All right, great. Thank you for joining us, everybody. I'm Casey Woodring from the Life Science Tools team here at JPMorgan. Welcome to our healthcare conference. Pleased to be joined by the management team of Mettler-Toledo. We'll do the standard 40-minute presentation slot. Patrick will go through the corporate presentation, then we'll do time for Q&A at the end. Patrick, go ahead.
Yeah, thank you, Casey. And good afternoon to everyone in the room and those joining us on the webcast. Thank you for being here today. Similar to the past, I'd like to start off by providing an overview of the business, our competitive advantages, a review of our growth strategies, and why we are well positioned to deliver excellent shareholder returns going forward. Before we get started, please notice our disclosure regarding forward-looking statements in the slides. To start off, for those of you that are not familiar with our company, Mettler-Toledo is a global market leader in precision instrument measurement instruments used in laboratory and industrial applications around the world. We generate about $4 billion in revenue, and the significant majority of our sales are in segments in which we are a number one global market share position.
Our business is very diversified in terms of the products we sell throughout our customers' value chain and the end markets and geographic markets that we serve. The fragmentation and diversity of our business provide significant opportunity for growth and market share expansion. We are well known for our track record of delivering excellent financial results, and we are very much focused on continuing to build on this track record going forward. We do this by leveraging our many competitive advantages, our well-developed and proven growth strategies, and our unique culture of innovation, collaboration, focused execution, and continuous improvement. In recent years, we have also introduced the next generation of several corporate programs such as Spinnaker and SternDrive while accelerating our pace of innovation that will help us to continue to deliver strong financial performance.
Now, turning to our market share exposure, we target highly attractive end markets that prioritize solutions delivering exceptional accuracy, driving automation, boosting productivity, and facilitating digital transformation. We estimate that more than 70% of our sales come from attractive market sectors such as pharma and biopharma, food manufacturing, and specialty chemicals. Among these, bioprocessing is a particularly promising segment, accounting for a low double-digit percentage of our global sales. We support bioprocessing customers with our comprehensive range of laboratory and industrial solutions. Our business mix has improved over the years as our Spinnaker sales and marketing program has guided our sales teams to our most attractive opportunities, and we have expanded our portfolio into faster-growing segments.
We are also very well positioned to capture onshoring opportunities throughout the world, as today we are already well established with many of the relevant companies, and the majority of our revenues support production and QA/QC labs. Our solutions are ideally suited for these investments, and we are agnostic between small molecule and large molecule production facilities, given the breadth of our portfolio. Our business is highly diversified geographically, with products sold into 140 countries worldwide, and we have a direct sales presence in about 40 of them. China represents about 16% of our sales. We compete very effectively in China, where we design and manufacture products specifically for the Chinese market, and most of our sales are to local private companies. We also believe we are poised to capture growth opportunities related to governmental priorities and investments in life sciences, technology, new materials, and clean energy.
Emerging markets outside of China account for roughly 17% of our sales and are an important component of our long-term growth strategy. We expect these markets to benefit from nearshoring investments throughout the world. Our direct sales teams in these regions enable us to fully capitalize on these opportunities. We operate around 25 strategic business units, each representing a key product category. This extensive portfolio enables us to deliver comprehensive solutions that support our customers from research and development through scale-up and quality control all the way to production, final inspection, and logistics. Our broad and diverse product offering provides a unique opportunity to help our customers gain insights and drive productivity throughout their value chain. Now, let's briefly review our product offering, starting with laboratory instruments, which represent approximately 56% of our total sales.
We provide scientists and chemists with the most frequently used solutions in biopharma, chemical, and food labs for research and development and quality control applications. We are the worldwide leader in laboratory weighing and recently celebrated 80 years since launching our first analytical balance. Over the decades, we have significantly broadened our product range and now provide the most extensive array of laboratory instruments available in the industry, complemented with a strong software offering. This slide here highlights our laboratory offering for R&D labs. The life science industry is an important customer for our laboratory products, and we estimate about one-third of our sales to the life science customers would be to R&D labs. These customers require a high degree of precision and flexibility, which we support with pipettes, balances, analytical instruments, and automated chemistry solutions. We are well known for our innovation, high quality, and deep application know-how.
