Welcome, you all, to the Jefferies Healthcare Conference. My name is Matt James, and I'm part of the healthcare banking team here. With me is Tom Logan and Brian Schopfer from Mirion Technologies, and I'll let you guys take it away.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our session. We're really delighted to have the opportunity to tell you more about Mirion today. I'm going to begin recognizing the usual disclaimer by talking about really who we are and what we do, recognizing we may be an unfamiliar name to many of you. Mirion is a company that became public in October of 2021, but our history predates that. I'm the founding CEO. We began the creation of Mirion back in 2003. I've been leading the company since then. This is my 21st year leading this business. Over that time, I think we've built up something that's interesting and compelling in the marketplace we compete in today. At its core, if I describe what Mirion does, I would tell you that we are the global leader in ionizing radiation detection, measurement, and analysis technologies.
And I recognize that sounds very arcane, very technical, but it's a very, very exciting market. And let me try and convey why. Firstly, I'm going to begin by kind of parsing what I just told you. Firstly, when we talk about ionizing radiation, importantly, we are talking about radiation that can knock an electron out of its orbit. We were talking about alpha, beta, gamma, X-ray, and neutron radiation. We're not talking about microwaves or anything else on the electromagnetic spectrum. The core of our focus revolves around unsurpassed domain knowledge, again, in and around the technologies we use to, again, analyze, measure, detect ionizing radiation. The importance of this has many dimensions. Firstly, when we think about the addressable market that we compete in today, it's rather large.
Our estimate is that we compete in a $18-$20 billion addressable market today, of which we're competing in a currently served component of about $4 billion. But importantly, as we think about the growth of radiopharmaceutical therapy, or as many people describe it, theranostics, we see that addressable market growing at a rather rapid rate. And as I go through the presentation, I'll drill down on that a little bit more deeply, and I'll also talk about another very important super trend that I think you should understand as you think about our company overall. We view ourselves as the global leader for a number of reasons. Firstly, of our 19 product categories, we're the global number one in 16 of those product categories. Secondly, even though we compete against much larger companies, on a like-for-like basis, we are many times larger than the nearest of those competitors.
Finally, I would note that in terms of cutting-edge applications, particularly the most advanced scientific applications, we are clearly the most involved firm in these applications overall. As an example, our instruments were used for the discovery of the last nine elements on the periodic table. Our instruments have been launched on many of the important interplanetary space probes spanning the last two decades. And even in the last year, we have launched instrumentation on the European Space Agency's Jupiter mission, the NASA Artemis mission, and the NASA Psyche mission, which is focused on intercepting an asteroid viewed as a protoplanet that's currently orbiting beyond the Mars orbital planet. We are currently on the International Space Station. We have developed instrumentation for the Mars mission. But beyond that, as we think about pure science applications, we are deeply involved in the detection and measurement of dark matter.
And the importance of this is not so much as it relates to the financial profile of a company. This is, to be clear, a small market. It's an important market for us, but a small one. But rather, it demonstrates the technological prowess of our company, which we believe is second to none. But beyond that, there's a very important second-order effect in that the work that we do in these bleeding-edge applications, as we think about things like detector design, the inherent material science associated with that, signal chain management, electronics through development of ASICs, and power-conserving circuitry firmware, a whole host of other things, have relevance beyond that immediate application to everything that we do. There is a very high degree of technological fungibility across our vertical market boundaries, and this is really the key to our company.
As we'll describe again in the presentation, we have two operating segments that are very different. One is what we call our technology segment, which is largely focused on industrial applications. The second is our medical segment, which is certainly focused on healthcare applications. But there is great coherence between the two, and I hope to be able to make the case to you. Fundamentally, what that means is that as we continue to scale as a company, not only through strong organic growth, but through strong total growth supplemented by a strong M&A program over time, it gives us the ability to scale to a considerably larger size without ever having to conglomerate, to continue as a pure play in this space. We think that's very attractive. We think it has some very compelling dynamics. So let me unpack this a little bit further.
Firstly, by touching on a few metrics about our company. Again, we were created officially in 2005, but the initial work began in 2003. I mentioned our category leadership position. Our brand equity is also unsurpassed, recognizing that even though Mirion is a young company, many of the component pieces that coalesce to form Mirion are companies that have been in their respective space for many, many decades, in some cases spanning 50 years or more. And so as a consequence, the customer relationship capital that we've built up in our chosen space is second to none. We're a very global company. We have 2,800 employees around the world, broadly distributed in a very heavy component, as you might imagine, of technologists, including both engineers and scientists. And our operating footprint today spans 12 different companies.
From an investment thesis standpoint, I think the things that are important and should be of interest as you evaluate our company are these. Firstly, we are the global innovation leader. We tend to spend about 10% of our revenue on engineering, which is comprised of pure R&D, sustaining engineering, and customized customer projects, all of which involve, again, a very high degree of engineering beyond the normal industrial or operational engineering. As a consequence, there's a bit of a flywheel effect. As we invest in the continued evolution of our product line, we often view ourselves as the disruptor, trying to truncate product cycles to drive toward ever greater coherence, and in this era, a greater degree of digitization overall in the product offering we bring into the marketplace. Secondly, we have very high visibility into our long-term growth.
