diversified. Magnesium, we got caught short here.
China had stopped supplying that for a while, but that's 85% of the world supply is magnesium. We've well diversified beyond just that local player that we had here. As long as that diversity is in place, right now, we're pretty comfortable with the position that we have.
You're not exposed to a 30%, 50% price on that.
Nope. You saw the document. We immediately pass through almost 95% of the products we sell. That's a pass-through for us. We demonstrated that in the last cycle.
Maybe last question. You're consistently generating mid-20s EBITDA in the past, you know, kind of prior to COVID, and there's been some market dynamics, you know, some challenges you've had. You've spoke to some of those. What steps are the companies, I guess, taking to improve margins from here? What kind of tangible steps and, you know, how do we get back to that sort of level?
Yep. As packaging became a larger position, especially in 2022 than the past, that's a slightly lower margin than our other products in the general area that we cover, and that's the can itself, the lid and the tab. Our focus longer term, this is what we go back to do in all the markets that we're at, we look for those niche areas where we can extract a larger premium in a maybe a select area. Our investment, we're focused on growing in the higher margin, higher value-added coated products. The investment we have is another roll coat line that's gonna allow us to put 25% of our existing capacity into a higher margin category. We've already established contracts to position that in place.
We're gonna move our margin up from that perspective. From a cost perspective, last year was a really difficult year to measure anything on cost. Long term, we have efficiency gains and positions that we know we're gonna get to. We're gonna continue to take cost out of the operations. We mentioned we were 40% down on aero. We expect that to be back by middle of next year. That's another $150 million of Conversion Revenue just to get back to where we were, and the potential margins there are very high.
The companies we've talked about in the first quarter, we've got a plan to take $8 million-$10 million of additional cost, variable cost out of our process. We are very confident we can continue to do that because cost is a big piece of the gain here. That's a very big focus for management. We expect to get there as our markets get back. We make the investments that we've talked about. We execute in more normalized fashion.
Great overview, Keith. Thanks for coming and supporting the conference. Thanks again.
Okay. Thank you for your attention and interest in the company. Thank you.