Ingevity is a leader in activated carbon and warm mix asphalt technology, and is going through a strategic transformation. The company currently operates in three reporting segments, but in the past six months, Ingevity announced a strategic review of its Performance Chemicals, Industrial Specialties product line, and its North Charleston CTO refinery, which culminated in the sale of the businesses completed at the beginning of the year. Additionally, in December, the company announced the completion of its portfolio review and the start of a sales process for its Advanced Polymer Technologies segment and Road Markings business. Post-divestitures, new Ingevity estimates that over the next two years, it will have $1 billion of deployable cash from the core business and divestment proceeds.
Ingevity has around 36 million shares outstanding, closed at $65.69 for a $2.4 billion market cap, net debt of $1.1 billion for a $3.5 billion enterprise value. Joining us are CEO David Li and incoming CFO Phil Platt. David became CEO of Ingevity in April last year, bringing 25 years of experience in the advanced materials industry. Prior to joining Ingevity, David was CEO of CMC Materials, formerly Cabot Microelectronics, and he also serves on the boards of CoorsTek and Hexcel. Phil has been with Ingevity since 2015 and was recently announced as new CFO effective May 1. We're excited to have David here to give us an overview of Ingevity.
Thank you very much. I think you gave a great intro. You took a lot of the interesting information, but it's great to be here and see some familiar faces. I've been in the specialty materials industry for almost 30 years and at Ingevity for almost one year and really excited to be here. You know, I wanna talk about new Ingevity today. I think as mentioned in the intro, we're a company that's going through a significant transformation of our portfolio. We also have a refreshed and experienced management team, and we have a really unique cash flow generation and capital allocation system in place, something I've actually never seen in my 30 years of specialty materials, so quite remarkable. What I wanna talk about today is first, the transformation that we're undergoing in our portfolio.
As mentioned, we're simplifying the company significantly. We already announced the exit of our Industrial Specialties business, a sale that we closed on January 1st, and then we also announced the intention to enter sales processes for our Advanced Polymer Technologies business as well as our Road Markings business. Those are underway, and we expect to announce something by the end of this year, and both transactions are going well. That leaves us with new Ingevity, two industry-leading, very profitable businesses that I'll go into in more detail with some very interesting growth opportunities associated with them, market leading and best-in-class profitability. All of that kind of leads to a very, very strong cash flow generation. We call it the cash flow juggernaut in terms of.
We plan to use those proceeds to invest in organic growth, reduce debt, and buy back our shares. We recently did an investor day in December. We talked about our expectation to generate about $1 billion of deployable cash over the next two years, and I'll talk a little bit more about where we plan to use that cash in the future. This is a snapshot of new Ingevity. Again, the numbers on the right reflect the pro forma company, so those are the two core businesses that I mentioned. Just about $1 billion in revenue, $335 million in EBITDA, and you're not reading that wrong, 37% EBITDA margin. Best-in-class EBITDA margin.
That combined with our low capital intensity, it gives very, very significant cash flow conversion, and we'll talk about the use of cash. On the left side are the snapshot of the two core businesses, Performance Materials and Pavement Technologies. I'm gonna go through those in more detail in the coming slides. On the bottom is just where we participate globally. We are a global company, although you can see from the pie chart on the right side, we're a very North America-centric focus for both of our businesses. I think that's proving to be a competitive advantage. We knew that coming into the year. Now, two weeks later, we think it's an even bigger competitive advantage.
Diving a little bit more deeply into Performance Materials, this is obviously the foundational business for our company, around $600 million in revenue, and over 50+% EBITDA %, so contributing a significant amount of profitability to the company. What is sort of our unique value proposition? What gives us the ability to command such high EBITDA margins? First, we have unique technology and experience in activated carbon, and we've used that to provide emissions solutions for ICE and hybrid cars. It's fair to say today, if you're driving an ICE or hybrid car, you have Ingevity content in that car. Today, Ingevity content allows our customers and consumers to save over 8 million gallons of gas every day. From an environmental standpoint, very, very important from an emissions control perspective. That's really the foundational part of Performance Materials.
We have decades of experience in this industry. We were the pioneer, and we continue to build on that technical performance by building and innovating new and creative solutions in the activated carbon space. From a market trends perspective, I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail. Obviously, recently, especially in North America, the expectations for the longevity of ICE and hybrid vehicles has been really prolonged and is much more robust than it was in the past. I think that's in the same case of the moderation of the expectation of EV adoption. From a regulatory perspective, we also see some positive tailwinds there with major regions like China and India widely expected to adopt more stringent emissions controls over the next couple years, which we should be the beneficiary of.