Our laboratory instruments are also very important in QA and QC labs, and we provide these customers approximately 40% of the bench instruments typically found in an analytical quality control lab. We continue to expand our portfolio of instruments with automation features, which provide tangible productivity gains and better data management. Our LabX instrument control and data management software is unique in its ability to connect our broad portfolio of instruments in a highly compliant and audit-proof manner, while we are also automating workflows. Now, the final segment of our lab business is process analytics, where we are the market leader in continuous inline monitoring of critical process control parameters such as pH, oxygen, and CO2, as well as analyzers for ultra-pure water applications.
Our consumable sensors are seamlessly integrated with our advanced transmitters to provide highly accurate measurements for applications like bioprocessing, as well as other industries such as chemical, food, semiconductor, and power generation. This next slide is an overview of several of our industrial products and solutions, which represent about 40% of our total sales. The largest portion of our industrial is our core industrial business, which is approximately 24% of our total sales and includes our bench and floor scales, weigh modules, terminals, and software that are used for process control and applications like formulation, filling, and dosing. Our largest end markets for core industrial are pharma and biopharma, food, and specialty chemical, while we also serve a wide variety of many others.
The mix of this business has shifted over time, with approximately 60% of our sales to these more attractive end markets, and our products mix has shifted towards our automation and digitalization solutions and products that provide enhanced operator guidance. We also provide a comprehensive portfolio of product inspection solutions, which is approximately 15% of our total sales. Our advanced metal detection and X-ray systems are designed to detect physical contaminants at the end of a production line, ensuring product quality and safety. Additionally, our high-speed checkweighing solutions enhance productivity and quality control by preventing over- and underfilled packages. Our primary customers are food manufacturers, as well as pharmaceutical companies who rely on these critical end-of-line inspections to protect their brands, maintain the highest quality standards, and boost productivity. Now, this slide outlines our competitive advantages and why we are so confident in our long-term growth prospects.
First, we are very proud of our long and rich history of innovation, which has been fundamental to our success and has helped us become a market leader across approximately 75% of our businesses. At the same time, we serve very niche and highly fragmented markets, and our market share overall is only in the range of 25% or more. Our price points are relatively low and on average less than $10,000, and our customer base is highly fragmented, with no one customer representing more than 1% of our sales. Our strong brand and excellent product portfolio provide ample room for continued market share expansion. Now, we engage with these diverse and fragmented customer bases through our internally developed sales and marketing excellence program, Spinnaker.
This program is highly sophisticated, comprising various digital tools that guide and help prepare our specialist sales force of approximately 3,000 employees to the most attractive growth opportunities in the market. Having a direct sales force with deep application know-how is a significant competitive advantage. We also have a very large installed base of over $16 billion of instruments in the field, with a serviceable revenue opportunity of approximately $3 billion, supported by the largest global service organization among our direct competitors. This installed base provides steady growth for our service business and creates opportunities for future instrument replacement. Our global scale is a powerful competitive advantage, further strengthened by our Blue Ocean program, which harmonizes data and processes worldwide.
This enables considerable visibility across our global supply chain and sales and marketing teams, and having a single instance of a global information technology infrastructure provides us with rich data, analytics, and business insights so we can execute with speed and agility. Lastly, we have a strong culture of teamwork, collaboration, and focused execution that is a critical asset of the company we have nurtured over many years. Our continuous improvement mentality is a hallmark of the organization and has allowed us to drive consistent sales and strong earnings growth over many years. Now, I'd like to share some additional insights on our growth initiatives, starting with Spinnaker. As mentioned earlier, the diversity of our businesses and fragmented customer base means we need sophisticated processes, tools, and analytics to identify the most attractive and profitable growth opportunities for our sales teams to pursue.
