Let's get started. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to MSA Safety's 2024 Investor Day. I'm Larry De Maria, Executive Director of Investor Relations at MSA Safety. The team is excited to be here, and we appreciate you all coming. For those in the webcast, thank you for joining. Just a quick safety announcement before we get started. If there's a reason to evacuate the building while you're here today, there are two exit paths through the doors at the back of the room. The stairwell is located just behind the back of this room. If you exit to the left side of the room, take a quick right, which will lead you to the hallway with access to the stairwell. If you exit on the right, please make a quick left by the product display to access the stairs.
Those stairs will take you to the lobby and then outside. We're here today to talk about MSA's next phase of profitable growth. The team has a lot of great content in today's presentation, which is also being webcast live. For those of you in the room, please silence your phones and computers, and for those on the webcast, you'll be able to follow along with the presentation slides this morning. The materials are available on Investor Relations website at investors.msasafety.com. First, forward-looking statement. Before we get started, I want to remind you that today's presentation will include forward-looking statements based on our best view of things as of today. Non-GAAP financials. Also, references to materials are non-GAAP financial metrics, and those reconciliations are included in the appendix of today's presentation.
Now turning to today's agenda, we have two sessions this morning, and each will be followed by a Q&A panel. For those in person today, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions, and for those in the webcast, you can submit your questions online. We'll have a break after the first Q&A panel and lunch reception with the team after the second Q&A session concludes. If you need to use the restroom, get a drink, make a phone call during the presentation, please feel free to do so. Looking at today's lineup, in the first session, you'll hear from our key leaders, including Nish Vartanian, Steve Blanco, José Sanchez , Greg Martin, and Stephanie Sciullo, on the topics of strategy, operational excellence, innovation, and sustainability.
In the second session, you'll hear from Gustavo Lopez, Bob Apel, Rob Willis, and Lee McChesney as we dive into our product categories and financial goals. With that, let's get started with a video introducing MSA Safety.
If I spend my whole life doing what I can to lessen the likelihood of the occurrence of such terrible disasters, I shall feel in the end that my life has been well spent," John T. Ryan Sr.
What John T. Ryan Sr. and George Deike began more than 100 years ago, we continue today.
The mission they envisioned to protect workers' lives will never change.
At MSA Safety, innovation is how we serve that mission.
It's the lifeblood of what we do.
It's not just innovation, it's customer-driven innovation.
Innovation begins with listening to our customers and understanding their needs.
So we can imagine and develop the equipment and solutions they need to work safely in dangerous and demanding jobs.
Protecting facilities and infrastructures from hazards that compromise people and our environment is central to that mission. At MSA Safety, we're reimagining the future of detection technology to protect people and facilities in all kinds of industries, including energy, utilities, and chemical processing.
This includes systems that precisely monitor and detect refrigerant leaks on board naval ships and in food service and grocery store settings, helping to protect worker health and safety while reducing our customers' own carbon footprint.
When first responders put their lives on the line, MSA Safety is there to protect them. We envision, design, and create the equipment, apparel, and instruments that firefighters rely on when it matters most.
With innovative technologies like FireGrid, we're creating a connected firefighter ecosystem that seamlessly works together to keep firefighters safe, connected, and accounted for in the most dangerous situations.
Falls are the number one cause of injuries and fatalities in the workplace. Equally dangerous are tasks that require entry and egress from confined spaces. But by reimagining connected technology and ergonomics, we're working to dramatically change that.
As an example, we're developing fall protection systems that are not only comfortable to wear, they let the workers know when they're connected correctly and when they're not. We're innovating and creating the safety solutions of tomorrow.
Our customers are at the heart of what we do.
Listening to our customers to understand their needs.
Taking safety to new heights and new markets.
Fulfilling our mission through innovation.
Helping our customers around the world go home safely each night.
This is MSA Safety.
This is MSA Safety.
MSA Safety.
That is our legacy.
All of us-
Working together-
For a safer world.
What a great video! It really encapsulates what MSA is all about, a mission of safety, one that's focused exclusively on protecting worker health and safety. MSA is leading the way in driving advancements in the safety solutions of tomorrow by focusing on customer-driven innovation. It all starts with our talented and purpose-driven team.
... We have our executive leadership team here today, and in the reception area with the product showcase, we have several leaders who are responsible for innovation across our product areas. I hope you're able to interact with many of them throughout the day today. It's a pleasure to be here this morning and to see so many familiar faces, and I'm sure there are more joining us on the webcast. So thank you for your support, and thank you for being with us today. I'm Nish Vartanian, Non-Executive Chairman of MSA. For the past six years, prior to my recent retirement, from my management role, I was MSA's Chief Executive Officer, and I'm proud to say I worked at MSA for my entire 39-year career.
I often think to John Ryan's quote at the beginning of the video about a life well spent and how our mission continues to positively impact worker safety around the world. At MSA, we know our work matters each and every day for those 40 million workers around the world, and I'm excited about today's presentation, where our team will focus on how MSA continues to evolve and deliver value for our shareholders over the long term. Jumping into the slides, MSA Safety is a purpose-led company, driven by a singular mission of safety. Our company's mission and focus on protecting the world's workers has been unwavering since our founding 110 years ago in 1914, and I'm incredibly proud to spend my career with MSA and continue my affiliation with the company going forward as non-executive chairman.
From the early days of our founding, with the flameless cap lamp developed alongside Thomas Edison, to Gibbs breathing apparatus and our first carbon monoxide detectors, to our current lineup of innovative, interconnected safety technologies across detection, firefighter safety, and industrial PPE, MSA has been at the forefront of innovation in the safety sector throughout its history. With our well-established brand and global presence, our customers look to MSA to keep their employees and critical infrastructure safe and protected. This has resulted in tremendous progress and growth, profitability, and returns over the last ten years. Over this time frame, we've made substantial and sustained improvements in our business by focusing our efforts on our customers, innovation, in categories where we believe we've earned the right to win.
During my time as CEO, we had a goal of getting a 20% operating margin, and we surpassed that goal, finishing 2023 with 22% margin. Our progress over time has resulted in tremendous returns for shareholders, those who believe in our mission. This has been the case across our past three CEOs, John T. Ryan III, Bill Lambert, and me. If you're looking to invest in a business that serves an important role in society and providing compelling returns, you're in the right room or on the right call. I have tremendous confidence in Steve Blanco, who I've worked alongside for over 12 years and watched him work and watched him drive that, this business, and I also know we have the right team in place to drive the company forward and to expand our successful execution.
With that, I'd love to welcome my friend, Steve Blanco, to the stage.
Thanks, Nish. And, you know, first on Nish, I just want to thank him for the support, the mentorship, and his leadership to MSA over his career. And certainly, since I joined the company, the relationship we've had is more than just a work colleague in MSA. It's... We talk about family all the time, and that's how I feel about it, about Nish, and a true friendship. So thank you very much. And thank you for coming, and good morning. As Nish said, I'm our CEO, our tenth CEO, in a 110-year history, and I'm privileged and honored to serve MSA in that capacity.
I joined MSA in 2012 because of the mission we have that Nish talked about, and really, our mission and our focus on worker safety has never been more prominent than it is today. So you being here really excites the team, so we can share a little bit more about where we're headed. And the interest you have in MSA excites us for where we think the future will go after our first 110 years. Today, I believe you'll hear how MSA continues to be a market leader and how we'll drive sustainable, profitable growth in our business going forward. So some key messages and things to think about today is, as you know, safety is all we do, and that singular focus on safety motivates us and drives us forward.
Our mission puts the customer at the center of everything we do, and that mission, that men and women may work in safety, and they, their families, and their communities may live in health throughout the world, drives and motivates our 5,000 associates. They are inspired and driven by every customer interaction. We aspire to be the leader in premium safety across the globe, and we have safety products and solutions that protect workers and critical infrastructure. Since our founding in 1914, we've grown to be the global leader in sophisticated safety equipment and solutions, and we're relentless in our advance of our mission throughout the world. We've also built resilient positions in our business that are defensible, and they're across three market product categories I'll talk about later.
It's based on diversification across those products and solutions that we sell, and certainly the end markets we participate in and the geographies we serve. Third, innovation is really core. As you know, we started out innovating, you know, 110 years ago with Thomas Edison's help, and it's not changed. It's there to serve our customers, and we address their safety challenges and solutions based on what their needs are, what they identify as their challenges. Operating in this sector of the safety industry requires a mindset of continuous improvement, and it's about solving the challenges that our customers have. To do that internally, one of the things we're really proud of is our culture of continuous improvement. We focused on the execution of msa Business System, which helps us deliver on a high-performance culture and has become critical to our success.
And of course, we're gonna continue to have a disciplined and balanced capital allocation program that enables us to fuel profitable growth, enhance our market position, and return capital to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. When you think of the safety industry at a macro level, it's just become even more of a critical priority across the globe. This gives an illustration as you look at the accelerated pace of that trend over the last five years. Organizations, whether it's their leadership, all the way through to their employee base, they're focused on making sure that safety is foundational to their success. And this slide just illustrates some of the examples of how ubiquitous this has become as a secular trend, which certainly supports MSA Safety and our mission. We protect workers and critical infrastructure in a variety of diverse markets across the globe.
This shares some of those markets, such as fire service, energy, it's utilities, industrial, and these are in the sophisticated safety space, in the toughest markets and challenges that these, these end users might have. We're proud of MSA's products being able to protect over 40 million people annually. It demonstrates our positive impact on society. Today, we're about $1.8 billion in sales globally across our categories. We invest about $80 million annually in R&D, which enables a product vitality rate in the mid-30s. This innovation and the Business System we talked about, and we'll talk about a little bit more, enable us to have attractive gross and operating margins. Our business is highly diversified across our regions and products, as well as the end markets we talked about.
Over two-thirds of our sales are in the U.S., the Americas, US, Canada, Latin, South America, and then the remaining third are what we call international, which makes up the sales for the rest of the world. When you think about where we're at globally in our footprint, we have over 5,000 associates around the world aligned to and motivated by our mission. That singular focus is all about safety and what they think about day in and day out. It's how we bring value to our customers through innovative and differentiated products that protect workers' lives in the markets we serve. We've got global coverage and capability, and stay very close to our customers to ensure that we understand their pain points and their needs.
When you look at our three product market categories, to show some of the diversity, I'll share, as you see from this illustration. We'll start with detection on the left. Detection represents 36% of our sales, and this is a, you know, a category for us that includes solutions that protect the individual worker, as well as facilities and critical infrastructure from harmful gases and fire. Our detection business has been built through organic growth and acquisitions. In recent years, we've launched the X5000 and S5000 categories, product lines that have been very successful. And just recently, we've launched a fully connected product, portable gas detector that's connected, called the ALTAIR io4 . The product leverages all of the durability and reliability we're known for at MSA, and it's also cloud connected. It's connected to our Grid software platform, which helps enable and enhance worker safety and productivity.
One of the key differentiators for us at MSA for this detection business is that we make our own sensors. Owning this proprietary sensor technology really helps us, and our products respond faster, last longer, and be more productive for our customers. This is an area we have a lot of IP and differentiation from our competitors. Acquisitions in this sector have also been a benefit and have further diversified our end markets. An example of that is Bacharach, which added a full range of products in the HVAC and refrigeration applications across a broad range of markets. If we move to the middle of the screen, you'll see fire services, which represents about 38% of our sales. Here, we protect firefighters with innovative head-to-toe solutions that start with our SCBA, or self-contained breathing apparatus, include protective apparel, and includes helmets.
The products are utilized throughout the world by fire departments. This is a global business for us as well. In recent years, we've launched our cloud-based platform for the fire services market called FireGrid. It's a platform that ties in SCBA data, as well as a range of productivity solutions such as asset management and servicing data. The products and solutions are sold primarily through the fire services market, where we have well-established positions, and we go to market through a really strong and unparalleled distribution network. It's been a very durable market for us, and the funding in this market is very resilient over economic cycles. The third segment on the right is our industrial PPE or personal protective equipment business, and it represents about 26% of sales. Head protection and fall protection are the two main core categories in this business.
We have other products that are critical to our customer, but these are the two we see as growth drivers. We've got a leading position in head protection and are quickly growing our share in fall protection. Fall protection continues to be a fast-growing segment in the safety market. Our solutions comprise both what you would wear as a worker, harnesses and mechanicals, as well as things that, solutions that we have that attach to infrastructure. It's a market that we go to, or it's a segment we go to market through typical industrial distribution, think Fastenal, Grainger, et cetera. Across our categories, we estimate our addressable market to be more than $10 billion with attractive tailwinds. We believe we've got ample room to continue to grow in these markets.
And across the businesses, we've seen a greater focus, as I said, on worker safety by our customers, and the regulatory landscape around the world continues to positively evolve for our business, along with increased economic investment. Our customers' journey isn't just about safety. They're looking for productivity. They want solutions that not only protect, but it deliver enhanced productivity and improved compliance. So there's an increased focus on the connected technologies, and we've been building out that capability for years. We believe safety is positioned to have attractive long-term growth, and these trends support our business for years to come. When you think of our competitive advantages and where we stand, one of the things we really like to start with is our talent and our people.
We have an incredibly diverse workforce that are incredibly talented and highly motivated by MSA's mission, and we're able to attract, retain, recruit. People come to MSA because they're passionate about that mission we have, and they stay, and they innovate, and they get closer to the customer. The intimacy they provide is fantastic. And then, of course, as we talk about innovation, we're really proud of how customer-centric we are in on innovation. And we've got a comprehensive and proven innovation process we use that challenges us on how we come up with the best safety solutions for our customers. It's about solving those customer problems. Our scale.
We're the trusted brand globally, and we're recognized globally, even where we don't have quite the share position as, as in some other areas of the world, as the trusted brand, the brand you know will get it done each and every time. That brings us to our strategy. We've spent a lot of time on this. We've done a comprehensive review recently to really evaluate what did we think worked and where could we improve. Those results really were used to help us figure out and put together a guide path to go forward with for profitable growth. As I've noted before, and you'll hear late through... Or later today, we believe we're uniquely positioned to drive superior performance within our sector. It's gonna start with continuing to focus on being a leader in the premium safety solutions for our products and for our markets.
We believe that when we use our scale, our brand reputation, and our customer-driven innovation, we'll continually focus on meeting our customers' requirements with a focus on exceptional commercial execution and customer experience. Next, we did define, and we're really leaning into a set of targeted categories that we believe we can have accelerated growth with. These we think we have a competitive advantage and includes areas such as connected solutions, leaning into higher growth end markets, and capitalizing on safety megatrends around connectivity and productivity. We're also expanding our suite of solutions with recurring revenue streams and further building and exercising our M&A capabilities in a disciplined manner. Next, we'll continue to lean into deployment and application of Business System, what we call MBS, in all that we do across the company. It's really our mindset and our toolkit to drive continuous improvement.
Last, we are going to be strong financial stewards of our capital, as we have been, focused on allocating effectively in ways that drive value for our organization and for our shareholders. It's important to note that while we do this, driving this strategy forward, it all remains centered on advancing our mission for our customers. It's really, when you look at it holistically, it's a combination of organic growth and inorganic growth that's disciplined in its approach. It will allow us to continue to win and enhance our position with customers. Our value creation starts with the organic growth, where our innovation is done through a proven R&D engine. It results in high product vitality, which you'll learn more about today. And our investment here will continue and helps us maintain leadership positions in the category. We'll complement that growth with acquisitions.
You know, over the past several years, we've made four acquisitions in our core markets of detection and firefighter safety, and we continue to have a robust M&A pipeline. As we move forward, we're focusing on strengthening those M&A capabilities as we believe this is an important aspect of our growth strategy. Switching to Business System, this is really, if you think about this holistically, this is our behaviors, processes, and tools to help us drive continuous improvement across the enterprise. It utilizes lean principles. It allows us and focuses on ensuring all associates are engaged in continuous improvement, with high engagement for leadership to solve problems and improve the business at all levels. We initiated an operations-based approach in 2012 when I joined the organization, and have expanded that to what we call the MSA Business System.