The last one, as I mentioned, our solutions help our customers save significant gallons of gasoline every year, 8 million gal of gas every day. This is a snapshot of kind of how we think about the industry for both the automotive but also the filtration markets. I'll talk a little bit more about filtration as well. On the left side is kind of the auto production levels. Two ways to think about it are, one, we are far away from peak auto production. If you think about where auto production was sort of pre-COVID and extrapolate that forward, if we were to get back to peak auto production, that will result in over 6 million more vehicles being produced today. Obviously, that would be a tremendous beneficiary of that. Auto production today is nowhere near the peak.
If you think about the age of the U.S. auto fleet, it's as old as it's ever been. The average age of the car these days is over 12 years old in the car park. I'd encourage all of you to buy new ICE and hybrid vehicles to support that refreshment of the car fleet. Obviously, something's going to have to give there. We're far off from peak auto production. The second thing that's really impactful for our results is how the adoption of pure battery electric vehicles or BEVs. Versus just a few years ago, that expectation has moderated significantly. You can see that in the behavior of our customers' customers, companies like Ford and Stellantis that are really leaning in towards new ICE and hybrid models versus pure electric vehicles.
You can see the expectation versus a few years ago is 3.2 million more ICE and hybrid vehicles than previously forecasted. Very robust and some good tailwinds from an industry perspective when you think about ICE and hybrid cars. I want to shift a little bit also to another part of our Performance Materials segment, actually one that we're very excited about, which is the opportunity to participate more broadly in filtration. As I mentioned, we today are the leader by far in the evaporative emissions space for activated carbon. What's not well understood or well under appreciated is that we actually participate significantly in the filtration markets. In the current state, and we presented a snapshot of this during our investor day, it makes up about 1% of our EBITDA. Probably we'd say it's less than 1%.
However, it makes up 20% of our volume of activated carbon. So what does that mean? That means we're selling millions of pounds of activated carbon into the filtration market today at basically 0% EBITDA. The opportunity that our team is really seizing upon is to look at where we are really differentiated in the filtration markets and where can we add value. We're early in the discovery process, but we're really encouraged by what we see in areas like water filtration, pharma, and food and beverage. We believe we've got unique competitive advantages in the filtration space, either by ability to eliminate odors and flavors and colors that are important for food and beverage. For pharma, we can remove large molecules. We also have a very low residence time.
If any of you have these things called Brita filters, that's actually our activated carbon there because you've got to be able to remove the impurities from the water very quickly. Now, what's really changed is in the past, we've just taken the mindset of outletting the material at very low value. That's why you end up with basically 0% EBITDA. Going forward, we've put in place a dedicated team to look at upgrading that volume. Again, 20% of our volume is going into filtration today at 0% EBITDA and the opportunity to upgrade that over time, right? We're very excited about that. If you think about the entire segment margin, it's over 50% EBITDA. That includes the 20% going into filtration at 0% EBITDA. You can see the opportunity for accretive growth in this segment, and we're really excited about it.
I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about pavement technologies. This is about 1/3 of our revenue, $300 million. It has mid- to high-teens% EBITDA margins. We expect that to expand over time. This is our ability to participate in just about every layer of the road. I've got a slide next that shows where we participate. The really exciting part of this business is we have a unique additive that allows our customers to convert from Hot Mix Asphalt to Warm Mix Asphalt. There are significant benefits to doing that, and we're working with our customers for that conversion. From a market trends perspective, we've all heard about the need for better infrastructure. Again, this business is very focused in North America, where we see a significant need for improved infrastructure. We see those as a tailwind.
Think about that growing at kind of GDP levels. The real opportunity for growth here is to convert more of the hot mix to warm mix. That's why we have the expectation of high single-digit growth for this business. This just shows a little bit more in detail where we participate. Fifty percent of the business is on the left side. That's pavement preservation, where we basically participate in every layer of the road. On the right side is the one that I mentioned, the warm mix, we call it Evotherm. We're the clear market leader here. This has significant advantages for our customers. A 20% reduction in paving costs, they can save in energy, and it also allows the road to last 30% longer. Significant value proposition for our customers.
Today, we'd estimate that warm mix only makes up about 20% of the market, and the market's around $500 million. We anticipate there's another $400 million of opportunity for us to convert over time to warm mix. We're very excited about our ability to grow this business. Talk a little bit about capital allocation. This is probably Phil's, our incoming CFO's favorite slide. This just shows a little bit of the journey we've been on as a company and our approach to capital allocation. On the left side is what we've done historically, so for the previous three years. You can see a pretty balanced capital allocation. Also about $1 billion deployed, a lot of it towards M&A, some of it towards share repurchase, and CapEx.