The very nature of what we sell is that we are selling highly regulated products, compulsory solutions into environments where the cost of failure is high. Switching costs are high, but paradoxically, oftentimes the wallet share dedicated to our solutions is relatively low. It's this paradox that tends to drive our long-term customers to favor us over many others. We have a concentrated competitive base, a deep and broad competitive moat overall. All of that is to say that if the wallet share is relatively low, why not choose the best? Why not choose somebody that you know and trust who's been at play in the market for a very long time? But importantly, from a visibility standpoint, we're also a backlog-driven company. Today, our backlog exceeds $800 million. Typically, about half of the NTM revenue at any given point in time flows out of our backlog.
And this, again, tends to give us a very high degree of visibility as to the upcoming flow of our business. But beyond that, as we look at the longer-term trends driving demand in our sector, we have a long-term view that exceeds that by many, many times. Our company is very resilient. If you think about the initial chapters of our business, again, beginning our foundation in 2003, formally becoming Mirion in 2005, you have a period of time that spans the Great Recession, the birth and death of a then-prevalent nuclear renaissance, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, Areva, the Fukushima incident, another recession thrown into the mix, the devolution of global trade between the West and China, COVID pandemic, dot, dot, dot, many other factors. During that time, the vertical headwinds were enormous.
The profitability, the financial duress that many components of our customer base were under during that time, I think, is self-evident. But the interesting thing is, despite that, we were able to grow. And through the first 15 years of our history, we grew at a top-line CAGR of about 12 points, four organic, eight inorganic. We drove a substantial margin expansion. We continued to gain share. And ultimately, we built a company that we were able to take public in 2021. We believe we're good operators. Again, I would refer to the fact of if you were to look through our P&L, look at our growth history, look at our margin profile, look at our historical free cash flow conversion, we feel like we've proven our capability through our business system to deliver superior results over an extended period of time.
And then finally, I would just touch on the fact that from a capital allocation standpoint, we're very disciplined. We're also self-aware, understanding that for the first 17 years of our existence, we were private equity funded. Throughout that time, carried typically about 6x leverage. We came public in October 2021 at about 4.5x leverage. We recognize fully the negative views toward that level of leverage in the marketplace. We've been very successful at deleveraging our company since going public. Last quarter, we finished at about 3.1x leverage. If we continue on course this year with no M&A, we'll end the year in the mid-2s in terms of our total leverage overall. To be clear, our history is of being an acquisitive firm. I think since 2017, we've done about 16 acquisitions. They've been highly accretive.
It's been an important component of our overall strategic evolution. We have continued to be active in M&A markets, even while deleveraging the business. That really is our stance going forward, that we're going to continue to play small ball and both deliver the balance sheet while at the same time continuing to focus on highly accretive, strategically important acquisitions. Recognizing we're here at a medical conference, I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes on the medical segment, and then we'll go much faster through the balance of the remainder of the presentation. Simply to note that firstly, if you look at our overall medical segment, it represents about 37% of our total revenue, about 42% of our total EBITDA. Our medical segment is the faster growing segment as between the two of them.
It is our expectation that given that organic growth and candidly, given the fact that we have been over-indexing on inorganic growth in the healthcare segment, that ultimately this will become the larger of our two segments, firstly from a profit contribution standpoint and subsequently from a revenue standpoint. Today, our position in healthcare has three major components, the largest of which is in our radiation therapy quality assurance segment. So when we talk about RTQA, again, radiation therapy quality assurance, basically what we are talking about is offering solutions in the form of hardware, capital equipment, software, and services that are focused on patient treatment planning and machine-level QA for external beam therapy. Typically, in a Western country, about two-thirds of newly diagnosed cancer patients are likely to be prescribed external beam therapy as a component of their overall treatment plan.
We provide an essential service into that sector, again, because there is a vast preference on the part of clinicians for independent quality assurance. It's critical to make sure that machines are going through daily, weekly, quarterly, annual safety checks as prescribed. We are a global leader in this business, both in terms of our software product, our core workflow software platform called SunCHECK, but also in terms of capital equipment and consumables like various types of diagnostic and therapeutic phantoms. Secondly, we participate in the nuclear medicine segment. This is a tremendously exciting growth area within the industry. There's been much discussion today at this conference about the evolution in the so-called theranostics market or the radioligand therapy or radiopharmaceutical therapy market. Choose your term of choice. But again, we have a great position here.
Today, we own the leading data management software platform in North America, the EC2 platform. We're also a leader in critical capital equipment, critical instrumentation that support the nuclear medicine ecosystem, most commonly in the form of dose calibration instruments, but also including thyroid uptake systems, xenon gas-based respiratory study systems, various types of compounding, transport equipment, and the like. Finally, we are a leader in occupational dosimetry. We proudly offer the unique digital dosimetry platform in the industry, the Instadose family of products. We are in the midst of launching the third generation of technology here in, and we think it will continue to really drive a broad-based global evolution in occupational dosimetry. In total, this represents our medical segment. We expect that, again, this will be the fastest growing of our two reporting segments.