We're focused on doing that because we want to continue to improve the business, improve collaboration, transparency, and deliver improved results for the business efficiency and operations productivity. I'm really excited how much the team's embraced it, and the fact that we're on this improvement journey, and believe we have ample runway to continue to improve the business. We're really on a journey that's never gonna end when it comes to continuous improvement. So with the team's confidence and our relentless focus on results, we've defined specific 2028 financial targets that we've now put out, and that includes mid-single-digit organic revenue growth, continued positive operating margin expansion, resulting in earnings of $10-$11 per share. This is organic related growth targets that we've defined.
Along with these identified organic targets, our business will be supplemented by acquisitions to drive upside, with the disciplined allocation of about over $1.5 billion of capital from cash and debt capabilities. We'll manage it appropriately, and we'll make sure we do it in a disciplined manner, but we really have strong belief in our ability to leverage the market with the capabilities we have in the space we're in. The MSA leadership is excited to continue the legacy that we've had for the last 110 years. We've compiled a very high-performing leadership team with diverse experiences and backgrounds. The team's got a deep cross-section of experience across industry and at MSA, and it's supported by an incredibly dedicated team of associates who are inspired by our mission.
So we're well prepared to build on our culture while we execute on our strategic priorities. So I wanna leave you with a few takeaways of what you'll hear today. Just a reminder that we're mission-driven. You're gonna hear that consistently and continuously throughout the day. That's what we believe in. That's what makes us really tick. We really drive that. We operate in attractive and resilient markets. We like where they're headed. We have an R&D engine that really revolves around our customer, that will continue to deliver market-leading innovation. As I said, our focus on continuous improvement with the Business System will deliver sustained value creation, and we'll continue our disciplined capital allocation, focused on growth and returns to our shareholders. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to José Sanchez to talk about operations.
Good morning, everybody. My name is José Sanchez, and I am Vice President of Global Operations. I have been with MSA for a bit more than 5 years. 2 years ago, I was expanding my role from internationals to lead operations globally, and I moved from Switzerland to our headquarters in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. 1 year ago, I became part of the executive leadership team of MSA, and before that, I have 20 years of experience in automotive sectors, where I've lived in Europe, China, and now in USA. Today, I'm very excited to talk to you about the tremendous progress that operations have done over the last years, share a bit about our vision for the future, and our relentless focus on continuous improvement around our customers. Over the last years, we have evolved operation by being mission focused and delivering performance at a higher level.
We are excelling in different areas, and we want to take this as the baseline to continue improving. As we move forward in our vision in operations, we want to further accelerate on our mission to become best-in-class operator around customer centricity and margin enhancement. We are going to do that through utilizing the principles of MSA Business System to continue accelerating continuous improvement culture, not just in operations, but enterprise-wide. So Steve said, we are in a good situation today in operational excellence as a result of creating MSA Business System a few years ago, which at the time, it allow us to deploy lean principles across operations to build a robust set of processes and tools.
Back in 2019 Investor Day, we highlighted that we had opportunity in manufacturing footprint consolidation, and we began a long-term journey of rationalizing our footprint and simplifying some of our global business models. Today, we are going to show you that we made good progress, and there is more to come. That operating system evolved into a Business System by expanding its scope from enterprise-wide to... from operations to enterprise-wide, and by incorporating behaviors as part of the way that we lead and manage. I'm excited to share that today, we are a best-in-class organization in safety and quality, and we have achieved that, while at the same time, we've been able to drive remarkable financial improvements of our performance, both in gross margins and working capital....
While we are very proud of what we have achieved so far, we want to continue advancing our performance and further accelerate on our ambition to drive scale and efficiency around customer centricity and margin enhancement. For that, we're going to focus on advancing our continuous improvement culture through MSA Business System, continue on optimizing our footprint to meet customer needs and enhance customer satisfaction, and accelerating our vision for Factory of the Future , and executing on connected products. As Steve mentioned before, MSA Business System has become one of the pillars of our strategy. It started in operations, but now it has rolled out through the entire organization. On that journey, we are strengthening the organization, training, qualifying, driving projects, and processes are coming to life.
MSA Business System is a set of behaviors, processes, and tools that define how we behave, how we work, how we treat each other, and our effectiveness in achieving results. During the last years, we have been deploying MSA Business System throughout the whole organization, and the first proof of truth was when we went through COVID, that we didn't allow our margins to go backwards, where we were able to maintain them despite the incredible supply chain. We did that through going after more productivity than we have ever done before, and we did it through our pricing organization, and we did it driving our mix. Every team executed as a high-performance organization.
Now, during the last year and a half, without the big headwinds of inflation and supply chain getting a bit better, we can see all of that works coming to life through our gross margins. But we wanna be better, and that's why we keep progressing in our behaviors in the way that we embrace opportunities. For example, we recently stood up our Project Management Office for the whole company. Meanwhile, we continue leveraging our shared service centers around the world as part of the global business processes. Together with our behavior, we have relentless focus on driving cross-functional collaboration and driving process excellence. I'll elaborate later a bit more about how we approach our working capital and build processes to drive sustainable and scalable results.
Together with behaviors and processes, we keep building tools that helps our teams to drive results via systematic problem-solving and data analytics. We're incorporating new technologies, like manufacturing execution system, to bring greater visibility and real-time data, from all our manufacturing plants, connecting machines and people. Now, I'm gonna present three case studies that show the success that we've seen in the organization through utilizing the principles of MSA Business System that I just walked through. The first is about delivering margin enhancement. In our efforts to derive productivity and excellence in our operations, we realized that our decentralized manufacturing footprint could be an arduous undertaking, and we believe that there are still significant opportunities in manufacturing. Let me give you an example. We have four manufacturing plants around the world manufacturing V-Gard model helmets: China, Brazil, France, and USA.
Each of the plants have similar processes, but not the same. When we put together the experts of each of those manufacturing plants, we realized that each of them was the best in one category. One was the best in scrap, another one in the shortest cycle time, another one in changing the fastest, the shortest, the color of helmets, another one in the number of pieces per person per hour. We can select the best of each of those categories to create a norm, a common global standard that drives the best of the best of the performances, not just for the processes we know today, but for the tech, new technologies we are working to develop as part of the Factory of the Future .
We reorganized our structure to create a Global Operations Technology Team to allow us to be more agile, efficient, and effective on identifying new technologies and deploying them across the whole company in better collaboration with the other areas of the organization. This Factory of the Future vision includes all our plants and functions globally. Let me give you another example. We are testing a state-of-the-art disruptive cutting technology in Globe for turnout gear, that basically takes a new customer order and is directly produced without almost any manual intervention, neither in planning, programming the cuts, preparing and spreading the material. That technology help us to reduce labor content of that process by 80%, material waste by 4%, and reduces our lead times in turnout gear by one week.
Once validated, it can be deployed across the other plants of turnout gear around the world. At the same time, we keep evaluating the opportunity to deploy minimum viable automation into our dynamic processes, and one of those technologies is cobots, that we could use for some repetitive and very manual-intensive activities for some products like SCBAs and detection. We have come a long way, and we have done tremendous progress, but with the spirit of continuous improvement, we believe that we can still target to drive 30-50 basis points annual operating margin improvement. To support what I just mentioned, we have deployed full-time continuous improvement personnel in all our major plants to drive savings and advance our continuous improvement culture.
I talked before about our relentless focus on driving process excellence and creating sustainable and scalable platforms to allow us to keep improving our performance. In this case study about how we keep improving working capital is a good reflection of it. During the last 18 months, we've been improving day by day in our inventory, accounts payables, and account receivable numbers, while we've been reducing backlog and improving our delivery service to our customers. We feel confident that we have built strong processes to drive 30-50 basis points of working capital reduction continuously, sustainably, and annually, while supporting business growth and improving customer satisfaction. This is a great reflection of how we embrace the opportunities utilizing MSA Business System. Back at the end of 2022, we formed the MSA Cash Council.
The goal was about driving sustainable process enhancement to improve our balance sheet while serving better our customers. Let me share a couple of examples. We review and refresh our SIOP, Sales Inventory Operations Planning process, redefining roles and responsibilities, expectations, communication channels, metrics like forecast accuracy or delivery rates, connecting operations from sales for inputs. All of that, all of it, with the goal to have a better cross-functional alignment and execution on how we, how we anticipate the demand and optimize our supply, serving better our customers. Meanwhile, we introduce an intelligent supply chain platform called LeanDNA, that allow us to extract the SIOP data, connect with forecast, demand, planning, transportation.
All of that, with the goal to have a proactive, preventive and predictive management of our full supply chain, helping us again to drive inventory reductions while improving customer satisfaction. And not just in inventory, but there has been tremendous progress on account payables and receivables through different process improvements. For example, let me share with you, our overdue management process in accounts payables, including metrics and reporting, was totally reviewed. And we standardize and deploy global best practices of terms in our, in our accounts receivables. Those are just a few process improvements among multiple initiatives that give us the confidence that we can keep reducing 30-50 basis points working capital annually, while supporting growth and improving customer satisfaction. Another area of focus for improving our deliveries while enhancing margins, has been through footprint optimization.
There has been significant progress over the last years in multiple product groups and regions. We have carried this out with our vision for Center of Excellence for different product groups, where we can create superior capabilities, not just in manufacturing, but as well in engineering and supply chain. We are looking all together how we can reduce the complexity of some of the business models. Let me give you a couple of examples. Last year, we transferred our operations of Sierra Monitor to our Center of Excellence in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. We are continuing to grow and expand the Cranberry plant, currently transferring the facility from the Bacharach acquisition, too, centralizing all our recent acquisitions of detection products into one location in Pennsylvania. Another example is about fall protection business in North America.
We were serving our customers in North America from three locations in Europe, China, and Mexico. Now, we are finalizing the centralization of all those three manufacturing centers into just one Center of Excellence in North America, in Mexico, Querétaro. That will help us to serve our customers closer to the, to them, which will help us to improve our efficiency and ability on how we serve them, by reducing transportation and within lead times and the associated cost and our carbon footprint as a-- using less fuel usage. Another example is the opening of a new facility in Casablanca, Morocco, where we can complement our value proposition for Europe in high labor content product. That plan is expanding what we were already doing in the region, supporting internal transfers, and by building new capabilities that allow us to in-source some of the operations performed today by third parties.
These are just a few examples of continuous improvement linked with MSA Business System, behaviors, processes, and tools. We'll continue to review our operational footprint, aligned with Center of Excellence, to drive innovation, enhance productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. As we close out this section, I would like to reiterate my excitement about the tremendous progress our organization has achieved resulting in getting best-in-class results. However, the journey is not complete, and we still have opportunities to continue driving better operational and financial performance, while driving customer satisfaction. We're going to achieve it through our relentless focus on driving and advancing our high performance, continuous improvement culture, deploying MSA Business System across the whole organization. Thank you very much for your time today, and I'll hand over to Greg Martin now.
Thank you, José. Good morning, everyone. Great to be here. I'm Greg Martin. I'm MSA's Chief Product and Technology Officer. I'm responsible for product strategy, product development, our overall technology strategy at MSA, including IT. This combination of functions was really a natural fit for us after developing our customer-facing cloud offering and data analytics platform over the last decade. I've been with MSA for nearly 20 years, and I've worked in every product area that we have. Like I said, I'm very passionate or very excited to be here. I'm passionate about safety, and I really like sharing innovation and what we're doing at MSA. At MSA, everything starts and ends with our customers.
We spend a lot of time understanding how they do their jobs, what keeps them up at night, and what their specific pain points are. We design every aspect of our product to help simplify safety programs, which allows our customers to focus on their jobs. We're also committed to introducing advanced diagnostics and data-driven tools that improve situational awareness, to help our customers better understand their hazards, so that they can make their safety programs more robust and more proactive. Also, because of our global scale and safety, our 110 years of experience, and our reputation for innovation, our customers rely on us to not only launch new products, but also bring new and innovative, complete safety solutions to market, which include hardware, software, and services.
To accomplish this, we do a lot of technology scouting and partnering, as well as working with university and other industry experts to introduce the latest technologies into the safety industry that really help protect our customers. We have a true culture of innovation at MSA, and this culture is driven by our mission, as Steve referenced. From the beginnings of the company, our employees know that they're part of something bigger. It is because of the mission and the innovative work that we do that we have been successful at recruiting and retaining top product development talent in a large variety of technical disciplines. A fundamental piece of our strategy is to continue to lead and drive scale in the safety market with premium, innovative safety solutions.
We will do this by continuing to deeply understand our customers, continuing to expand our offering in high-growth markets, and continuing to evolve from a hardware supplier to a complete system solutions provider. Let me dive a little bit deeper into our product strategy, where we've come from, and where we're going. In the past, MSA has built an incredibly strong reputation on innovation as primarily a hardware supplier with great quality, reliability, and customer service. Trust is incredibly important in safety, and we're a brand that customers trust. In recent years, we have focused on deepening our customer intimacy and using hardware and software systems approach to go after some longer-term strategic outcomes in the industry, while ensuring that we provide additional customer value with each incremental step.
Essentially, we're setting strategic North Stars that we're heading towards while making very calculated, incremental advancements along the way. As we continue down this path, we're building on this foundation for growth. We're more focused on connected and integrated solutions versus just standalone products, solutions which provide more value to our customers in both safety and productivity, increase TAM, and help us diversify into complementary markets and applications. This integrated solutions approach does not mean that we'll sell less PPE and detectors, but rather it becomes the foundation of an ecosystem. We are applying our unique strengths to growing customer trends and widening our competitive advantage across multiple industries. As Steve had referenced, safety is absolutely top of mind for companies around the world today. Behavior-based safety is a step beyond compliance.
Companies absolutely want to have documentation that their workers are in compliance with their safety programs, but they also want to better understand the behaviors of their workers on a day-to-day basis to eliminate potential future hazards through data analytics, AI, and various levels of control, which I'll speak to a little bit later. MSA is very well positioned because of our product install base, our talent, our cloud architecture, our dataset, our analytics, and our connected solutions to help our customers expand behavior-based safety programs and improve their safety training and controls to solve their long-term safety challenges. MSA has an extremely passionate product development team that has been changing and improving over the past decade. Not that long ago, software developers made up only a small percentage of our global R&D team. Today, they account for around 45% of all of our engineers.
This is a testament to our effective talent acquisition and how we are able to drive retention through the high levels of mission-driven engagement. This recruitment, retention, and engagement of our technical staff is really part of our special sauce. Attracting top talent in areas like data science, cloud application software, is a critical part of our success. Retaining our best and brightest keeps MSA top of mind as a safety thought leader with our customers, government entities, standard writing committees around the world. This transition to more of a hardware, software, solutions provider comes with a lot of business benefits as well. Software does not add to manufacturing costs. It can be continuously updated to provide more value and feature options via over-the-air updates, and we're becoming more embedded in our customers' day-to-day operations with data and analytics.
As we get closer to our end user customer, that's always a good thing, and it continues with our customer intimacy. Since I said everything starts and ends with our customers, I wanted to provide some real examples of how we're truly embedding our teams with our customers to drive unique solutions and safety. Within our portable instrument segment, we embedded engineers at customer facilities. We witnessed how detectors were often issued to workers in a tedious pen and paper process. We also noted that if an incident occurred, how difficult it was for the customer to get the data required to fully understand the situation or improve it because of those pen and paper records.
In our ALTAIR io4 , we created an electronic tag-in, tag-out process that ties the instrument and its data to a user, a group, a zone, an application, whatever the user wants, for the day. All that information is then automatically downloaded to document compliance and drive accountability. This data is critical for developing better and more robust training procedures, and all the reports that come out of it can be automatically generated, so when the safety manager or director comes in the next morning, it's right there for them. In the fire service, we had engineers spend weeks with a large U.S. fire department as they trained in the fireground and in live burn exercises. I've been in live burns, quite a bit myself.
I actually, I think it was my second day at MSA, I was testing one of our new bailout devices, and I got to rappel out of a third-story window. So it was a very cool experience, and I was hooked on MSA ever since then. But on the fireground and in these live burns, we were able to witness some of the many logistic challenges occurring at the fireground when you have hundreds of firefighters. We watched how they used our software, as well as all of their other systems and tools. And then we talked to them about what information was most critical and how they would like it displayed to make it very simple and very intuitive.