On the right side, what we're really excited about is over the next two years, we also expect to generate about $1 billion of deployable cash. Of course, we're gonna spend what we need to support CapEx and strategic growth initiatives, you know, those organic growth initiatives that I mentioned, including filtration. But really, the remainder is really gonna be focused on debt reduction and share repurchase. So think about that $1 billion of cash. We need very little for our own capital, CapEx and strategic growth. The rest is all gonna go back to debt paydown and share repurchase. So significant return of capital to shareholders expected over the next two years. I wanna pivot a little bit to our 2026 outlook. We provided this when we reported last quarter. I would just say very healthy growth.
Again, there's a little bit of noise in these numbers because we do have the full year of two businesses that we intend to divest, the APT business and the Road Markings business. That kind of makes the sales number look a little bit. It's kind of in transition. You'll see very healthy EBITDA. What's sort of underscoring that as well is we don't anticipate a significant recovery in auto production, so this is within a flat auto production environment. We continue to see very strong profitability and kinda low single digit growth associated with the company. Also, on the bottom, you'll see our expectation for free cash flow, $225 million-$250 million of free cash flow generated, and then sort of the net debt.
When I took over the company, we were almost four times levered. We've been able to reduce that leverage by over a full turn in less than a year. Significant cash flow generation that goes right to debt paydown. The last slide I close with is just the key takeaways for new Ingevity. We think we are one of the most exciting specialty materials companies out there. You can see the financials on the right side. I don't think you'll see a company today with the level of profitability that we have. Given our capital allocation program, we expect to grow EPS at double digits and also pay down debt, buy back shares.
It's an exciting company to get involved with, and really happy to have the opportunity to talk about new Ingevity with all of you today. Thank you.
Well, thank you, Dave. That was a great overview. My first question was going to be, you know, it hasn't even been a year yet, you've done so much. What excited you about taking the role? I think you just gave a pretty good overview of that.
Yeah, thanks. You know, I'll add on. It's just you know looking at Ingevity, seeing the quality of the businesses, obviously the company's been through some challenges in the past. Having the opportunity to be part of the journey to kinda unlock that value, have the quality of the businesses shine through, and then execute, you know, it's a great company. It's a great culture. We've got a great organization, a refreshed leadership team. We think we've got some real momentum going into the year.
That's great. If there's any questions in the room, just raise your hand and we'll get you a mic. I'll continue while we're getting Keith a mic over there. You just completed the sale of Industrial Specialties. You're in the sales process for APT and the Road Markings. I know you said by end of this year. I just wanted to get a feel. How's the level of interest and your thoughts on valuation there?
Yeah, thanks for that. From the two transactions, one for Road Markings, one for APT, both of those are in flight. I'd say we launched markings a little bit ahead of APT, so that's trending a little bit faster. We continue to have the expectation to announce something by the end of this year. We've had strong interest for both assets.
Thank you. Great presentation, David. You've done great work there, obviously. Just clarifications. Your adjusted EBITDA contributions for the two remaining businesses, that's net of corporate overhead allocation or that's the segment contribution? That's the first question. The second question, just to clarify, this guidance here, that's assuming the divestiture of the two businesses, correct?
Yeah, that's right. Phil will correct me if I say anything incorrect, but that's net, so those are inclusive of all the corporate costs inside. We do anticipate some stranded costs associated with the divestitures. We talked about $15 million of stranded costs associated with Industrial Specialties. We fully expect to be able to address those through 2026. Assuming successful divestiture of the two remaining businesses, an additional $20 million-$25 million of stranded costs associated with those two assets. We are working our best to try to prepare to go after those. I would say we'll probably get some, but not all of those stranded costs associated with those businesses.
Can I have a quick follow-up? Just given the margins in activated carbon, do you expect other entrants to come into those markets? Maybe you could just talk a little bit about what moats or competitive advantages you have there that would make that, you know, painful for our competitors to show up.
Obviously, whenever you have 50%+ EBITDA margins, you have a very healthy paranoia about who might be after that and trying to take your cheese. We think about that all the time. You know, I think first of all, I'd say from the market perspective, one of the things that has been a kind of lingering concern that follows the business might be a benefit in this case, which is, you know, if you're gonna invest today, are you gonna invest in something that's focused on ICE and hybrid, or are you gonna focus something that's focused on EV? If you think about what it takes to compete in this activated carbon market for automotive, it's probably hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to build a plant.