Spinnaker is our sales and marketing excellence program that over the past 20 years has evolved from a collection of marketing tools into sophisticated initiatives and digital capabilities that increase the effectiveness of our sales, marketing, and service processes by identifying, guiding, and preparing our sales force for the most attractive market opportunities across our 14 market organizations around the world. Spinnaker has been developed and deployed in waves over the many years, and our most recent wave, Spinnaker 6, started in 2024. This wave focuses on advancing digitalization and expanding our big data analytics capabilities to enhance lead generation and sales force guidance programs. Key initiatives include integrating new capabilities and databases to support our Top K program, which delivers timely investment alerts to our sales teams. These alerts highlight high-growth targets with significant opportunities, such as investment in GLP-1s, CDMOs, and reshoring investments.
Additionally, we are introducing innovative tools to elevate customer experience, including digital sales rooms for seamless online collaboration and enhanced features within our customer portals. An important component of our value proposition is a comprehensive service offering that helps our customers maintain reliable readings from our instruments and maximize uptime in a production environment. Service represents approximately 25% of our sales and is an important competitive advantage and a significant growth opportunity. Our goal is to grow our service business faster than the company average over the medium term, and we continue to make dedicated investments in tools and field technicians, telesales, and data analytics resources to support these growth targets. Additionally, we have also recently acquired several channel partners that not only expand our direct service network but also bring new services we have not previously offered.
Our greatest growth opportunity in service is expanding the service coverage of our existing installed base. Currently, we cover about one-third of a $3 billion market opportunity within our installed base. Leveraging our extensive data, such as purchase dates, user profiles, and specific applications of each instrument, we can design highly targeted sales campaigns tailored to meet the unique requirements of our customers. Additionally, we have had good success in selling service packages at the time of new product sales, further driving our growth in this important area. Now, complementing our growth initiatives is our commitment to technology leadership and innovation. We have accelerated our rate of innovation in recent years to help our customers generate new insights, improve workflows through automation and digitalization, and to capture more precise and reliable measurements.
Our dedication to bringing new innovations to market helps increase our value proposition, stimulate replacement demand, gain market share, and support our price premiums in the marketplace. Now, on this slide, you will see many examples of recent innovations across our lab and industrial portfolios, and there are many more that we have launched but have not included on this slide. Our team has continued to lean into our customers' needs for automating processes and workflows, and we are uniquely positioned to support needs for high-quality data capture and analysis from our instruments. Our corporate program for innovation, which we call Jetstream, provides a structured process to identify, validate, and document customer needs and support rapid development to capture hidden market opportunities.
While no one product launch is material to our results overall, given the significant diversity in our business, we believe we are very well positioned with our innovative portfolio to capture even more market share as market conditions improve in the future. While we are fundamentally an organic growth sales growth company, we also continue to look at inorganic growth opportunities. We believe we are a great platform for small and medium-sized bolt-on acquisitions that expand our portfolio and technology leadership, product offering, and channel reach. We look for complementary technologies or businesses that would benefit from our global supply chain and manufacturing capabilities and from our global direct sales force. In the second half of last year, we completed the acquisition of several small distribution partners that expanded our direct sales and service capabilities and also brought new service offerings.
Additionally, we also acquired a small life science equipment product line that complements our OHAUS portfolio. Now, let's turn to our margin expansion initiatives, where we have an excellent track record and look to continue to build on this track record over the coming years. We are confident in our ability to expand our operating margins by 100 basis points or more per year for the foreseeable future. The main driver of our margin expansion is organic sales growth, which we target at 6% or better on average over the medium term. Our global pricing, SternDrive, and Blue Ocean programs are also important drivers and enablers of margin expansion, while business mix is also a tailwind as our faster-growing businesses have higher margins. We have also accelerated our pace of innovation that further enhances our value proposition, which is fundamental to our pricing program.