These findings are being implemented in our FireGrid platform and are launching later this year to provide an even better user experience, especially for very large fire departments. In industrial PPE, we worked with large warehousing companies and order picker manufacturers to design a product that integrates with the order picker itself, and it only allows the machine to operate at full speed and to lift up when the operator is successfully tied off safely. This is an example of moving beyond PPE and becoming part of an engineered control system, and this helps ensure higher levels of safety and compliance. This same technology is now being applied to other applications within different segments of fall protection. These are examples of how the MSA R&D team is putting the MSA Business System to work.
They are truly collaborating and problem-solving, along with our customers, to create win-win product development. A big part of our overall technology and innovation strategy is to set long-term targets that will materially impact the safety industry and our customers. We refer to these as North Stars within our product development group. Once identified, we set out to iterate every few years with products that provide increased value to the customers and get us closer on a continuum to achieving that North Star goal. This allows us to continuously improve our product lines, continuously add value for our customers, and makes it very hard for our competition to catch us. Overall, this helps us create a very defensible position with over 1,100 active patents in attractive and growing markets. Let me just give you an example of the process that we follow.
So, defining a North Star in fixed gas detection and fixed gas and flame detection within our portfolio over the last few years. As you spend time with customers in this segment, you truly understand how important these products are to protecting lives and the facilities where they're installed. Based on the critical nature of these products, customers are very much focused on uptime, how to simplify maintenance to ensure that uptime, the best ways to reduce complexity, and the overall cost of ownership of these very long-life products. Since 2016, we have launched multiple products that move us along this continuum to keep providing additional value along the way for our customers.
We launched our first XCell sensors for fixed gas and flame detection in 2016 in our X5000 and S5000 gas detection platforms, which provide industry-leading life, stability, and reduced maintenance costs. This was followed by our TruCal launch, which was a new-to-world system of auto-adjusting sensors, which again, increased uptime and increased the time between maintenance intervals. Gustavo will talk a little bit about this more when he gets into gas detection later this afternoon. More recently, in 2023, we continued to utilize the power of advanced data analytics when we launched the SENTRY io controller that has built-in diagnostic tools to aid in predictive maintenance. All the way to our latest launch of our FL5000 flame detector, which launched this year, which utilizes an artificial neural network.
This is a form of AI that's able to learn different flame scenarios, and you actually train the detector through the development process. And this helps increase range, accuracy, and reduces costly false alarms. This is an area where we continue to innovate and provide more customer value, which directly helps us maintain our leadership position. In speaking with our customers, it was clear that we can create win-win situations by developing safety products that not only protect our customers, but also help them achieve their overall impact goals as a company. At the same time, we can and do consider our own footprint when developing new products and look for every opportunity to reduce energy consumption and waste. To this end, we created the MSA New Product Development Impact Playbook.
This playbook is a process that we follow from portfolio development through product definition, product design, launch, and lifecycle management. We have implemented impact criteria into our portfolio pipeline process, and we've also implemented process gates like a sustainability product review within our new product development process. The end result is that we are taking every opportunity to look for ways to make our products, which help make the world safer, have even more impact on people, places, and planet. Creating connected solutions is a key part of our overall strategy. Customers who previously just bought a piece of hardware are now interested in adding on software, data analytics, and services to have a complete solution. This not only increases the total available market, but also helps MSA become more valuable and sticky with our end user customers.
An example of this is with our portable instrument segment and how in the past, a customer may have just purchased the instrument itself. Now they're buying a software subscription, they're getting automated reports, data analytics are continuing to be added and upgraded, and they're buying add-on services like our calibration auto gas replenishment system, where the customer signs up for this, and electronics actually read as their calibration gas is running low and new gas is automatically shipped to them. They pop it in, and they're ready to go, and it's the easy button for our customers, which is really what they're looking for. And there's really a good reason that our customers are looking for safety solutions. Just have a look at these safety statistics. These are really big numbers, 80%-90% being attributed to human error.
PPE is and will remain the foundation of safety programs around the world, but technology has enabled PPE to become even more useful and valuable as part of a safety system. There is an industry-standard hierarchy of controls. It shows PPE is foundational, but additional controls can be added to increase the overall robustness of a safety program. So what safety professionals around the world are looking to do is add these controls and robustness to their programs, and MSA is very well positioned to help with this. Data collected in our cloud systems can aid in administrative controls, such as training. Systems, like I described, our tag in, tag out function, built into our ALTAIR io4 portable instrument, is an example of using engineering controls to ensure accountability and have the data at your fingertips.
All the way up to using system data analytics running in the background to find a small gas leak that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, and thus, you're eliminating the hazard before the incident actually occurs. That's a really important point because that's what everyone wants. So when we talk about proactive safety, that's what we're talking about, is stopping the hazard from ever occurring in the first place. In the past, we sold PPE, but with connectivity, data, and AI, we can provide a connected safety ecosystem, which provides much more value to our end user customers and helps improve safety programs around the world.... I would like to switch gears for a minute now and briefly talk about utilizing scale and growing efficiency within product development.
By using a continuous improvement or lean mindset, the MSA Business System, and our deep talent within new product development, we continue to focus on getting better at what we do every day. A couple areas that we've been very focused on over the past several years is globally and efficiently scaling how we develop new products to accelerate the number of impactful products that we launch each year, and also improving how we most efficiently handle our existing product lines from a sustaining standpoint, so that we can keep those products up and running, our customers happy, and also be able to divert greater resources to our new product development. We internally track overall average development time for our NPD projects, and we have decreased this time by 25% over the last 5 years.
We also have reduced the percent of our total engineering costs that go to sustaining existing product lines from 23% down to 15% over that same period. These are really exciting overall results, which have led us to launching 30 new product platforms and solutions over the last 5 years, which is impressive, considering that this is over a time period with a global pandemic and a supply chain crisis. At MSA, we are concentrating on a deep understanding of human-centered design to enhance safety programs with proactive safety solutions. We're driving growth and defending our market-leading positions through customer-driven innovation, new safety solutions and services that increase the total available market. We are leveraging leading scale and our proven innovation process to bring the latest technologies to the safety space, and we continue to attract and retain top R&D talent through a purpose-led culture.
MSA has dramatically improved its R&D muscle over the past several years, and with msa Business System and our continuous improvement mindset, we will continue to strengthen in this area of our business in years to come. Thank you. With that, I will turn it over to Stephanie Sciullo.
Good morning. I'm Stephanie Sciullo, President of MSA Americas. I joined MSA 14 years ago. Prior to this role, I served as Chief Legal Officer. When I came in-house, MSA was actually my favorite client to work for at the time. Today, I continue to serve as executive sponsor for the company's corporate social responsibility efforts globally. For MSA Safety, corporate responsibility is about the twin goals of growth and impact. Financial performance and business growth and positive societal impact are inherently linked together because of the very work that we do. We estimate that we protect more than 40 million workers annually with our best-in-class products and solutions. Because sustainability and impact considerations are embedded into our business strategy and operations, you'll continue to hear these themes throughout our speakers' presentations today, and you already heard about them from Nish, Steve, Jose, and Greg this morning.
I'll tie a couple of these things together right now. Talking about these topics, our mission, keeping our customers safe, that's something that's very natural to us. If you walk through our facilities, you'd hear about this in daily conversation. Our associates know that they have a platform to bring to life new-to-world technologies and make a positive impact at the same time. That purpose energizes and engages our people to give their very best every day. Our impact, commitments, and investments can be seen across our products, our people, and our planet. This growth and impact mindset spans the markets that we serve, what we make, how we make it, and how we govern ourselves. We serve end markets that are growing because of sustainability trends, and we have products that deliver environmental benefits to our customers.
We have products with features that have been designed with sustainability in mind, designed to be inclusive, to serve broad demographics, and to support worker wellness initiatives. Impact and sustainability are truly part of our culture of innovation, as you just heard from Greg. You've heard this morning how we integrate sustainability principles throughout our product development, and there are a few themes to continue to listen for throughout the presentations today. Enhanced ergonomics, comfort, and diverse sizing for diverse workers across the world. Reduced cost of operations and ease of maintenance for operators. Productivity for both the worker and the work site. You'll continue to hear why these types of sustainability-linked features are a part of our product's value proposition, truly providing compelling reasons why our customers choose our products, and truly supporting the strong pricing that we earn when we deliver on those differentiated value propositions....
You've also heard from Jose how we're making our operations more energy efficient. We're reducing waste and consumption in packaging and manufacturing, in shipping and transportation, and throughout our core operations. That's how we're making progress to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42% by 2030. You've also heard we're optimizing our manufacturing footprint. When we do that, we simplify our supply chains, building greater resiliency. We bring production closer to talent, and we bring production closer to our customers so that we can better serve them with speed. Impact and sustainability are part of our culture of continuous improvement. When we reduce waste in our operations, when we reduce carbon and consumption, we do that in ways that reduce cost at the same time. So these programs are actually supportive of our margin expansion efforts.
Finally, we continue to invest in a variety of business continuity and resiliency programs. That includes incident response, preparedness, and foundational programs like product quality and business integrity. You'll continue to hear more on our flagship products throughout the day. Let's take a few examples now from that lens of impact and sustainability. MSA Detection helps customers connect and detect for safety and sustainability, making work safer, easier, and more productive. Bacharach Parasense fixed detection product line serves customers in food and beverage, cold storage, and quick-serve applications. We help these customers better detect and resolve refrigerant leaks, which helps them reduce their emissions and their reportable events. In addition to the environmental benefits, this truly reduces their operating costs. You'll hear more today about our ALTAIR io4 portables. In addition to providing that seamless compliance and real-time safety awareness, these devices support circular economy initiatives.
The devices are capable of being refurbished, reused, and recycled at the end of contract life. Our X5000 and S5000 fixed monitoring systems support worker safety and infrastructure safety. These are products that are well suited for both traditional energy and new energy applications like hydrogen. The way our detection systems are uniquely designed, they significantly reduce customers' calibration gas consumption. Basically, customers know that their devices work with less time and less gas. That means they decrease cylinder waste to landfill, and installing an MSA fixed monitoring system can save hundreds of maintenance hours a year and over six figures of cost savings for a customer annually. You can also see these themes of ergonomics and ease of maintenance in our G1 and M1 firefighting breathing apparatus platforms.
For firefighters, our breathing apparatus offers lightweight, electronics-free facepieces and overall design that increases the comfort and the wearability with how and where the apparatus sits on your back, as it's adjustable for a wide range of body shapes and sizes. For department administrators, these platforms feature a central power design, so the entire unit is powered by one single rechargeable battery. This saves significant maintenance time for the department and reduces battery waste to landfill. And these two features are not something that are incidental. Fire departments actually choose which breathing apparatus to buy based on those two features. We also outfit firefighters head to toe with protective apparel, turnout gear, boots, helmets. Our gear offers inclusive sizing for diverse body shapes, expanding the availability of our equipment. Our Globe line was actually the first firefighter apparel company to offer firefighting gear that was specifically cut for women.
The new Cairns 1836 fire helmet is a great example of impact innovation across the stakeholder value chain. It features a broad array of sizing, those ergonomics we've talked about, and cleanability for the firefighters, supporting worker wellness initiatives, ease of maintenance for department administrators, and this helmet actually fits 95% of firefighters based on industry-recognized sizing data. It's one of the lightest fire helmets on the market, and it delivers enhanced comfort and fit and balance for the wearer with how it sits on your head. Removable soft goods makes it easier to clean, and a patented Slide-Lock system allows quicker and easier maintenance without the need for special tools. Finally, FireGrid. You heard earlier how our FireGrid cloud platform enables incident commanders to monitor fire scenes locally and remotely.
Post-scene data is automatically stored and aggregated, and that allows for easier creation of post-scene incidents, reports, and data analytics so that you can learn from every incident you respond to. Sustainability and impact features can be seen also throughout our PPE portfolio. Our V-Series line of fall protection delivers exceptional comfort, fit, and ergonomics. A patent-pending design improves worker mobility and reduces the feeling of restriction. You have contoured, breathable shoulder pads, horizontal leg straps. So these are harnesses that are comfortable to wear all day. And like a seatbelt, a safety harness must be actually worn and engaged, not just available, but used. So these are important features that help support customers' behavior-based safety programs. We're also the leader in industrial head protection, beginning with our iconic V-Gard hard hat line. Building on that world-class brand, we offer next-generation impact-linked products.
For instance, the new V-Gard C1 protects against heat stress with our patent-pending thermal barrier technology. It's capable of reducing the temperature inside the helmet by up to 20 degrees in sunny environments, so it helps workers in those environments be safer, more comfortable, and ultimately, more productive. Our newly launched V-Gard H1 safety helmet provides superior comfort and versatility, using the latest technology to help redirect rotational forces to the head in the event of an impact. Our singular focus on safety matters. It matters to our strategy, and it matters to our talent. A singular focus on all things safety is a competitive advantage. We dedicate our top talent and industry-leading levels of R&D reinvestment to safety markets. Focus allows us to advance the state of the art faster. That's what allows us to deliver on that 37% New Product Vitality Index .
At MSA, we also bring together that culture of innovation you've heard about this morning, diversity of people and thought, purpose, impact, engagement, and continuous improvement. The MSA Business System allows us not only to drive efficiency, but also empowerment, allowing our people to work at their best. This is something that associates want to be a part of. Our mission enables us to recruit, retain, and uniquely energize top talent. We're recognized for our mission-driven work, and our people know they make a unique impact on the world. 92% of our associates worldwide know how their work connects to help keeping real people safe, real workers safe, and that those are the workers that build and protect communities. When we drive business growth, we also grow our impact, because safety is what we do.
We take pride in our mission in protecting our customers, the world's workers, for so many years to come. Thank you. Larry, I'll turn it over to you.
Awesome. Thank you very, very much, Stephanie. Okay, we're going to pause for a minute while we get our chairs situated, and we're going to go to Q&A. Remember, for those of you in the webcast, you get into your questions there; we'll take those as we go through the session. And for those in the audience, just please raise your hand, and we'll get you a mic. We would ask you to please use the time this morning for questions on the content you heard in today's session, and we'll have, obviously, another extensive Q&A at the end of the second session. Steve Blanco, Stephanie Sciullo, Greg Martin, and also, for the first time today, Lee McChesney, our CFO, who will have more extensive comments in the second session today. So I think we can get started.
I think, we have a mic back there.
Hey, guys. Ross Brown with William Blair. Thanks for the presentation today. You know, very helpful. Question for Steve. I know we touched on this briefly in the past, but, yeah, what are your primary focus areas under your new leadership role? Any aspects of the business or strategy that you're looking to address? And, how are you measuring your success in the first couple of months?
Thanks, Ross. So, and thanks for the question. Yeah, I would say to think about measuring success, the team's kind of helping me with that as we went through the strategy refresh. But as I reflect on, you know, my priorities, I would start with, you know, where historically we've been and, the mission and our service to the customer, first and foremost. And, and we're really focused on how do we continue to evolve and develop our culture while we execute the strategy going forward. I would also say, you know, it's interesting, as I reflected, as we've gone through this strategy, my time at MSA, you know, before MSA, it was most of my time was operations, engineering, a little bit of finance, but most of my time at MSA has been in the business, right?
and really, when Nish was CEO, I was privileged to run the Americas business. So real focus on growth, and, you know, that's something this team has really spent a lot of time on, is how do we effectively grow globally, you know, in Americas and international, and execute on that strategy. So we put that strategy together. I think that really gives us, you know, the playbook that we believe can help us do that.
Thank you. And then, you know, if we kind of look out five years here, you know, and you're looking back at, you know, what you've accomplished, the five-year targets look fairly incredible. I mean, what do you think the biggest challenges are there?