We are tremendously excited about our ability to take our existing positioning, both in the RTQA market as well as the nuclear medical market, and through a combination of enhanced software functionality, enhanced connectivity with our ecosystem of instrumentation and consumables to drive a higher degree of digital solutions in this space and to provide superior offerings as the demands and needs of practitioners continue to change. I'll just end it by noting that our technology segment is also a very attractive component of our business. Today, this is the larger of our two segments and really dominated by commercial nuclear power. The thought I want to leave you with is that nuclear power increasingly is seen as a critical component of the world's global energy mix. The world simply does not have enough electrical generating capacity today.
That imbalance has been made worse by the sudden awareness, the public and investor consciousness in and around the needs of AI in terms of building out data centers and having the power necessary to support this ecosystem overall. Nuclear power today, generationally, is healthier than it has been probably since the 1980s. Participants are making money. Capital and operating budgets are swelling. We are seeing a pickup in new build activity. But more importantly, we're seeing great health in the installed base. And we expect that these trends will continue. We do believe this will be a super trend supporting not only utility scale nuclear power, but also beyond that, the movement in small modular reactors, which will be another important component, not only in powering data centers and the increasing digital economy, but also displacing decommissioning coal plants and the like.
We offer a broad array of instrumentation in this space, again, a market leader in most of what we do. And importantly, that also spills over into defense, both civil and military applications, and the labs and research space. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to end my comments there. This presentation is available online and certainly we are highly accessible. But at this point, I'd love to answer any questions from the audience. Well, we've got some more time. Oh, we have a question here.
Yes. One question maybe regarding what we are seeing indeed and hearing more and more news about new builds, as you mentioned, in the nuclear power and extensions also, in terms of timing. And while some have already been announced a couple of years ago, so in terms of timing, when do you expect to really see this wave of new demand for nuclear?
Yeah. So the nuclear do-build activity is incredibly important. It's very exciting right now. But firstly, just to put it into context, today, if you look at our revenue associated with nuclear power, which I think is about 37% of our total revenue, the vast majority of it today actually comes from the installed base. So once we gain a position of incumbency, and today we have a position in more than 90% of the world's roughly 450 operating commercial nuclear power reactors, we are highly likely to retain that position over many decades, potentially even a century or longer, depending on the power plant, the application, and the location. And importantly, when we think about the installed base, a decade ago globally, most of the operators of nuclear power plants were losing money. They were competing against an environment where firstly, demand was very soft.
Again, think of the Great Recession and the very tepid demand that we had both from a retail standpoint as well as an industrial standpoint globally. But beyond that, you also had competition against seemingly limitless natural gas and the attendant buildout of combined cycle gas turbine power plants, the first wave of the massive buildout in heavily subsidized renewable power. And so as a consequence, at the same time, from a demand standpoint or a supply side standpoint, we were building capacity. And so it led to a situation where electrical power pricing in both regulated and deregulated markets was weak. And so again, most of the operators were not making money. This led to a deferral of capital, a lot of collective belt tightening, profound capital rationing overall.
Comparing that with today, where if you look at what's changed, firstly, with a strong global economy, secondly, with the new calls on electrical generating capacity in the form of not only AI and the growth in data centers, but also the electric vehicle economy, the general electrification of developing economies, etc., has placed new demands on the overall power capacity globally. That coupled with energy security issues that have arisen as a result of the war in Ukraine, liquefaction of a more significant component of American gas, etc., have created a situation where from both the demand and a supply standpoint, electrical pricing has gone up as a result. The operators of nuclear power plants on a global basis are now making money. They are catching up on capital spending. They're very interested in running their reactors at higher capacity factors, life extending them and operating them.
All of these things ultimately will benefit our company overall. But specifically on the new build activity, there are nearly 50 new nuclear power reactors being built today. There is a great call globally, even most lately coming from the UN and their climate conference, calling for a terawatt of additional new nuclear power between now and 2050. We don't think that's candidly possible, but we do expect and we do see anecdotally through our customer engagement that there will be an acceleration in new build activity. To be clear, most of this activity will happen outside of the U.S. It's happening today largely in Europe and in Asia.
But we do believe that as we see the small modular reactors begin to come online, most likely in the next 5-10 years, understanding that last year we booked about $10 million in backlog on 5 different SMR projects. But this stream of this trickle of business still is unlikely to turn into a stream until probably 5-10 years out. But the bottom line is that new build activity very clearly is picking up. We see that directly. We continue to be excited about this long-term super trend that'll be very important to our company. Who else has a question? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we're out of time today. It's a pleasure to have had this opportunity to speak with you and to be listened to by those of you who are online.
We'd love to take further questions from you through our IR organization should you have any. We hope to have the opportunity to come back and talk about our progress next year. Thanks.