Over the past year, our SternDrive program and our global supply chain organization were critical in helping us navigate complex global trade disputes and tariffs. Our team has been very agile and effective in accelerating and implementing our supply chain optimization strategies, and we continue to focus on evolving our in-region, for-region manufacturing capabilities to increase flexibility and resiliency. At the same time, our team has also introduced the majority of our business units onto our third wave of our SternDrive initiative, which has a specific focus on smart manufacturing strategies and automation projects in 2025 that helped to drive material cost reductions and productivity improvements. We have also introduced increased digital sophistication that allows us to better diagnose and drive operational improvements. Digitalization has been at the core of our strategic programs for over 15 years via our Blue Ocean program.
Blue Ocean is a unique competitive advantage as we have harmonized our global processes that are enabled by a single instance of a fully integrated IT infrastructure. This program provides rich data that provides deep insights into our business and also supports the rapid deployment of new technologies across our global business. We have also continued to introduce digitalization technologies across our business to increase our organizational knowledge, capture productivity benefits, enhance and accelerate product innovation, and to improve our customer experience. In recent years, we have already launched solutions across our organizations that provide significant productivity benefits, and we also brought to market products and software solutions that leverage artificial intelligence capabilities.
These include, for example, our Fresh AI food retail scales that use AI-based image recognition to identify items placed on checkout scales, or our AI Wizard software for thermal analysis that identifies thermal effects automatically, and our QuickPredict moisture analyzer that reduces measurement by almost 80%. So let me summarize the key points from my presentation today. First, we have a significant competitive advantage, including a very strong product portfolio, highly sophisticated go-to-market strategy, an excellent service organization, and a fully integrated global supply chain and IT environment that supports significant agility across our business. Our culture of innovation, collaboration, agility, and continuous improvement makes a tremendous difference and is a key competitive differentiator. Secondly, our team is squarely focused on driving growth.
Following a few years of below-average demand across our end markets, we believe customers will gradually return to more normal replacement patterns as we move through 2026. We serve very attractive end markets that benefit from secular growth tailwinds, and our global footprint will allow us to continue to benefit from above-average growth in emerging markets over the coming years. Additionally, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on our customers' onshoring investments with our unique portfolio and solutions. Our innovative portfolio supports their automation and digitalization needs in their existing environments and is even more important as they build out new capabilities. And lastly, while we remain fully committed to delivering on our medium-term over-the-cycle financial targets, this includes 6% or better sales growth and 100 basis points or more of margin expansion annually.
We have an excellent cash flow story and continue to aim to convert approximately 100% of our net income into free cash flow and return this to investors through our share repurchase program, contributing to mid-teens level of EPS growth. Now, that concludes my comments. Thanks, everyone, for being here today. Great. Thank you, Patrick. Maybe to kick it off here, 2025 was a challenging year for the life science tools sector, with ongoing policy changes and trade disruptions creating significant headwinds. So could you elaborate on some of these challenges and share what specific actions Mettler-Toledo took to adapt and mitigate some of those disruption impacts? And additionally, how do you see the market dynamics evolving here as we move into 2026? Okay. Very good. Thank you. Well, look, I'm very proud of how our team really handled all these challenges that we had in 2025.
I mean, one of the hallmarks of our culture is really our agility and our resilience, and we have demonstrated it over and over again. If we look at 2025, of course, one of the key things was the tariffs that we had to face and how we really addressed that challenge. Our team really stepped up very quickly, and we used our global footprint and optimized our supply chain strategies to make sure that we can mitigate these tariffs as much as possible. We said in 2026, we will fully mitigate these. There will be no headwind anymore. Then you saw also how some of the policy implementations really disrupted, I would say, academia and smaller biotech, which is not a big market for us, but still, it also has some consequential impact on our end markets, and again, our team has stepped up very quickly to mitigate this.