Well, that's a good question. So we, we put out the targets, so glad you noticed that. So that's a first for MSA to put out targets, but they're targets that the team's confident in, and as I said, we've got a playbook with a strategy to execute on those targets. You know, when we look at those, five years is a pretty good time horizon, right? And you think about what's happened in the last five years, we've had a pandemic, we've had supply chain challenges, we've had inflation, tariffs. We don't know what the next five years looks like, but what we do know is the resiliency of our business.
and where we play, and, you know, the consistency of the need for that, you know, from a safety perspective, is really strong, which gives us a lot of confidence, no matter what the economic cycle is. So I think that really positions us well for the next five years, and so we're looking forward to it. You know, we'll see where it ends up, but those targets were intentional, and we think we think they're a good place for us to be.
Thanks. Rob?
Rob Mason with Baird. Again, thanks for the, the day. It's really good to see everything on display. It's pretty clear you value being in the premium segment of the market, and you refreshed the market sizing. I'm curious, within that $10 billion or so of market addressable market, how you view the sizing of the premium part of within that? And then, as you think about, I guess, longer term and maybe executing some of the capital deployment M&A strategy, is it solely within remaining within that premium segment, or do you see opportunities to leverage your scale, maybe perhaps in other parts of the globe?
Yeah, great question. So, you know, if you think about that, addressable market, I would hit that in two ways. You know, we're probably just over half of that addressable market's premium. In our view, it, it's probably a little bit more than that. I think we, we're very conservative on what we think that addressable market is. We actually had some conversations with people externally, what they say it is versus what we say it is. What we do believe is, over the next five years, that you'll see expansion of that addressable market. So when Greg was talking about, that safety hierarchy, you know, a lot of what we participate in, in that addressable market is, is that foundational element, right? That product category. But we're seeing just so much interest in the marketplace that goes up further in that, in that hierarchy.
So I think you're gonna see that continue to grow in our minds, and I expect that's gonna be a real positive for growth. As we look at M&A, you know, we think we differentiate with technology, right? And so we intend to stay in the sophisticated safety space. We're really pleased that we have what I would say is the intimacy with the customer. And where that really plays out is important when you need to create solutions for the customer. If it's a product category that they might need, but it's more commoditized, you know, where that intimacy with the customer isn't quite as important. So we'll stay more so in where we think we can differentiate in the marketplace. So that would be our focus.
Can I just add one thing, Steve?
Yeah, sure.
And also, I think we've seen over the years that different segments of the market, it may not be like a premium spot in the market, where before they were buying the least expensive product they could buy, but then looking at the total cost of ownership over the life cycle. So you might pay more upfront, but by adding new technology, you're actually making it less expensive, and it allows us to penetrate other parts of the market. And we've seen that in segments like portable gas, like fixed gas detection. And even as we get into SCBA, with our modular, our M1 SCBA, we're able to really configure that for the customer need, which allows us to penetrate deeper, but still provide a very sophisticated solution.
Cost of ownership.
Yeah.
Just a follow-up question as well on the targets, and maybe we'll get to this in the financial portion later. But just quick observation around the margin expansion opportunity. We've been talking more recently about an incremental margin range that's 30%-40%, and again, some of that's the benefit of coming off pricing and supply chain catch-up and whatnot. Did not appear that the upper range was maybe as present in the targets and just maybe a commentary on how you're thinking about the range-
Sure.
and so margin.
Yeah. So we're pointing out, obviously, five-year targets. As Steve said, we haven't done that before. It's a good period of time, but the thesis is still good. You know, that 30%-40% incrementals are our opportunity. Typically, when you're on the, you know, the lower side of our mid-single-digit range, you kind of come out in the 30% area. And then if we have an opportunity to be on the higher end and then, you know, potentially mix in some M&A, we've shown historically, we've done a nice job of being closer to that 40% side. But when you look out five years, probably a good caution to just to baseline that on the lower end, and that becomes our opportunity.
And certainly, you look at the, I think in the past five years, we've typically delivered, somewhere more in the middle of that range, Rob. So no change there.
Thanks. Stanley, please.
Good morning. Thank you all. Stanley Elliott, Stifel. Steve, I guess just one quick point of clarification. So the $10 billion addressable market is not including really the services option that we're, we're talking about on a go forward?
Yeah, I think that's an opportunity.
Wanted to say.
Yeah.
Yeah, that part's growing quite a bit.
And kind of sticking on the services piece, you know, what's the biggest hurdle in terms of adoption for your, your customers? It's—do they not have the infrastructure? Do you all have the infrastructure, the salespeople, to be able to push this out? And, you know, any help with, maybe, like, adoption rates, I guess, for some of these different end markets as we're thinking about over the, you know, five-year term?
Yeah, good question. Greg, you want to take it?
Yeah. The quick answer is yes. You know, it really depends on the market segment. You have different customers at different levels of maturity. It depends on your distribution. You have different distributors. It depends on the region. There's different regions at different levels of maturity. We've been at this for about a decade now, so we've really been ramping up our internal teams, our sales, our engineering, our materials, and what we've been...
... really focused on the last two years is meeting the customer at where they're at from a maturity level and, and helping them get over any hurdles that they might have.
Thanks. Thanks. We're gonna take some questions from the webcast as well as we're going through this. First one: given your leading positions in most of the categories you play in, what are the upper bounds in terms of potential to capture additional share over the next three to five years?
Yeah, thanks, Larry, that's a good question. So when we think—again, I come back to this addressable market, and maybe I'll answer this two ways. One, when you look at our categories that we participate in, those three product market categories, we have, you know, a really nice brand globally. And in some regions of the world, you know, we would say nice share positions, but it's a big place in the world. There's a lot of opportunity in areas where we frankly feel we're not participating at the level that our capability is, going forward. So that's number one. We think on a global basis, there's some really nice opportunity for continued growth within those categories, even in the stronger markets.
I mean, if you break down, you know, the market we're in right here, the US, you know, there's some areas of the US where we have, you know, really nice share, and then others that we're not as penetrated, and we've got some plans around that. But then I would come back to the second piece, and that's that addressable market. Because, you know, our feeling and where we see this market going is you're gonna continue to have the needs, across the industries for those safety products, but more and more around that solution set. And so if we're able to continue to get that addressable market growth, we think that that's, that's a benefit and a tailwind for us.
Thank you. Another one here. You know, the first session and overall, it seems to be a bit more focused on the detection segment. Has anything changed in your strategy that makes this more important?
Well, I think detection is... That's a really good question. Detection has been an area, as you know, it's the product market category that has the highest margin profile for us. We've been really pleased with the growth in all three of our categories, frankly. But we've seen, you know, an overindex growth in the fire service and detection in the last period of time. We just see the opportunities in detection, both organically and inorganically, to be pretty significant, because of the macro environment and the secular trends. Greg talked a lot about what's going on in the marketplace, and detection is a space where there's gonna be an incredible need going forward.
We're bullish, really, on all three of the markets having growth potential, but detection, we feel like, has more room for growth and really that addressable market. You know, and so that, for us, is an area that we're gonna lean into. But I would say the fire service is also an area that we're excited, and you'll hear more about this later, but it's been a strong market. We're coming off a tougher base, right? We've got the Air Force this year. That customer's been really a nice big win for us. But when you look at that trajectory, you know, it makes it tougher as you're trying to do the comps over a five-year period.
But we're, I think all three of those markets are areas that we believe we can participate competitively and win into the future.
Let me just add a little bit to that. So give you a little bit of historical context. You know, we focus, you know, kind of combines a few questions here, on these three categories, and you're gonna hear more about them after the break. They've all grown over the last last decade, and we've really seen a nice evolution, advancement of the businesses with that focus. You know, some of those other categories, maybe, Robbie, you were asking about, we, you know, we consciously chose to focus in these premium areas, and it's been helpful. But to Steve's point, you know, the industrial PPE business has grown. We certainly like certain categories in there more than others, in terms of, like, head and fall protection, they have a higher growth characteristic, so that's gonna be good.
Other parts of it have really good profit margins, really good, good cash flow. But that part of the business has actually become a smaller percentage, even though it's grown, because those other segments have grown at a faster rate .
So the fire business has gone through a, you know, quite a transformation. At one point, it was number 2, now it's become number 1. You know, there's a good characteristics to all these businesses. And then, certainly, detection has had a really nice, really nice, solid run. You've also seen us add to that with an enhancement in the M&A front. And then going back to Steve's point, so there's just some higher growth characteristics in some of these businesses, and we certainly want to participate in them fully, and we have a really good market position, really, in almost all of our businesses today.
The one where we're not number one, you know, top leading position, you know, we're really growing at almost double digits when we are able to navigate the supply chain side of that, which is fall protection.
Quick mic up here, please.
Hi, I'm curious to get a sense of where you feel you guys are relative to your competitors in this journey of kind of building solutions that marry hardware with software and building up this ecosystem. You know, where, where do you stand? Are they nipping at your heels? Are they ahead of you? Are they 5, 10 years behind?
Hmm, good question. Greg, do you want to start that?
Yeah, when you look at the markets we're in, we really believe we have a scalable tech stack that we can leverage across all of these different segments. So, we've spent a lot of time focusing on industrial first. They're, they're-
... a little further along on the maturity curve, but we're able to leverage most of that work, our technology, our cloud infrastructure, and our skill sets into the fire service and into PPE. So there's-- we're bringing the same technology along. And when you look at gas detection, we are right there with anyone on the market. And I feel because we have our own sensors, we're developing the data. We have a data set that we've been growing over the years that's incredibly valuable. And where we're heading in the future, we're extremely well positioned in industrial. And because of what we've done in industrial, we're really uniquely positioned in the fire service, and so I'm very excited there.
And then, what you'll see with, like, our connected products and fall protection, we're doing some things that will be very difficult for other competitors to follow. So that's sort of our mentality, is to leverage this across our entire platform globally.
And the only other thing I might add is, as we said earlier, you know, we invest about 4.5% in R&D. Safety is all we do, so for us, we're investing that R&D in those categories of safety. And as Greg said, we're able to utilize a lot of those technologies broadly across all of our product market categories. But we're consistently doing that, which we feel gives us a nice competitive position, and especially the way we interact with our customers. We've got a lot of good competitors out there, but our, you know, just consistent re- you know, just relentless drive on innovation helps us to kind of replicate those changes in the market. And we've obviously seen the results of that over the last decade.
And, we feel like if we can continue to innovate based on the challenges the customer has and give them those solutions they need, that's gonna continue to play out for us well into the future.
Thanks. We had one in here. Stephanie, you talked about sustainability, obviously, in your pre-prepared remarks. Can you talk to us about customer demand for sustainable products and solutions, and how do you see demand evolving in the future?
Sure. Thanks, Larry. So when I think about sustainable demand from the customers, the first place I'll start is with that 40 million workers that we impact around the world. So everything that we do is sustainability and impact because of that baseline of the safety that we deliver, and these are strong, secular safety trends that support and underlie every economy around the world. So whether it's industrials, you know how much industrials continue to talk about needing to invest in safety and keeping their workers safe. And for municipalities and governments, this is something where safety of communities continues to get great bipartisan support, whether you're here or any country around the world. So there are some really strong secular trends on that baseline of safety, specifically.
If I look at sustainability, let's separate it into three categories: where end markets are growing and continue to evolve, where those end markets will create greater demand for sustainability in terms of products. Where the products themselves deliver an environmental benefit, a significant environmental benefit to the customer. Or where the features, third, where the features of the product deliver an environmental benefit, that social benefit with diverse sizing or some other worker wellness initiative. So if I think about markets that are growing because of sustainability, just the clean energy markets, that's something that we play well, whether it's traditional energy or as the world's energy needs continue to grow and diversify. Whatever pace that takes and whatever proportion the world splits up its energy needs, we have products that map to all of those different energy environments.
If I think about infrastructure builds, whether for new energy products, general, infrastructure builds, EV batteries, as the world's supply chains are figuring out where they go and rewire into different countries, all of that project build and infrastructure builds are something that we can support, not just with fixed monitoring, but also our PPE portfolio, hard hats, the fall protection equipment, and the portable instruments that we have. So that's something that we will continue to be able to serve as, as all of the infrastructure gets built for these kind of new technologies and industries. Then finally, the features. You heard today how sustainability features are really woven throughout our NPD portfolio, our new product development portfolio. So that's something that we do see, that those features and benefits continue to win with our customers.
They're a reason why customers choose the products, and they're a reason why we continue to earn the strong pricing with the value that we're able to deliver. When I've traveled to Latin America, these are products that people are excited to hear about, whether it's the C1, whether it's the V-Gard Green, made with sugarcane instead of polyethylene, the connected devices. Customers want to hear about these products, so I think this is something we're really well positioned to continue to serve.
You know what, just to add to that, what's really cool about what Stephanie talked about is we look at this end-to-end, and I think the team's doing a really nice job thinking holistically about how we are sustainable throughout our processes. But at the end of the day, every product we make, every solution we provide protects people, right? It's, it's really... We're, we're in a, you know, an interesting and unique space because as somebody told us: "Well, you guys are the Big S ."... you protect lives. So, you know, for us, that's where it starts, and then we certainly have a lot of process and activity around the rest.
It's really that 40 million people impacted is something that I would just ask all of us to consider, just the importance of that for this organization, especially as we go forward.
Great. Thank you. Thank you all for your questions and the great answers. We're gonna take a short break, and we're gonna restart at 10:20, in about 10 minutes or so. Thank you.
Okay, we're gonna start up again. Let's start our second session of the day, and please welcome Gustavo Lopez to the stage. Gustavo?
Thank you, Larry. Good morning, everybody. Glad to be here. I'm Gustavo Lopez, the Vice President of Product Strategy and Pricing in MSA, and I'm very excited to talk to you today about an area that I've been a part of throughout my 20-year journey here at MSA, where I've held roles in R&D, product technology leadership, as well as leading the recent acquisition of Sierra Monitor. So let me start by sharing a story about how the MSA mission really becomes embedded in our DNA. As a young 20-something software engineer, I was part of a development team for one of our gas detectors, which helped protect firefighters from entering a building that had a gas leak. At the time, the customer need was for faster response time on the sensors, which meant you would alert the end user quicker of a potential hazardous situation.
And that it did. In this case, the sensors alerted the firefighters as they were arriving on scene, which prompted the fire chief to keep his team outside. Now, unfortunately, there was an explosion shortly thereafter, but no casualties or injuries occurred because of the technology that we developed and put in the customer's hands. Fire department followed up with a handwritten letter to our team, expressing their gratitude for the technology. This is just one story of the many that we have in which our solutions make a positive impact on society, driven by the commitment of the many MSA employees throughout the world. As Steve said, "We truly live our mission." So throughout this presentation, you're going to hear how we differentiate, have a clear strategy for growth, and continue to deliver value for our customers, thus commanding a leadership position in the marketplace.
This journey really began over 10 years ago when we invested organically in the design and manufacturing of sensor technology rather than purchasing from third parties. This truly became the catalyst for us to become a leader with clear differentiation on performance, speed of response, and sensor life, all backed by significant IP. Couple our leverageable tech stack with geographic reach, and we really participate in this area from a position of strength globally. Our main goal for the business is customer-driven and is to ultimately help them achieve their desired outcomes, safety, emissions, and sustainability. As we look at secular trends like the green energy transition, as well as a shift to connected solutions... Our detection portfolio is poised for continued growth and profitability. Lastly, we will leverage our unique expertise and technology breadth to drive scale and diversity on our business.
Over the past five years, we have experienced 8% growth, with combined sales of $635 million. Our detection business is global in nature and diversified, both from a market and technology perspective. Fixed monitoring represents about 68% of our business, and is composed of fire, gas, and refrigerant leak detection systems that are typically installed in a facility to help protect the asset. This is a very sticky business, as once the product is installed, there's a big service component over the life of the product, as it is critical to ensure that they continue to operate properly, as they help ensure the safety of a facility. This includes maintenance work as well as spare parts. Portable gas detectors make up 32% of the detection area. These devices are worn by workers to protect them from hazardous gases in various types of applications.