I think in all of these challenges, there's also a big opportunity for us as Mettler-Toledo. We have over and over shown that in challenging market conditions, actually, we really thrive, and we continue to take market share. Our commitment to innovation and bringing new solutions to customers faster than competition really pays back big time, and we're looking forward to actually to 2026 and hoping that there will be more stability in the market and that, of course, will also then continue to again to put more confidence with our customers and then we can bring back the replacement cycle, so I would say, to a more normal pattern.
And if you think about mid and long term, with all the announcements that have been made for reshoring, onshoring, and investments into the U.S. economy by larger European companies and others, we are very well positioned to really work with these companies. We are connected with these companies today and help them to build out their facilities, their QA/QC labs, etc. So I see that actually as quite some tailwind in the years to come. So I'm optimistic what we're looking for again is more stability in 2026. We probably, as you know, we guided 2026 to about 4% growth. And if there's real good stability and the replacement cycle kicks in, then there potentially is more upside.
Okay. That's helpful. One of those aforementioned challenges, you just mentioned them, tariffs.
What are your latest thoughts on tariff impact, both from your perspective and then from your customers' perspective?
Shawn, we were just talking about some of the most recent tariff noise over the last few weeks. It seems like the talk track changes every day there. But anything to call out as it pertains to tariffs moving into 2026?
Yeah. Hey, so maybe I'll try to walk from where we were when we gave guidance to where we are now, to where we could be later this week. So when we provided guidance at the end of Q3, we had assumed a 6% gross headwind to 2026 EPS related to tariffs. That compares to a 5% gross headwind in 2025, and we expected to fully offset those tariffs in 2026. Shortly thereafter, there was a trade agreement with Switzerland, okay? And so reducing the Swiss rate from 39% to 15%.
So we had estimated the gross headwind to EPS would be reduced from 6% to 4%, but the net benefit to EPS would be less than 1%, just given the nature of the mitigation actions that we had already put in place to offset the Swiss tariffs. Now, today, there's new news. We're still, I think, trying to all understand it and digest it. And I think there could be some questions in terms of ultimately how it's defined in terms of by country. But when I think about it, probably the easiest way for everyone to draw their own conclusions is for us to maybe just give an update on what are our key import statistics or key imports into the United States. And so you can see what's exposed here. So China, of course, has been a topic in the past in this area.
Our supply chain team, as Patrick mentioned, has done just a fantastic job of creating a lot more flexibility in our global supply chain, having more region-for-region supply chains as well, too, and we've accelerated a lot of topics over the past year. This is something that we had started working on coming out of COVID, and we're able to kind of lean into it over the past year, given the nature of this topic. Now, if we look at our estimated imports in 2026 from China, it's now closer to $30 million. That's a much different number than it was, say, two years ago. Our largest import exposure is now Mexico. That's kind of gone the other way. Mexico is more than $100 million that we would estimate in 2026. Our second largest import exposure would be Switzerland.
And that's also reduced quite a bit, and it's less than $100 million. So now, as we kind of go forward, there's a lot of speculation what's going to happen in the Supreme Court. We'll see how things play out in the court. But we can imagine Adam's phone's going to ring if something happens there. And so maybe we can try to proactively answer the question. So if the courts rule against tariffs and if there are reclaims, of course, we're going to pursue that reclaim process, okay? If and when we receive a reclaim or a refund, we would share that refund with our customers to the extent that we had raised prices to them related to tariffs. So an easy example is if we had a surcharge for tariffs, of course, you would expect to receive that back.
But the other side of this is that the administration has also made a lot of comments that they, or at least there's speculation that they're going to replace the tariffs with new tariffs. So I think from our perspective, we're not assuming any changes going forward. The mechanics might be different of how we get there, but we're assuming that there will likely be some form of new tariffs to replace it. So we're not expecting or planning for any changes. But of course, we don't know. This is a very dynamic topic, as we all know. And I think in the end, we'll stay agile. I think we've demonstrated a lot of organizational agility in the past, particularly over this past year. These topics can create a little uncertainty with our customers that we've seen, which can create some short-term market softness, potentially.