In this particular category, there's a growing need for connected solutions, as real-time accountability of workers is critical. This data, in turn, is extremely valuable as customers evolve safety programs to become more proactive. Both fixed and portable share similar sensor technology, which is a key value driver and differentiator for MSA. Our detection business operates in the sophisticated safety technology space with an accessible TAM of $4 billion, growing in the mid-single digits. Our end markets and customers are diverse, ranging from traditional and emerging energy activities to utilities, food and beverage, as well as general industry applications. In all these markets, there is a need to protect both infrastructure assets, through our fixed monitors, and workers, with our portable gas detectors, from toxic and flammable gases.
When you look at the key markets that we participate in, there are some nice synergies from secular trends, regulatory tailwinds, and changing market dynamics, which gives us confidence in the ability to outpace market growth. Later on, I will share some specific case studies on how we developed unique solutions for customers in the energy and food and beverage sectors. One of the case studies will detail how MSA sensor technology is used to drive increased uptime while reducing maintenance cost. We will also cover how, through the Bacharach acquisition, we are leveraging a connected enterprise platform to improve detection of refrigerant leaks, allowing customers to lower energy cost while ensuring compliance to regulatory requirements. The shift to connected solutions, it's also exciting, as Greg alluded to in his presentation.
As customers evolve their safety programs to proactive, we are now providing solutions that leverage real-time connectivity, data analytics, guaranteed uptime, and advanced reporting. This shift allows us to become a true partner with our customers as we become more embedded in helping them achieve their goals. We have also begun to see significant wins for gas detection systems for the green energy transition, as we were recently selected as the fire and gas system provider for one of the largest green hydrogen plants currently under development. Our winning formula really starts with the customer and understanding them at a deep level, so that we can uniquely solve their spoken and unspoken customer needs. Throughout this customer centricity obsession, we leverage our strong end users and channel relationships to ensure that our solutions and services are designed hand in hand with the stakeholders, creating a very collaborative business relationship.
Our innovative R&D teams have years of experience in the gas detection field, which allows them to provide the widest and most differentiated set of gas detection technologies. Over the past years, we have complemented the detection technology with big investments in connected solutions, allowing us to deliver complete end-to-end solutions going beyond the sale of the initial product. All these innovations are protected through IP, where we have a strong position in. In particular, we have a unique position with sensor technologies, which, again, you're going to hear a case study later on about how we drove significant value with. We're also in a position where we can take all this data and are able to provide insights to our customers.
From providing recommendations on testing cycles, to identifying unsafe behaviors down to the operator level, we're becoming closer to our customers and becoming the trusted advisors as it relates to safety, in turn, helping them achieve their outcomes. Based on our current market position, as well as our differentiated story, we believe we can outpace the market growth, achieving mid to high single-digit growth, results over the next years. We will do this by focusing on our foundation in being the leader in the premium part of the safety solution space, hitting on the various market drivers that we discussed before.... Our diversified and differentiated product portfolio, coupled with a global market leading position, for, means we are leveraging our strong position for above-market growth. Being application leaders is critical, as our customers are looking for partners to help them achieve their goals.
Through our recent strategy work, we're also going to drive the implementation of the Growth Accelerators . In particular, we will look to further diversify our end markets as we did through the Bacharach acquisition, leveraging the tailwinds around regulations, as well as general high growth areas like food and beverage. Capitalizing on the growing trend of connected solutions on the portable gas detection space will also be important as we scale in this space. There's also an opportunity to drive efficiencies, leveraging MSA's Business System. With the broad portfolio that we have, we will look to further drive scale around the product line through optimization of shared technologies, as well as footprint consolidation, as was detailed by Jose. So that we can better serve our customers from a delivery and simplification of ordering perspective. Lastly, our growth and differentiation strategy has yielded many results.
Organically, we created technology leadership in sensors and software, which we will continue to invest in, in as core differentiators. Inorganically, both our Sierra Monitor and Bacharach acquisition have been big successes and bolstered our leadership position in the marketplace. Acquisitions in this space continue to be very attractive to us, given the targets and our proven track record. As Greg showed in his presentation, we have a passion for helping our customers increase safety performance while also improving operational efficiency. This particular case study details how a large international customer came to us with a need to increase uptime while reducing maintenance costs.
Based on that, and the feedback from many other customers, we developed patented technology, which has been deployed, allowing this particular customer to reduce up to 75% in maintenance cost, while also ensuring that the product is under compliance and working correctly, all in real time. Now, let's start with the background. Fixed toxic detectors are usually installed at a facility, and calibration is performed every 90 days per customer's standard operating procedures. In many cases, these detectors are installed in hard-to-reach areas, so performing a calibration is not only costly from a materials perspective, it is also challenging to execute from a manpower component. These are the type of problems where our innovation processes and best-in-class R&D organizations shine. Through continuous voice of customers, our teams got to work and develop our patented TruCal solution.
This technology consists of the sensor performing a self-check every 6 hours, ensuring proper functionality, as well as compensating for environmental conditions that may cause the sensor to drift out of calibration. It also verifies that the gas path is clear, ensuring that gas can get to the sensor. All of these results are communicated in real time to the central station. By using this technology, customers can extend their maintenance intervals from 90 days all the way up to 24 months, creating large savings on materials and people, all while giving peace of mind that your critical asset is being protected with gas detection that is under compliance. Again, in this particular case, this large end user implemented TruCal throughout their facility and reported up to 75% savings in maintenance costs after implementation. More importantly, they have fully standardized on this technology for future projects.
This is a great example of how we partner with a customer to understand their needs at a deep level and uniquely solve these needs, all backed by significant IP. It is a testament of what sets the MSA brand apart in the market as a true leader. With the Bacharach acquisition, we further diversified our portfolio and end markets. This following case study outlines some key benefits of our connected leak detection platform. This particular area is one where regulations are creating a nice tailwind for our type of business. More specifically, per the EPA Clean Air Act, companies need to monitor and report their refrigerant leaks on an ongoing basis. On top of the regulatory compliance aspect, these leaks can cause increasing energy costs at facilities, as well as potential loss of product.
Current solutions require a safety technician to go into the equipment room, take samples, record the results, and write up a report to create the paper trail for audit purposes. MSA's unique solution is a fully connected enterprise platform, where the refrigerant detection devices are connected in real time to our cloud platform, quickly alerting users of a potential leak. Our cloud platform also has the built-in necessary analytics to comply with the EPA regulations, as well as to provide insights through our reporting engine. Giant Eagle, which is a large grocery store chain in the eastern part of the United States, standardized on our solution with really fantastic results. Among the many benefits, they have been able to improve their leakage rates by up to 15% by deploying our real-time system, which allows them to detect and repair leaks quicker....
The really exciting part for this solution is that these challenges can be implemented by other grocery store chains as the regulations continue to evolve, which presents a great opportunity for growth in the future. Going back to our winning formula and process for innovation, our North Star really centers around the customer need to deliver increased uptime, as well as to evolve safety programs to become proactive through the data insights that our connected ecosystems provide. To achieve this, we look at driving four key areas, starting with our technology solutions, which revolves around the detection devices, its sensors, and the enabling software. By leveraging these solutions, we provide extreme durability, fast sensor response time, and advanced analytics to minimize the amount of downtimes on our systems due to preventive maintenance, as was showcased by our TruCal example.
As you saw in the refrigerant leak detection study, compliance to regulations is another key lever. With investments in cloud technology and connectivity, we have created ecosystems where customers can easily manage their fleet of gas detectors and receive real-time information on the various incidents that may happen during a work shift. All this data that is generated would be meaningless without the power of analytics. By applying data science principles, our teams are focused on providing actionable insights to improve, improve both product use and human behaviors. For example, through analyzing product usage of one of our portable gas detectors with real-time data, we were able to push an over-the-air software upgrade to improve battery life by up to 25%.
On the human behavior side, we have been able to help customers drive training and accountability to improve unsafe behaviors down to the operator level by identifying trends on incidents. Lastly, we recognize that detection systems are costly to implement and switching costs are high. In order to minimize these costs for our end users and provide them a path to newer technology, we ensure that our next-generation fixed detectors can use the same wiring as their MSA predecessors, ensuring an easy transition to next-generation technology. As we close out this session, I'd like to reiterate our excitement over this category, as we believe it can generate above-market growth results over the next five years. There's good runway for us, given the market dynamics and secular trends. We have a proven track record where our customers value our differentiated solutions.
We've also grown our business with both organic and inorganic investments, and there continues to be room for continued innovation and growth through connected solutions and technology leadership in diverse applications and end markets. And lastly, we will continue to drive meaningful relationships with our customers and position ourselves as a leader in the safety market. Thank you for your time and interest in MSA, and with that, I'll pass it over to Bob Apel.
Thank you, Gustavo. Good morning, everybody. My name is Bob Apel. I'm the Executive Director of Global Fire Services and Digital Experience, and I'll be talking through our fire services business and strategy this morning. I've been with MSA for 28 years, half of that time working in our industrial markets, and the latter half of that working in fire service. Prior to my current role, I served as COO of Globe Manufacturing, where we achieved significant sales growth and margin expansion while enhancing performance for our customers. In today's environment, 28 years at one company is a long time. However, as you've heard from many others this morning, our mission drives our associates.
I've remained here for 28 years because I believe in our mission, and it's personally fulfilling to go home every night knowing that the work that I've done has contributed to saving a life. If you're looking for purpose in the work that you'll do, you'll have a hard time finding any greater purpose than the work that MSA does. So there are three key fire service topics that I'll be covering over the next 15 minutes or so. I'll cover how we're combining industry-leading products and solutions to develop an integrated ecosystem of products that enable sustained growth and resiliency. We'll also discuss the importance of Pillar Cities to our strategy. These are large, influential departments around the globe that are not only important because of their relative size, but also because of the halo effect that they have among surrounding departments.
Winning these Pillar City opportunities helps create additional conversions and share gain in the surrounding areas. Engaging with these Pillar Cities at a deep level helps us develop future features and solutions that help advance firefighter safety. Finally, I'll talk about how we will leverage our current capabilities to further extend our leading position in head-to-toe solutions with both NFPA and EN-certified products. Today, we define head-to-toe safety as fire helmets, SCBA, protective apparel, or as known in the industry, turnout gear and boots. We estimate that we have at least one of our products in over 90% of U.S. fire departments, and we're incredibly proud to be the manufacturer of choice for so many firefighters. Over the past five years, we've experienced 7% growth to achieve $684 million in revenue in 2023....
We currently enjoy leading positions in SCBA, fire helmets, turnout gear. While revenue by product category is reasonably balanced, you can see that we do have a nice opportunity to grow our international business. For example, by leveraging recent acquisitions such as Bristol, we now have an opportunity to serve the international markets with EN-certified turnout gear. Our gear can be customized to meet regional needs and even individual fire department needs with different material choices, colors, trims, sizing, pockets, and other accessories. Our new innovative Cairns 1836 fire helmet offers us the opportunity to build upon our current leading position in fire helmets by offering firefighters an innovative helmet that is lightweight, low profile, and easy to maintain. Our EN-certified M1 SCBA has had success in Europe, similar to the NFPA-certified G1 success in the U.S.
By listening to our customers, we're able to provide them with the products and solutions they need, ensure firefighter safety, and maintain our leading market positions across the globe. We estimate the total addressable market for SCBA, turnout gear, and fire helmets to be around $2.5 billion, growing at a 2%-3% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. Starting in SCBA, this market growth is largely driven by SCBA replacement cycles. For example, the G1 SCBA was launched 10 years ago. Over the next few years, fire departments will begin to replace their aging fleets, and there are new standards right around the corner that will drive some attractive new product features for some departments. We intend to assure, ensure these departments re-up with MSA by helping them through that replacement process.
Solutions for incident command, remote monitoring, and asset management are becoming more in demand as technologies improve. We are on the forefront of this trend and are continually updating our current offering, as well as customizing features to accommodate specific departmental operating procedures. This level of customization helps build strong partnerships and helps protect against potential conversion. In turnout gear, as departments increase their focus on maintenance, second sets of gear are starting to become the norm in new bids. This allows firefighters to have a clean set of gear while another set is being washed or maintained. Another growth driver is the historically resilient government funding for firefighter safety. We offer assistance to fire departments in applying for funding grants to help build the relationships and hopefully drive that grant spending towards MSA.
By leveraging key differentiators for MSA, we can continue to outperform the market, extending our market-leading positions and driving revenue growth. Our global experience and reach across markets is something that few others can match. For example, when we developed the G1, we lived with firefighters. We went on calls with them. We spent time in the firehouse with them. We serviced product with them. This gave us an intimate understanding of their pain points and how we could potentially solve them. One such development that arose from this effort was our patented central power management system on the G1. We saw how many batteries the fire departments went through on a daily basis, the amount of time they spent checking those batteries, charging those batteries, changing those batteries that were used on multiple SCBA devices. Our sole power source on the G1 changed the game.
Now they only have one battery to power the unit, to charge, to maintain, saving departments hours in labor and significantly reducing cost of ownership. As you heard earlier from Stephanie, our innovations haven't stopped there, and our deep connection with our customers and the fire service market has never been better. The connected firefighter ecosystem that we continue to build out focuses on the user experience, how we can provide valuable insights without being obtrusive or adding complexity. Firefighters need to focus on fighting fires. Our technology needs to allow them to keep their focus where it belongs, and we are positioned to do that better than anyone else. In addition to our products and solutions, we also have a highly skilled, exclusive channel partner network. Many of these channel partners have been with us for many years, serving as an extension of our sales team.
Their knowledge and local relationships help to maintain current and drive new business. They also serve as a critical listening post for us on market conditions. Our growth strategy combines products, services, and resources to achieve success. We continue to build upon the proven track record of innovation in R&D. Again, the recent launch of the 1836 fire helmet is evidence of our ability to continue to reinvent products to meet customer needs. We'll continue to optimize our manufacturing capacity as required for protective apparel or turnout gear to meet new demand. You've all probably likely heard that over the past few years, like many others in our space, we suffered through some supply chain challenges as a result of the pandemic. Specifically, as it relates to turnout gear, lead times across the industry reached 12 months.
Through a number of lean activities, leveraging msa Business System, supplier partnerships, and creative approaches to attract talent, we are now able to deliver turnout gear faster than any of our competitors. The result of this improved lead time is an uptick on incoming orders, faster recognition of revenue, and a re-energized sales organization. Building external partnerships to expedite time to market on emerging technologies is also part of our playbook. For example, a few years ago, we began a partnership with an autonomous drone company, expanding our connected firefighter capabilities, and we'll continue to make investments on technologies that further firefighter safety. Altogether, we expect this activity to result in 3%-5% growth through 2028, which again, exceeds market growth.
With some of our larger breathing apparatus, wins over the past year, like the U.S. Air Force, there can be some lumpiness in the business periods and some challenging comps. That said, we're excited about our momentum, and we're focused on executing our strategy to continue to outpace market growth. As you've heard throughout the presentations this morning, we have a passion for safety. This case study shows how that passion translates to a customer solution. A large West Coast fire department conducted an extensive evaluation for their new SCBA. They were looking for a way to leverage fire scene data to increase firefighter safety through faster, better-informed decisions, as well as find a product that offered improved comfort and ease of use for firefighters at a lower cost of ownership. The MSA G1 SCBA platform provided the capability and flexibility they required.
The G1 configurations promote inclusive sizing with adjustable lumbar pads for comfort, integrated thermal imaging to eliminate the need to carry a separate thermal imaging camera, and connectivity to the FireGrid. In this instance, FireGrid was deployed to work alongside existing fire department tools to provide greater safety awareness to firefighters on the scene. The capability of FireGrid has led to additional discussions about creating APIs to integrate even more external scene management tool. If you're not familiar with APIs, it's essentially a connector between two types of software, right? So, our willingness to configure these new APIs is how we work with fire departments to bring new capability to the market as quickly as possible to improve efficiency and safety. This West Coast Pillar City has resulted in another nearby city purchasing MSA, and we're just getting started.
In another example, we recently switched a large U.K. fire brigade from an embedded competitor to MSA's M1 SCBA. The M1 was introduced in 2019 and incorporates many of the features of our G1 SCBA. This fire brigade wanted to improve departmental safety and efficiency. They struggled with the lack of accessible data logs and fire scene management tools. SCBA maintenance costs and the inability to upgrade their current fleet of SCBA created a number of operational challenges. They were particularly interested in leveraging SCBA user data to drive lifetime maintenance procedures. Our M1 SCBA and FireGrid solution was exactly what they needed to accomplish their goals. The M1 SCBA is an upgradable platform with reliable communication capability. The U.K. telemetry system was specifically designed to perform in challenging urban environments, including skyscrapers and underground tunnels.
Utilizing repeaters, the system was able to cover 54 floors in a building located inside a large city. FireGrid, FireGrid provides the brigade with the additional maintenance tools and data access that they need to operate more efficiently. The FireGrid Monitor app was designed specifically for leadership personnel coordinating operations to monitor air pressure, alarm status, and state of all active firefighters. The touchscreen user interface allows commanders to manage team assignments and issue evacuation requests. The FireGrid Cloud platform offers a centralized and easily accessible location for customer data. If you didn't have an opportunity to see this software in action this morning before the session got started, I would highly recommend that you do that afterwards. We have it on display out there. It's truly an incredible piece of software.
This conversion, which was aided by our acquisition of Bristol a few years ago, established a strong foothold for us in a large international market, and this partnership serves as a benchmark for other European and international fire brigades. Our North Star in fire service is to create unique, market-leading safety solutions to protect firefighters. We achieve this through seamless integration of value-added technology, connected solutions to drive productivity through data analytics, automating burdensome reporting and inventory management processes with intuitive interfaces, and creating true partnerships with fire departments to develop new products and solutions to improve their safety. Two years ago, I was sitting in my office in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, when I was COO of Globe. I received a call about a local firefighter who was injured in the line of duty. He was wearing our turnout gear.... His department was fighting a fire in a three-story structure.
He and his team rescued six individuals that day. Just after leading a third-floor resident to the rescue ladder, as this firefighter began to exit the building, a flashover occurred. Flashovers can exceed temperatures of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, and our gear protected him from that environment. After he was released from the hospital, we exchanged some messages on his recovery and his appreciation for the work our team does to provide industry-leading turnout gear. He credits our gear for saving his life and allowing him to return home to his wife and kids. Having kids myself, it's incredibly rewarding to know that the work I've done, the work that Globe does, the work that MSA does, had a hand in keeping a family together.
If you remember nothing else from the presentation, remember this: We are a market leader in combining products and solutions to develop an integrated ecosystem that enables sustained growth and resiliency. This is showcased by the success of our G1 and M1 SCBAs and our FireGrid application. Our focus on Pillar Cities and the associated halo effect those wins have, will drive growth and market share gains. You saw real examples of this in the two case studies I reviewed. Leveraging and scaling our current connected firefighter capabilities, fire helmets, turnout gear, and boots, provides an unmatched head-to-toe solution for firefighters and makes it difficult for our competition to win. Over the past two years, we have seen strong double-digit growth in Pillar City win percentage and revenue from Pillar Cities. The fire services market fundamentals are strong, and they're resilient during various business cycles.
With our capability in developing products and solutions for firefighters, our market knowledge and customer intimacy, we are well positioned to outgrow the market over the next five years. Thank you for your time. Appreciate you being here, and with that, I will turn it over to Rob Willis.
Thanks, Bob. Good morning, everyone. My name is Rob Willis, and I've been with MSA for just about 20 years now, all within our R&D and marketing functions. I'm proud to say that I've spent my career advancing worker safety, whether that's through regulatory development, where I attend and help write some of the fall protection and head protection code, or it's getting involved in product demonstrations, webinars, or giving training. But it's the commitment to safety that we have at MSA that excites me, and it's why I'm happy to be here to discuss how MSA is advancing worker safety through innovative industrial PPE solutions. There's 4 key messages for today's presentation. Number 1, MSA is growing share in gaining above-market growth in fall protection. In head protection, we have a leading position, and we're extending that lead every single day. How have we done this?
Through our deep customer relationships. At MSA, we understand our customers' problems, we understand their pain points, and we're able to create unique insights that give us compelling reasons to win. We take these insights, and then we allow our tenured design teams to create the best products and solutions. These products and solutions ultimately turn into diverse revenue streams. Whether that's revenue generated from our channel partners, we're in distribution, we're the name in safety, or it's revenue generated from our end users from pull-through because we've saved, we've solved an application-based safety problem. It's this strong foundation that we have in industrial PPE that has me so optimistic about our future. Let's start by looking inside the business, where in 2023, we did $469 million.
Between the years of 2018 to 2023, head and fall protection had a 4% CAGR. But if I had to describe the business in my own words, there's really 3 parts to it. You've got fall protection, which should be seen as that growth catalyst. We're growing share, gaining above market growth, and it's one of the largest markets that we participate in. Then you've got our industrial head protection, where we're the number one position today, and it's been through iconic products like the V-Gard, that's been around for 60 years in defined head protection. Industrial head protection should be expected to follow general economic conditions and track with GDP. And finally, we have our other product category, which primarily consists of APR or air-purifying respirators. This is a very sticky business for us.
There's high cost associated with switching to other types of products, and historically, it's been a great source of cash generation. These are the three elements of industrial PPE. From this point forward, I will focus primarily on fall protection and head protection from a market perspective. Those two combined have a total addressable market of $2.5 billion, and we expect a market CAGR of 4%-5% over the next five years.... While I won't list all the diverse markets on the left-hand side, what's important to note is that we have threads of consistency with growth drivers. The first one won't come as a big surprise, but compliance with government regulations is a key driver.
From OSHA's perspective, fall protection and slips, trips, and falls continues to be the number one citation, and I can tell you from talking to customers all over the world, we're hearing a very similar message. New regulation, new compliance, and enforcement is coming along with it. This is truly one of the biggest drivers of industrial PPE growth. These, speaking of government and, and government spend, in the U.S., we see things like the infrastructure bill continuing to be a source of steady employment. Consistent employment means consistent use of PPE. These markets also have a need for increased productivity. Last year, over 100 million production days were lost due to work time injuries. There is truly an economic need to keep our people safe.
When it comes to trends, MSA has always been on the front of them, and we react when we need to. Today is no different. We're hearing discussions around the need for comfort, style, and what's going on with heat stress. We'll have more on heat stress later. And finally, these markets are looking for technology, but they want it done the right way. We have to be careful not to create a product, go out there and look for a problem. You have to start with insight, and then use technology in a meaningful way to solve that problem. Great example of this was the V-TEC io1, which was shown in the opening video, and Greg went through it in his remarks.
Again, here, we took fall protection PPE, we worked with an end user, learned some great insight, and then we used technology to allow our PPE to talk to their product. It improved compliance, and it's improving safety, but it started with the insight and the customer. And that intimacy is what makes us unique. But how long can it take to really learn the problem? Well, that's what gives MSA such an advantage. We've got individuals with 10, 20, 30 years of safety knowledge. They've talked to different customers. We understand their problems. We've seen the perspective from so many different angles. That's what makes us so unique, is that body of safety knowledge. To bring this to light, I'll walk you through how we developed the V-Series harnesses. Thanks to the tenacity of the design teams, they watched work being done in harnesses for years.
The number one complaint was always comfort. What we came to understand is that comfort wasn't solved, as it traditionally was, by adding more expensive padding in different locations. What we observed was that comfort could be achieved by redesigning the shape of the harness so that it moved with you. And that's why a harness from MSA looks different than anyone else's, because we figured out how to solve comfort through mobility. It all comes back to that body of safety knowledge that drives innovation. I'm proud to say, in a very specific example, that over the past five years in the U.S. alone, in fall protection, we have over 70 patents issued or pending, just that one small slice. This speaks to when MSA invests in differentiation, we make sure to protect it.
And finally, if there's one thing that rivals our strength in R&D, it is our strength in distribution. Again, we are the name in safety; we've got great access to customers, we've got a great network, and we can deliver fast. And what's the growth story going forward? Well, from head protection, we will continue to leverage all the strengths we get from being number one, whether that's our scale, access to customers, or the influence we can give. In head protection, we're gonna double down, leverage that size, and continue to take more share. In fall protection, the investments we've made in R&D are paying off because we're growing share and gaining above market, and again, it's one of the largest places we participate in. From the fall protection perspective, we see growth coming from our Need It Now business.
Jose mentioned changes we're making in operations to be producing closer to the customer. Need It Now describes a customer that needs innovation; they want a true problem solved, but the reality is they need products delivered in one to two weeks. With the changes we've made, we will be able to supply products quickly through that distribution network and grow revenue because of these changes. Another element of industrial PPE that I'm very excited about is application-based problem solving. This will end up being a very resilient part of our business, and the case study on the next slide will kind of tie this all together. This is all backed by the MBS systems, where we'll do things like SKU rationalization, footprint optimization, and that best-in-class R&D team; they help us innovate, but they also help with margin improvement projects and dual sourcing initiatives.
At MSA, we understand it's a total team effort to design and deliver great PPE. So all in, industrial PPE is looking at a 2%-4% CAGR over the next 5 years. This does include all three parts of the business: fall protection, that we anticipate growing above the market, industrial head protection, tracking general economic conditions and GDP... and the other product category, which won't be a growth driver for us, but it's a valuable part of our business with some really important customers, and it helps create a diverse product portfolio from MSA. Love to spend a minute here on the case study of the WinGrip. So your background is, when traditional aviation maintenance was occurred or was, had to happen, large scaffolding systems had to be created. You can see a render of it in the bottom corner there.
They're big, heavy, custom-made for each plane, and it was very time-consuming to do the work, but you could do it at height. So to solve this inefficiency, MSA created the WinGrip, which you can see in the bottom right there. This is a mobile vacuum anchor, and you can install one, two, however, three, however many you need on the aircraft, and you connect your PPE to it, allowing you to work safely at height. WinGrips are lightweight, portable, can be used in any environment, and there's no electronics on board. This is truly a unique solution from MSA. The results have been fantastic. Our customers see a clear ROI, as again, they're not building complicated staging systems and tearing them down and moving them around from location to location.
They're able to just buy the WinGrip, and that's why it's specified in maintenance manuals for major OEMs and military aircraft. My point in showing you this case study is to help us all learn that there's different parts to this business. We've got our great PPE, innovation, distribution-led business, and we've got application-based problem-solving with products like the V-TEC io1 and the WinGrip. In the WinGrip example, these can be big-ticket items, where a whole set of these to outfit a plane gets into the six figures. So it's a nice spectrum of revenue that you can get in fall protection. I'll close with two North Stars. First is how we developed the V-Series of PPE. We're working to reduce OSHA's number one recordable of slips, trips, and falls, and in talking to customers, we found out style and comfort matter.
They have to wear these products all day long, so they need them to feel good, and they want them to look good. That's why those V-Series harnesses have a patent-pending racing style buckle, redefining comfort, and they look really modern. Customers have a job to do, so ease of use matters. They need to be able to get back to work, and that's why the V-SHOCK product line uses colors, iconography, easy-to-understand documentation, so that we can quickly train someone on how to use our products safely. Compliance. Your PPE needs to be inspected every single day. And attention to detail matters, so MSA uses clear housings on our V-TEC product line, clear housings that you see inside the unit, and you know it's working safely. And finally, availability. The world's dynamic, and when PPE is needed, it's needed quickly.
That goes back to the changes we've made in operations to be building PPE closer to our major markets and leverage that great distribution network. Next slide, to head protection. I'd like to close here with how innovation is going to continue to drive our leadership position in head protection. I mentioned earlier heat stress, and there's a lot of discussions around it in the industry, new regulations being developed, which MSA is participating in. To get ahead of the curve, we recently launched the C1 cooling hard hat. Again, how this works is you've got a patent-pending ReflectIR barrier inside, and so the sun's energy comes down, and it bounces right back off. That keeps the inside of that hard hat up to 20 degrees cooler. Cooler people are safer people, and they're more productive.
We're hearing trends around the asks for climbing helmets or lower profile helmets. That's why we recently launched the H1 and the H2. They come with different levels of lateral protection. My point in sharing this with you is to describe the breadth of head protection solutions. We've got every application covered, and that's why we're number one. Finally, innovation can come through product partnerships. So we recently announced, announced that the H2 is available with MIPS technology. MIPS, if you haven't heard of it, is available in biking, skiing, snowmobiling. And in a nutshell, how it works is you've got a slip layer so that if there's an impact on the side of the helmet, the force translates around it to the other side. It reduces the force through the helmet, reducing brain injury.
We've got a, a sample of that out in the hall, if you'd like to check it out after. Finally, process. At MSA, we can take a customer's logo, put it on a hard hat, and have it ready to be delivered in five days. That's some of the best in the industry. People are looking to catch up with us. So my point here is that innovation can come through product, and it can come through process. Now to close again, your key takeaways. In fall protection, we're growing share and gaining above the market. Head protection has that leadership position that's extending every day. How have we gotten here? Through our deep customer relationships, where we learn insights that we're able to turn into great products and solutions.
Those products and solutions end in diverse revenue streams, whether it's pulled through our channel partner distribution network, or we're the name in safety, or through end user pull-through, because we've solved those application-based problems. That concludes my presentation for the day. I hope you found some of it insightful. I look forward to meeting you all at the break, and I thank you, and I'll turn it over to Lee. Thanks.
Thank you, Rob, and my thanks to all of our presenters today. Each of you did a nice job really sharing really what drives our 5,000 associates each and every day. Again, I'm Lee McChesney. I am privileged to serve as the CFO for MSA Safety. Our presentation today has shown you that MSA Safety is a unique company. Yes, we have a great business. We have a compelling financial history, but it all starts with our mission. Our mission-driven culture serves as the foundation of everything we do. That mission started in 1914, that people go to work, and they come home safe to their families each and every day. That mission drove us then, and it still drives us today. I wake up each day with that mindset, that motivation, that purpose.
You know, we really have been fueled for over 100 years. It guides us, our minds and our hearts every day, the responsibility of those 40 million workers we protect. That mission and culture, it's our competitive advantage. We bring that to life through unwavering focus on innovation and serving our end users. This morning you've seen innovation come to life. Our innovation engine's fueled by experts in their field. Many of them have been doing this for decades, creating the best customer-driven solution out there. So while the mission and innovation aren't new to MSA, neither is our mindset to improve. msa Business System has been coming to life for the last 10 years. It started out in operations under Steve's guidance and is now firmly established across the organization. It's a continuous commitment to drive lean principles throughout MSA Safety.
The combination of all these elements really comes together in our value creation model that generates consistent, strong cash flow and delivers a balance sheet most organizations would aspire to achieve. So as we look forward, our leadership team is optimistic on the next phase for the MSA Safety journey. Our strategies and evolution have what's really served us well over the past 5 years. So let's begin our dive into the next phase of growth with a quick update on 2024. So last month, Steve and I provided an update on the first quarter and reaffirmed our outlook for 2024. In the first quarter, we were encouraged with a solid start to the year, with mid-single-digit sales growth, expanding operating margins, and a balance sheet that really provides us tremendous optionality. Our view for 2024 remains the same again today.
Our sales outlook of mid-single-digit growth matches what we're seeing on the order front across our global portfolio. We still see a path to 30%-40% incremental margins, and our free cash levels will be close to 100% of net income. As I consider that outlook, the growth performance in 2022 and 2023, and compared to some of the best-in-class peers in the industrial space, MSA Safety remains on a path of differentiated performance here in 2024. Those performance trends in 2024 and over the past five years are proof points of what MSA Safety can deliver. The results came from a consistent value creation model, and that model starts with our growth enablers, which, to no one's surprise, are rooted in an innovation foundation.
One that consistently delivers 30%+ productivity across a broad set of diverse and resilient product lines that are focused on growing in the secular safety market. As Greg and his team shared today, we spend significant, dedicated time with our end users, understanding their challenges and identifying the right solution. Those solutions are then brought to market through a long-tenured MSA Safety commercial team, who work with global channel partners to ensure market-responsive commercial execution. Many of our best products come from this connection, and you don't have to look much further than MSA+ Solutions, where you see the power of innovation and commercial connectivity coming together. That focus on growth, when combined with our expanding profitability enablers, provides a differentiated level of performance. msa Business System is the engine that brings those streams of... to life and enables long-term, resilient outperformance.