But they also create longer-term opportunities. And kind of going back to that first question, there's a lot of challenges last year, but there's also a lot of opportunities for us in the future. And we're actually in the page of being very excited about those opportunities. We've spent a lot of time over the last several months with our teams implementing new initiatives of how to pursue those opportunities. We believe we're extremely well positioned for topics like reshoring. And it's not just a U.S. topic. I mean, these are global topics. And so as a global company, we just feel like we're really well positioned here. And when you think about our business, Patrick had it on one of the slides, but approximately half of our business is sold into production processes, and about 20% of our business is sold into QA/QC processes.
So I think we're well positioned as a global company, especially when we look at that value chain and where our sweet spot is.
Super helpful. Yeah. Maybe on a related point, reshoring, can you just talk about how you guys are thinking about that opportunity just in terms of the timing and magnitude here for Mettler-Toledo and how your portfolio is positioned relative to others if reshoring does translate into a material growth driver for the industry in the next few years?
Thanks, Casey. Look, I mean, Shawn mentioned it, and I fully support him in that answer. We are fully engaged with a lot of the companies that have outlined that they will invest in reshoring or investments in the United States. We know these customers. They benefit from our solutions today.
When they think about building out capacities or even opening new factories, they really look also at us as a supplier and say, "Can you help us to really then fully automate these processes? Can you help us to drive the digitalization needs that we need, etc.?" Now, regarding timing, this is still very early innings. I mean, a lot of announcements have been made. Again, we are also excited about the opportunity to come. I think this is something I would admit in long term where we'll see some tailwind coming for this as a company.
The most important piece for me is now also through our key account program that we have the discussions with all these companies that make the announcements, that we understand their needs, and that we help them to prepare for the steps they are taking when they are building new factories or expanding capacities.
Okay. Helpful. Maybe touching on 2026, you guys have guided already, pointing to LC revenue growth of 4% or 3.5% organic, call it. Within that, you're assuming lab growth of low singles to mid singles, both core industrial and product inspection growth of low singles to mid singles, and then food rounding it out at around flat next year or this year. Can you unpack the growth segments or the segment growth expectations and highlight the drivers in each for 2026? A question that we've received a lot is on the industrial side.
Then just relative to the 10% organic growth rate you've seen in 3Q, how you're thinking about that for 2026.
Yeah, sure. Hey, maybe I'll take that one here. Yeah, so as you think about next year, the 4%, I think a lot of people are familiar with our key assumptions, but I think it's good to always break it down. The 4% assumes 2.5% of price increases. That's kind of like, call it a 2% normalized plus some extra benefit from some of the mid-year pricing actions that we did in 2025 to mitigate tariffs. It also includes some acquisition benefit. You'd mentioned about a half a point. That would be like one point benefit in the first half of next year. That kind of puts our organic volume growth at about 1%.
When you think about that, it's implicitly saying that we're not expecting market conditions to significantly improve. We do expect things to gradually improve throughout the year. We've kind of said last quarter that we wouldn't be surprised if things start off a little slower at the beginning of the year as people are in a little bit of a wait-and-see mode, but it's still too early to make that call. We'll see. Then as you kind of look at it by the different product categories, on the laboratory side, if you think about the third quarter, we had really good momentum in bioprocessing, right? Our process analytics business is doing very well. We continue to expect that to do well in 2026. When we guided the other side of that was our liquid handling business.
If you think about biotech and research, academia, just a softer end market for us in the third quarter. And that kind of factored into how we were thinking next year. On the industrial side, you mentioned the 10% growth in Q3. We were, of course, very happy with that. Certainly not a sustainable number. Benefited a little bit from comparisons, benefited also a little bit from some timing. Always difficult to say, was there a pent-up demand from Q2 in the first half of the year with the uncertainty? Was there a couple of things from Q4 that just happened to close out in Q3? But regardless of all that, we feel like the teams are executing extremely well. I think our portfolio is very well positioned for these trends in automation and digitalization and onshoring.