Our MBS toolkit of combined behaviors, ever-improving processes, and a best-in-class tools are a powerful combination. MBS provides us the foundation to deliver NPD that will generate improvements in margin and fuel sales momentum. It provides us the foundation to our teams to deliver increased levels of productivity, deliver pricing discipline that's focused on value propositions, and really enables the functional groups to look at challenges in a different way and remove complexity in our organization. Now, the combination of the growth, the profitability efficiency enablers, fuels industry-leading financial performance. We can consistently invest in organic growth, deliver returns to our shareholders, and complete high-quality acquisitions. As you've heard several times today, that capability has been on display well over the past decade. You know, during a period of time that can only be described as challenging... MSA Safety has continued to perform.
We've delivered 5% growth CAGR despite the pandemic, supply chain challenges, and a broad rotation of geopolitical challenges. Our well-positioned business groups serve as a broad mix of diverse markets, which really help us avoid the cyclicality often experienced by many industrials. That growth foundation has served us well, as we're really focused on improving our margins over the past decade, from a 12.7% adjusted operating margin to 22.2% in 10 years. The momentum, it started in operations and then our SG&A cost structure, and it's really blossomed, again, into msa Business System, and we still see more opportunity in costs and on the balance sheet. With that said, all this comes to life in a pretty compelling return on capital employed over 20%.
Our consistent growth, improving margins, and a compelling level of capital efficiency deliver really a differentiated level of performance amongst industrials. So let's turn to the balance sheet and the breadth of liquidity that's really available to us historically and as we look forward. Our balance sheet has been always an asset, and we, and we've been able to leverage it, and it continues to get stronger and ultimately provides us exceptional optionality again. Over the past 10 years, we've maintained 90% free cash flow conversion that has allowed us to continually invest in the business while keeping leverage levels quite low. I mean, consider the investments we've been able to make to fuel our business. Market-leading innovation that's fueled 30% vitality rates, long-term investments in the connected worker you've heard about today, acquisitions that significantly expand our fire services and detection business.
We've been able to fully fund the legacy liability divestiture. And of high importance to all of you here today, we've delivered strong, consistent returns to our shareholders that significantly exceed market average shareholder returns. So as we look forward, this balance sheet strength will continue to be our foundation to drive returns to all of our stakeholders. Our debt-to-EBITDA ratio has been healthy over the past decade, and it's a good indication of what we can do going forward. Broadly, our debt ratios on average will stay between 1.5 and 2.5 times EBITDA, as we consistently generate cash flow and improve those ratios quickly each year.
I'd also note that we have, in the past decade, exceeded 2.5 for a short period of time, for a few quarters, for strategic actions, like the General Monitors acquisition, and you might see us from time to time consider that on a really compelling basis. So with that said, let's think about how we're gonna really use this robust cash flow over the next five years. So let's start on the left side of the chart, which shows you our history of capital deployment. At a high level, there have certainly been a nice balance to investing, both organic and acquisitive growth, and returning cash to our shareholders. We'll certainly start with our focus on organic growth, where about a third of our dollars have been allocated to invest in our customers, innovation, and really building a stronger, leaner MSA.
We've also continued to deliver on the important commitment of dividends and share repurchases for our shareholders. As you've seen, as you may have just seen, we just increased our dividend 8.5%, which represents our 54th year of dividend increases. And we also just communicated that our board of directors authorized $200 million of share repurchase authorization that will enable us to fully offset dilution pressures from our employee compensation plans and provides us opportunistic reinvestment. We are in the market today under that program. Finally, we have made a meaningful allocation toward three acquisitions and the strategic legacy liability divestiture, investments that clearly accelerate our business performance and deliver significant value creation for our shareholders. So as we look forward, there's an opportunity to see a similar balance across all three priority areas.
One third going towards organic growth to continue our innovation, our customer and business capability journey, up to a third going to our shareholders, again, through dividend and consistent series of share repurchase activity, and then finally, a third going towards M&A, which has been a clear value creator and potentially could play a larger role going forward. So let's take a few minutes to explore that M&A opportunity a bit more. Now, it goes without saying, our first focus is organic growth for MSA Safety, the mix of products, the diversity of markets, the strength of our product lines that fuel our business across the globe. It's been our consistent first priority. However, with our focus on the mission, serving our customer, we've also enhanced that journey with a more consistent approach to finding high-quality acquisitions, and it's increased our impact to all of our stakeholders.
So I'm delighted to have Chris Hepler and his team now turning their full attention to organic growth and include acquisitions and capability investments. Chris will partner with the global leadership team and really find the right opportunities to enhance our portfolio. So where will these efforts be focused? Well, our core objective is to enhance the three major business portfolios we have today. We continue to seek out strategic bolt-ons and look for really complementary adjacencies. Certainly, we like the characteristics of detection. Bacharach was a great example of a group with a strong brand, excellent market position, in a space we already had some experience in.... Within fire services, there could be a geographic opportunity or a further expansion, what a firefighter uses to fight a fire. And finally, as you just heard from Rob, we like head and fall protection.
So if there are assets that could accelerate our progress, we'd certainly look at them as well. Now, broadly, we have a clear acquisition filter that requires leading market and brand positions, an ability to expand our TAM, businesses, again, where technology fuels differentiated solutions, and opportunities that could further diversify our end markets and the geographic regions we serve. With all that said, we'll continue to be disciplined on the financial returns we target with acquisitions. Now, generally, again, we're looking for opportunities that enhance growth and bring accretive margins within the first few years of ownership and enhance the portfolio. As I've said before, M&A has been an enhancement to MSA's story, the results, and we're positioned well to bring the right opportunities forward. So on that note, we have a strong track record of doing M&A by being selective.
On this side, you can see really an assessment of our four most recent acquisitions. You understand that we looked at over 50 before we got to these four. So we have a standard set of strategic and financial criteria that every opportunity is assessed against. So when you bring these deals together, think about the amount of capital we deployed and the value creation. You can understand the investments have delivered really a really strong return. And we continue to look for lessons learned. So recently, Chris and Stephanie championed a process to really deeply dive into these past investments through our toolkit of the Business System and identified several improvement areas that are now being enhanced into our integration toolkit for future deployment. So with that said, let's turn to what that all means.
Well, it all starts with what you've really seen from the team throughout the day. We're gonna continue to be the leader in premium safety solutions. We'll follow our mission, we'll fuel that with market-leading innovation, and continue to focus on markets where our product lines have served us so well. We've also identified Growth Accelerators that have the capacity, really, to enhance our trajectory and fully offset headwinds that likely will come our way. But our continued focus on delivering full solutions versus products, increasing our recurring revenue through an expanded focus on service offerings, pursuing connected solutions in higher growth areas like detection. We're gonna leverage the MSA Business System fully across the organization and deliver benefits to our customers and to our shareholders.
And then finally, we will continue to leverage our cash flow and resulting stellar balance sheet to fuel our business and deliver strong returns to our shareholders. So what does it all mean as you think about where MSA Safety can go over the next five years? So first, we foresee really a compelling opportunity to generate differentiated value creation. Yes, we are an industrial, but again, we're not your average industrial. That brings a fair amount of volatility. Our resilient business has come through consistently year in and year out, and that's the same mindset we have as we look forward here. Over the next five years, we have the growth programs to drive consistent mid-single-digit organic growth, leverage our market position, and enhance the journey with our consistent investment in innovation.
We will continue to leverage the Business System to target operating margin and working capital improvements annually across the organization. 30-50 basis points is what we'll target at each of those areas, and we stand ready for whatever the macro brings our way. Productivity, driving positive product line mix, managing inflation, value pricing, and really, the ability to deliver an adjusted operating margin that approaches 25%. Broadly, this is a platform with an organic EPS beyond $10, with a significant platform for M&A to drive an expansion even further. So all this is fueled by disciplined capital deployment, leverages over $1 billion of free cash flow generation, and a really nice mix of broad debt liquidity we have at our disposal.
We have this balance sheet that provides us the fuel to drive organic growth and invest in M&A, and it's just a powerful optionality we have to look at. All, again, coming together to sustain a strong ROIC, over 20% on an expanding capital base. So as we look forward, we see an opportunity to deliver over $2 billion of sales organically. As you heard today, our detection business growing up to 7% organically, our fire service business growing up to 5% organically, our industrial PPE business growing up to 4% organically. The Business System serving to accelerate our performance and provides that platform, again, to continue driving improvements in our margins and our working capital levels. Keep in mind our history. Our adjusted operating margin rate, again, was in the low teens.
We went to work to get it to the mid-teens, then the high teens, and then 20%. You heard that when we kicked off today. Certainly, it gets harder to drive the rate further, but we do see that path to approaching 25% adjusted operating margin. These objectives represent really a continuation of our mindset to deliver sustainable value creation like we have over the past decade. So we began this presentation with highlights from Nish on shareholder value created over the last three CEOs. I wanna bring that view to our shareholder performance over, really, the last 10 years. So whether you compare MSA Safety to the S&P 400 MidCap , the S&P 400 Industrials, the S&P 500, MSA has delivered differentiated value. A business has grown resiliently and increased its margin rate close to 1,000 basis points.
So my, my final thoughts are all about where we began. For MSA Safety, it's not about the number, it's about the mission and our culture that is our competitive advantage. Our organization is focused on serving that mission and fueling that pursuit with customer influence innovation. That focus drives a strong business model that provides our stakeholders an outperformance opportunity, and does so really with a level of resiliency, not often seen. That formula is why this business has survived for 110 years, why it's performed so well over those past three CEOs, and really why it's thrived over the past 10, and why you still see the team here today with a mindset that we can do it again. I will now pass you back to Steve to close out our prepared remarks. I say thank you for your time and your interest in MSA Safety.
Thanks, Lee. So first of all, thanks to the team. I hope you heard the passion and got a sense for just how optimistic the team is about the future, leveraging what we've done in the past, but continuing well into the future. I think we're well positioned to continue driving value for our shareholders. We feel good about that. We think we've made excellent progress over the past several years, staying focused on our customers and on the mission. We're in attractive and resilient end markets, and we expect that to continue. We think the innovation engine, which has fueled us for 110 years, is what's gonna continue to fuel us well into the future as we serve our mission for our customers.
The Business System, you heard a lot about it, you got some good examples, I think, from the team on how we've utilized it, and really, it's permeated throughout the enterprise. We believe it's, it's just really in the beginning stages. We think there's a lot more opportunity for what it can do to the organization. And of course, as you look at the capital deployment, as you heard Lee talk about, we think that's a great opportunity for us to really leverage, what we do and to be more effective in the utilization of capital going forward inorganically, as well as what we do, from the organic side. We've put targets out there. We're excited by what those targets show, and we're looking forward to your feedback and, the growth story as we go forward.
So with that, I think I'll turn it over to Larry, and we've got another Q&A. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Steve. Okay. We're gonna turn to our final Q&A, and this concludes our prepared remarks. Please give us a moment while we get situated on stage here, and we'll get going in a sec
As a reminder, for those of you on the webcast, please feel free to submit your questions online, and we'll get to those as we proceed through the Q&A. All right, let's get started. Rob, thanks.
Yeah, thanks for the presentations. Lee, toward the end, you mentioned value pricing in your commentary, and I'm curious how really the company thinks about, within this 3%-5%, how you're what you're including for price?
And maybe more specifically, over the last three years or so, if as you've had to go out for more price, has it changed your thinking about MSA's entitlement around pricing, particularly in this premium part of the segment that you play in?
Yeah, so I'll start. Hey, appreciate the question, Rob. So we have built really a nice capability around pricing over the past decade as part, you know, really under the MSA Business System banner. And it served us well, right? And it's really a tool that we've built a team around. It's deployed across the globe. It's deployed in all the businesses, so it's enabled us to really offset certainly what's been a period of high inflation. But I think we're now moving into this more period of a normalized inflationary environment, and that's one certainly where there's kind of a range of options on the pricing spectrum. So I think we're well prepared.
As we look out over the next, next five years, I think, you know, a safe assumption is more moderated levels of inflation, kind of, you know, between 1% and 2%. And we think between, you know, all the different tools you have in the, in the pricing toolkit, you know, we'll be able to, to mitigate and deal with that inflation. But I also think, you know, we're ready to respond no matter what happens in the market. You know, there's some elections that come up that could change some things. You know, we know we've built a really nice team-
… around the globe, and, you know, we've proven that we've been able to navigate that. So I think we're still in a very good place, Rob.
Just a follow-up question real quickly on fall protection. You've been in this status of number three player in the market, but gaining share. Could you just update us on where you think that share gap stands today, how it may have changed over the last few years? And then I'm curious if, you're obviously innovating in fall protection, how your, you know, top two competitors are, you know, is it one or two or both, innovating, trying to innovate at the same pace? Would you make a distinction there?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Rob. So if you think of fall protection, there are, there's a number of different participants in the market globally. Where we see that space, you know, you, you can kind of parse it out two ways. There's really three bigger players that participate, and we're one of those three. We are third right now in market share, and then there's a lot of other players in the market. There's some right behind us, but by and large, that, that bottom 50% is, is—it's a long tail
... that's pretty broad. You know, we have participated in that market over the last, I think it's 2016, we determined we're gonna make that core.
Once we determined that was core, we said, "That's going to get the same innovation, investment, and resource that some of our other core categories got." We acquired Latchways for the mechanical side, and we've been reinvesting in that business. So our market share, we're still third.
We're now double digits in our market share. We've doubled that market share over the last 5.5 years.
Six years, I guess, because, you know, that included COVID, and we're super bullish about the opportunity to continue to grow. Now, we've got in the market scale that really previously we were trying to get... People knew the brand of MSA. Fall protection wasn't what they really kind of leaned into in MSA until the last couple of years, and our brand recognition is now at the top of the game, even with the other competitors. And how they're participating, we've got strong competitors. We've got a couple of big competitors that are global in nature. They continue to be really strong competitors, but we do feel like where we're innovating, the things that Rob talked about-
... are really creating a gap in product capability. What stopped us from growing faster, quite frankly, is our supply chain issues-
and our ability to deliver. This is a product category where you need it now.
Right? It's helmets are very similar. We got great scale in helmets, and we've got great coverage because of distribution. But with the challenges we've had, it's really we've had these stops and starts, where we've gotten product to the customer, and then we've had supply chain issues, and we can't deliver in a timely manner. The unique thing for us, and what really makes me pretty passionate about this, is most of the times when you can't deliver to the customer because you've got a supply chain issue, they don't come back to you.
Right? They get something else, and they say, "Okay, well, I got this from this other competitor," and they're satisfied. With fall protection, every time we have product in, you know, available, they come right back to us, and they continue to tell us, "Your brand, we trust what you guys do here." So we've. That's why we've done that, footprint rationalization and changed our strategy and really have a center of excellence we put in Mexico to really improve our delivery performance, and we're following that up with the supply chain. So we're equally excited by what the next five years can do on fall protection, too.
Thanks. Let's go to Stanley over here, please.
Thanks, everybody. Lee, could you guys talk a little bit about the margin targets you framed out?
So the 2023, 2025, how should we think about that split versus the, you know, the international business-
... versus the Americas business? And then, you know, is this gonna be coming from, you know, gross margin expansion-
... or is it just kind of leveraging the cost structure?
No. Thank you, Stanley. Good.
Please.
So, you know, we spoke just to get everyone in the same place, about 30-50 basis points of operating margin improvement being targeted each year. And, you know, I think similar to what you've seen from us over the last several years, it's a, it's a good balance of both gross margin and SG&A opportunity. It's certainly something we look for everyone to participate in. You know, we made a lot of progress. If you look back, go back to the history of where we've moved from, you know, 12%-22% operating margin, really, we saw that come to life across the board. So that came across, you know, in the Americas, you know, in the international markets, and then if you double-click down, you get into things like Latin America.
Latin America, you're really almost up to line average now. So I think, you know, overall, it's-- there's opportunities. There's still plenty of opportunity out there. You know, you do have some parts of the world where, you know, maybe the competitive set or our scale's not quite where it is, you know, on, in the strongest places are. You know, there's gonna be that dynamic, and then maybe there's a little bit of a cost structure in some parts. Like, you know, Europe's gonna be a challenged place. We love the progress. We think it will continue to improve, but, you know, I think most people have found that Europe doesn't have the same operating margin in the end as others. But we, again, we love the growth there. We love the progress we're showing there as well.
Maybe a little bit more color, I guess, on the leverage assumptions that are based within these numbers, right?
I mean, if you could do a 90% free cash flow conversion off of $11, you're basically close to that $1.5 billion.
That's before you'd even lever up to-
... 1.5, 2 times, whatever that number is. How should we think about the leverage that you guys want to comfortably run with? Is it opportunistic around M&A? You know, any color there would be great.
Yeah. No, I appreciate the question. So to your, to your point, good, good math.
... You look out at those targets and, US cash flow of, you know, about $1.5 billion over five years. And, you know, again, I'll go back to the capital allocation I talked about earlier. You know, a third of that certainly goes, you know, to organically reinvesting in the business, a third going back to our shareholders, and then a third for M&A opportunities. So you're right, just that alone is, you know, incredible amount of optionality for us to utilize on the M&A front.
But, you know, as you look at kinda some of the things we're interested in, you know, whether it's in the fire space or in detection, and we even talked again about things in PPE and the multiples you got to pay, you know, you you're gonna need that cash flow and some level of debt. You know, I think, you know, I wanna try to give color out there that, you know, you know, 1.5x-2.5x is a comfortable zone. We can, we can, you know, the P&L balance sheet can support that. You know, our challenge will be to find, you know, the right opportunities that also meet all that criteria. But, you know, I think our message today is we have that capacity. That's where the bolt-ons...
A bolt-on today is different than a bolt-on than what it was five years ago in terms of size we can do. Then you really look at these, these near neighbor opportunities that we're also interested in. Well, they're really nice, like, natural extensions, increases the TAM that we plan. You know, I think you, you got right to the core, the heart of it. We have, we have more opportunity in this area than we've ever had.
Thanks. Ross, please.
Hey, guys. Thinking about, you know, the detection growth, the international piece has historically lagged the Americas. Anything we should read into that? And, you know, how do we think about the greater market opportunity going forward? And then just given that detection is expected to be a, you know, a bigger piece of that mix, just what does that imply for the margins? And just looking for, you know, overall resiliency of those targets.
Ross, can you repeat the first half? I'm sorry, I didn't catch it.
Just your expectations for international versus Americas on the detection growth?
Okay, on detection specifically. Yeah, thanks for the question. So you know, when we think of detection, part of it, you probably noticed strategically this time on Investor Day, we focused on product market categories. We didn't focus on regions. And that's because we believe we can participate and win globally with these three categories. So when you think detection, specifically, the markets there, I'm gonna parse it out a couple different ways. I'm gonna start with what we would call infrastructure, you know, the fixed gas, fixed monitoring, really categories. And we're really, we look at that internationally as a real growth driver and opportunity, especially in the Middle East and Asia. The Middle East infrastructure spend continues to go up.
You know, when you think historically about energy and oil and gas in the Middle East, but there's a lot of hydrogen work going on there, as well as carbon capture, right? The CCUS, carbon capture, utilization, and supply. As they're trying to capture that, that technology's been out for a little while, but they're now really leaning into applying that technology to make sure that they hit certain goals that they've set, and we've seen that play out well for our business, and we expect that to continue in the hydrogen space. So you've got this energy spectrum that's fairly broad, and when you add those all up, it's a pretty good story from a growth perspective over the next probably seven or eight years at least.
The Middle East is gonna play in that, Asia Pacific, and then Latin America and North America as well. Europe, Europe, we think, is pretty stable in that regard. And then when you get to the portable detection, this is an area where we, we've already seen strength outside of the U.S. for this ALTAIR io4 , this connected device. We've seen some really nice progress, and we just, again, have been launching this globally. We started in the U.S., but getting these approvals across the globe because of the cellular coverage, et cetera, we've just been knocking through. I think we're over 60 countries now. LAR, as soon as we got it out there, we got this big customer that said, "I really want to move this way," and we got a really nice win there.
We just had a nice roadshow in the Middle East. The team was in Saudi Arabia, and the reviews were fantastic. So again, I would say detection overall, we're very bullish. Internationally, I think the growth will probably come more Middle East and Asia than Europe. Europe's more of a stable business. They like the technology. That, Europe, if I could just swing a little bit, Europe's gonna be a focus on fire service share-
and detection share.
Thank you for that. And then just maybe parsing out the, the framework on the 3%-5% market growth. You know, it looks like the implied 3% overall market, you had a couple points of share and price, but then we also have this digital narrative and, you know, recurring revenue stepping up to, I think, 20% of sales in the coming years. Not sure if that overlaps with share, but, I mean, maybe just help us conceptualize.
Yeah. No, I'll do that. You got pretty good math there, Ross. So, just in case you didn't hear the question, just, hey, you think about that revenue outlook, what's the dynamics with, you know, within price and GDP and market share? So it's a similar that we've talked about in the past, for the mid-single digit growth. You know, there's probably a point or so of price, 1-2 points, depending what goes on with the inflationary environment. Certainly GDP, certainly some, I'll say, depressed views of GDP over the next 5 years, but, you know, normally that might be a little bit higher. And then the rest of it really goes to just what we're doing through innovation and commercially to win in the marketplace.
So it's the same mix. I think the GDP is probably a little bit of the difference maker as you look out for the next couple of years.
... We had a question online that maybe builds on Ross's question around recurring revenues, maybe where they are now and what they could look like going forward in the future.
So what's the question's on looking at revenues-
Where, where are we now, and where can they go? Recurring.
Oh, recurring.
Recurring revenues. We're about 15% right now on recurring revenues. We're not gonna put a number out there for the future yet, and part of that is because what we're trying to do is make sure we provide our solutions the way the customer wants to buy. I think Greg hit this earlier. We think the industrial space is more mature and probably will make that transition a little more quickly. They'll adapt that technology. We've seen a bit of a pull, right? When we've had these discussions and showed them the technology. Fire service, you know, very traditional market, high interest in the technology, but how they apply it and use it at this stage is. It's fairly early in the game. Some of the bigger departments, we looked at this and see this as, you know, something that helps us win.
Not by itself, but it's one of that, really, the suite of different capabilities we have that then we're able to win some of these larger opportunities. But I think going forward, we're gonna see that appreciate. The question is the timeline that it happens. You know, we've studied other firms and how they've done this in other types of businesses, and that time horizon is different. So-
We're very aware of that, and we're very measured in how we go after it. We're gonna have the suite of technologies to make it happen, but I think the percentage is gonna be... It's gonna be up to the customer, how quickly they adapt it. I don't know, Greg, if you have anything else you want to add to that.
No, I'd just add, you know, that 15% is really our standardized recurring parts, services, our contractual subscriptions, all of that. And we see that growing at a much faster pace than our standard business because you have adoption and uptake, but then you also have market expansion on top of that. So we really do see that growing nicely over the next cycle.
Yes.
Thanks. Another one online: "Looks like you're taking a step forward in terms of growth with your long-term targets. What has to go right to hit these targets? And if we fast-forward a couple of years, and you miss these targets, what went wrong?
Well, we have, we, we put a strategy together and defined some targets that the team has high confidence in and believes in. So I, I would start there. You know, we, we feel good about the targets. Obviously, it's the first time we've put targets out, so we felt this was important to define them and share our perspective in a way that showed you confidence in where we think we can be. You know, so certainly, we expect the execution requirements that some of the team laid out today as part of that story and how we do that. But as we said earlier, certainly we know that the economy can do different things. We know that based on what we've seen over the last five years. So there, there's possibilities that something different would happen.
If that did happen, if the economy was a lot tougher than we think, again, as we said, we've got a very resilient business. It's shown its ability throughout economic cycles to really be able to weather those storms, and we also know how to pull the right levers. We do a nice job. The team is very focused on making sure we keep the balance sheet intact, and we would do that again if we needed to.
So another question, looking for additional color on the M&A assumptions, which obviously feature large presentations today. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the M&A pipeline multiples and what we're seeing in the market?
Yeah, how about I start, and then I'm gonna hand it to Lee to close it out a little bit. First, the three categories we play in, right? Those three product market businesses we have, those are... We're staying within those swim lanes, so to speak, because we feel like there's just a lot of opportunity to participate in those, and we view the markets as very strong and providing a lot of opportunity for expansion and growth. So it's gonna be in those spaces first and foremost. We're excited, and Lee's super excited.
I think Chris is, too. We've got Chris dedicated, which gives you a perspective on our belief of the need for M&A and the capability we have, again, in a disciplined way. But, yeah, we're – I think we think that it's an area that we can grow. And why don't you talk a little bit about-
Yeah.
What's the sizing and the criteria? So.
Yeah, I'll do that and maybe just give a little bit of a market update as well.
To the question. So, hey, you know, as we talked about today, M&A has been important. It's enhanced the journey for MSA Safety. So, you know, we've had really the entire leadership team has relationships in the marketplace that we leverage, and we have obviously our dedicated M&A team, and we're, you know, you're always keeping the funnel warm. You know, certainly the last year or 2, the numbers speak for themselves. Not a lot of transactions have occurred. But I would say over the last 9 months, it's a lot warmer. So conversations are occurring. You know, people clearly know we're interested, and we're going through our evaluation process. We've been through some processes.
I mentioned earlier, we're disciplined, and, you know, they gotta hit all those boxes. So, you know, I think we're optimistic, and I think as everyone else out there—I think I heard this quote even this morning, "The dollars are increasing in the M&A space, the number of transactions are still lower." So, but that's a good place to start, because that means there's gonna be more coming. So, and I think just again, as Steve said, we've oriented towards this, you know, whether it's the resources we're putting into finding opportunities or making sure we're prepared to do the integration well, as I mentioned, as also. In terms of sizing, I mean, I would start off with, you know, look at what we've done in the past, right? We've done these nice bolt-on acquisitions.
You could certainly size in a bit higher, 'cause we're a larger group. The balance sheet's even stronger than it was in the past. But I still, you know, gave you those guidelines on leverage on purpose, because, you know, that defines who we are, you know, as a safety company, and kind of the level of risk and the level of, you know, how important that balance sheet is to us to give us optionality. But I said there could be some, you know, scenarios like a General Monitors. General Monitors, we went into the low threes. It checked every box we were looking for, and it really helped accelerate our journey in the detection space. Again, we were already in the detection space, so it wasn't a surprise we did that, but it really accelerated our journey.
You know, it would be within those, those financial thresholds.
Thanks. Another one. Stephanie, you've had good growth in the Americas segment over the past several years. Where do you see the best opportunities going forward, and what should we expect in terms of margins?
Sure. So I'll tie together a couple of the things that we've been talking about this morning. The Americas certainly has had a very strong position and strong track record for many years. I'll take this generally from a product portfolio and from a geographic point of view as well. If we think about this, generally, we see opportunities in top line growth and margin expansion. Speaking to some of these questions over here, first, just GDP. I mean, your basic market growth throughout the Americas provides some of our opportunity to grow, and that's before you get to possible TAM expansion, pricing, mix, sophistication from that perspective, or before you even think about the 1 or 2 that we can be taking on share.
The time that I've spent in the Americas, talking with customers, talking with partners, I like the position of strength that we have in our strong market share positions, and the strength that that allows us to be able to move from. In strength of brand recognition, strength of scale and reach, strength of customer intimacy. So that's actually, to me, a very good position to continue to grow and to have all of those different levers between market share, GDP, mix, the TAM expansion, and pricing opportunities. So with that portfolio, I continue to see good opportunities for profitable revenue growth, generally, across the Americas. From a product portfolio standpoint, we also see opportunities across each of these lines. In particular, Bacharach. You heard a little bit about refrigerant detection. That is fueled by regulatory tailwinds in multiple geographies, and that includes Europe as well.
Our connected portable devices, we have a considerable runway here. Steve talked a little bit about some of those geographies where we're announcing these products, customers are saying, "Yes, we want this, and we want it from MSA because you're a brand that we trust." If I look at detection, continued opportunities in that energy security and the clean energy applications and energy transition, serving all of our fire departments throughout the Americas, and we have continued runways, particularly in Latin America, on fire detection in some of the larger departments down there. Fall protection, we certainly talked about this morning as well. And then finally, I see some opportunities across the two continents in turnout gear.
That's a place where we have replacement cycles, but also the ability to continue to win, share, and serve all of those fire departments that know us from fire helmets and our breathing apparatus as well. And then in terms of other margin expansion, the productivity improvements that we have and opportunity there will continue to be able to drive some of those efficiencies through our Business System behaviors. So I really see a lot of opportunities and a lot of different levers that make me excited about our runway.
Great. Just a couple more online here. But, on the fire service presentation, you showed, obviously, UK Fire Brigade and, and West Coast win. Are there more Pillar Cities out there over the next few years to keep an eye on?
Yeah, thanks, thanks for the question. I'll, I'll just parse that out a little bit. There are... I, I would say when we look at the globe, there are certainly some Pillar Cities still in the Americas that are front and center over the next, you know, few years within this time horizon, which we're, you know, we're participating in and feel like we have a great opportunity to, to compete. International, over the next 2-3 years, we, we expect to see a lot more, you know, opportunities because of our M1-
that's bringing to bear our chances to compete in some of those things. So you're gonna see some of those in Asia, over the next 24-36 months even, and some in the European theater as well. So we are expecting to see more Pillar Cities. I think in the international market, you know, the comments that Bob Apel talked about with the Pillar City and the ability, once you have that city, to be able to participate in other adjacent departments and get those wins, is probably even more important. And, you know, we've got, when you think of the U.K.,
... when we were able to win London and have that customer, we were really fortunate, and we've got a great relationship we continue to build with London. But the amount of wins we've already had for a country where we had no participation before London's win, has been fantastic. So we expect that to play out again in some of these other big opportunities in the international segment. In the U.S., in, in Latin America, again, there's some, not as many relative to the scale of the business, but there's some really nice opportunities coming forward.
Yeah, if I could add, in the Americas, we have opportunities with Pillar Cities, and we're really proud of the Pillar Cities that we've been able to win, earn their trust, and continue to serve. But we really think about this as G1 for all. We have the ability to serve those large departments with our most sophisticated products, the top technologies with G1 and certain connected devices, and doing something pretty custom for those top departments. But for even the smallest volunteer departments, there's a modularity with the M1. There's the ability to have certain features that are an essential G1, that might not be all of the bells and whistles, but are still available, that are sophisticated technology and at a strong margin profile that we're able to play at any size of a department across the Americas.
Thanks. And then maybe the last one here. What part of the investment thesis is least appreciated or most misunderstood by the market? Maybe something that, you know, that came up today that you wanna double down on.
Yeah, thanks for the question. I think we, we talked a lot about the mission. I would start with the mission because it really enables us to have this, this really inspired and dedicated team focused on the customer. It's a, it's-- You know, and I didn't start with MSA, but, you know, as I've been here, it brought me here, it brought Lee here. You think about the talent we have and their passion to serve the customer, it's really unique. It's, it's a team of associates that every day are gonna do everything they can to support the customer, and that helps our business, right? It helps the customer because, we protect that customer with our solutions. But it really...
I think that's something that the reason we talk about that so much is just how innate it is within the buildings of MSA and our culture. So I would say that that'd be first and foremost. I also would say that number two, this transition we've made into the solution set is not to be taken lightly. We believe that this is where the industry is going and our ability to pivot, which we've been doing for years with some of the technology we've been creating, but what we think the market's gonna do with that over the next five plus years you know should be really good for the business.
Great, okay. Well, that concludes our Q&A session. I wanna thank everyone for your time today. We're excited about our positioning and the journey ahead. We hope this was an informative presentation and event for everyone with us here and those who are on the webcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for your ongoing support, and we look forward to connecting with you again. Thank you, and have a great day.