But we didn't really build anything incremental into our guidance for onshoring as well as some of these other topics. So we'll see. I think there's some upsides, but we weren't intentionally trying to go low here. We just generally felt like last year was a very dynamic year, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of volatility. We'd like to see things stabilize a little bit before we start to increase expectations. But we think we are overall well positioned going into next year or this year, so. And thinking about China, you noted minimal pressure from anti-involution policies, exited a lot of those more cyclical businesses in the region over a decade ago. And in 3Q, you actually saw growth in the industrial segment in China for the first time in two years.
So can you just walk through your assumptions for China in 2026 and that industrial piece in China as well? And when do you think you'd see China kind of return to historical growth levels or if we should expect kind of a re-rating in China growth moving forward? Yeah. So we were happy with our third quarter in China. As you mentioned, it was the first time we saw growth on the industrial side in two years. Patrick and I were just with the team in September, felt really good about our meetings there and the team, how the team's performing and just how their outlook kind of coming into this year. We feel like as a business, we're really well positioned in China.
We have a great China for China story in terms of making stuff in China for China, who we're selling to, largely private companies, as you saw on the slide, about 60% of the sales. We're pretty well aligned, I think, with the priorities in the country in terms of the five-year plan. But as you kind of look to the future, always difficult to say. We're still cautious in terms of how we guide this year. Our guidance for 2026 is low single digit. We're expecting growth in both our laboratory and our industrial businesses. We do feel like we're well positioned going forward there. I mean, there's a lot of opportunity, I think, on the lab side going forward. I know GLP-1s is a hot topic in the West. It's also a hot topic in China.
And there's a lot of research going on there, especially as generics come out and CDMOs play a bigger role. So we think there's a lot of good things there. But on the industrial side, like we said, we saw some early signs there in the third quarter. I think it's too early to make a call about when things are going to turn. But we'll continue to see how things play out in the course of the year. And then, Patrick, during the presentation, you mentioned Mettler-Toledo's continued commitment to R&D and innovation, even in the face of challenging market conditions, right? So could you just share where your current R&D efforts are focused right now, what new product launches investors should be looking forward to in 2026, and how you're thinking about that moving forward? Yeah, sure.
I mean, let me start with giving you kind of an idea of the size of an investment. We spent about $550 million over the past three years in R&D and really have stepped up there as well, and even in the market turned south and we didn't see volume growth and we saw reluctance in the market to pick up new instruments. We said we stay fully committed to invest into R&D because we are convinced that companies that invest through a down cycle will actually accelerate growth once the market pick up again. I want to be in that position, so we have launched over the last years a lot of great new products that really resonate well with our customers in terms of technology, automation features, digitalization, things like cybersecurity that we all address with our portfolio.
I think that will pay back well for us once the market picks up. Even today, I would say, comparing ourselves with most of the numbers we hear from competitors, we continue to take market share in this difficult environment. Our customers look at us and being a leader in this market, we lead, as I said, in about 75%-80% of the market segments that we own. And we want to continue to be in a position where whenever a customer thinks about a measurement problem, he thinks about Mettler-Toledo first. And I want to have the most competitive portfolio. And when you think about 2026 and the following years, you can expect more of the same. I mean, we will be halfway to the funnel of new products fully loaded. We launch more products and we are looking forward with that to gain more market share.
Okay. Great. Looks like we only have 10 seconds left. Maybe just last one quickly. What are you most excited for in 2026? In 2026, again, I'm really excited about our agility as a company of how we deal with the challenges and the opportunities we have in these hot market segments. And hopefully, the market will get to see more stability and come back to more normal growth, and we will just accelerate even more.
Great. Well, it looks like we'll have to leave it at that. Thank you, guys, for joining us today. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. Thank you.