You have to go through a very rigorous qualification process with the OEMs, and there's no unmet need. One of the things that we're very proud of is our quality, our on-time delivery. We've never had a recall in the history of this product line. That's very important to our customers. Although we've had competition in the business for, since we've started, I think we've been very successful in just continuing to have that strong position. You can see our expectation for margins going forward gives, you know, is meant to be a proxy for our confidence and our continued position in the future.
You mentioned you're far from peak auto production. It's historically been the focus of Ingevity's GAC. It's far from the melting ice cube it seemed to be a few years ago. Just, can you discuss the further dynamics there and the opportunities in food and beverage and water purification? One area that we're very focused on is PFAS. Is that an area that you're looking to get into?
Yeah. The interesting thing, just to back up a bit on filtration. First, I fully agree with you that there is a very long life for ICE and hybrids, and we've seen that kind of thesis play out, and we're excited about that. On the filtration side, we're equally excited. Here again, I just wanna reiterate, this is not requiring any capital investment. There's no invention needed. It just requires a dedicated sales and marketing team to understand where we really are adding value. We are already participating in food and beverage, pharma, and water. You know, that validation or that participation gives us confidence that we'll be able to identify those opportunities, things like, you know, the advanced water treatment, including PFAS.
You know, two of the early examples that we're excited about is, we've participated in municipal water bids for many years. In the past, we would just bid the lowest level just to outlet the material. Recently, we've had several occasions where we're not the lowest bidder. We bid higher because we thought our activated carbon was actually providing differentiation and value, and we won those bids. That's a validation that we actually have differentiation, our solution is valued, and we just weren't capturing that value in the past. We're early days, but we're increasingly encouraged.
You just mentioned there's no need for capital investment because you can improve just the pricing there and where you're putting that in purification. But we've also heard other presenters talk about the significant demand supply gap in GAC over the next few years. Is that a few years out to think about when you would need additional capacity?
Yeah. I think I would love to be in the position to reinvest in the business. Today, the reality is we are selling more than 20% of our volume into the filtration market. You know, the opportunity to upgrade or topgrade that volume is our first priority. If the business got to a place where the reinvestment economics made sense, so think of that as sort of, you know, teens to twenties EBITDA, then we would consider, you know, putting in some more capital. Today, we think we've got plenty of volume and, you know, it's just the opportunity to upgrade that volume.
Mm-hmm.
Hi. While we talked about PFAS, you know, being adsorbed by activated carbon, don't you need the activated carbon to be actually impregnated with some chemicals in order to hang on to the PFAS? Without any need of chemical impregnation, if I can pronounce it, can activated carbon collect also microplastics? Is that something that needs a membrane and activated carbon cannot play a role in it?
Yeah, I would say we are looking at all advanced water treatment applications, including PFAS and microplastics. The answer to your question is we're not sure yet. We're not sure yet because our activated carbon is made from hardwood. Others are made from coal or olive pits or coconut. We're still in that discovery phase of where do we actually add value? We might be participating already. The challenge around PFAS is once you are able to separate it, you have to dispose of it, right? Which is a big challenge as well. Our teams are working hard on that. We plan to have a lot more updates as we get further along in our journey, but right now, early days. Thanks.
Thank you.
Keith touched on it, the combined margin portfolio, profile of the remaining business is fantastic. Pavement technologies is significantly lower. You mentioned the mix, growth in warm mix. What's the potential mix shift there and how high could you get margins? Second question to that is what are the synergies of having those two businesses together with the very high margin, GAC business?
Yeah, the question around pavement, we see the primary growth driver to be the warm mix additive. That's at a higher profitability than the rest of the segment. As that grows, we'd expect the aggregate segment margin to grow. I think about high teens to maybe early in the twenties over time if we're very successful with the adoption of that material. As your question of synergies, that's really interesting. One of the things that we did early in my tenure is really take a deep dive on our core competencies and think about what we're good at and really be very discriminating in terms of what we're good at. That actually informed what businesses we kept and what businesses we decided to divest.
One of the most powerful core competencies we have that encapsulate both businesses, obviously, both are highly engineered materials, but the other aspect is this concept of advocacy. In the evaporative side or the automotive side, we work very closely with the regulatory bodies like in the U.S., in China, in India, to help them understand, educate, and in some cases help them develop the next generation of emission standards. Obviously, when you do that, you're gonna be in an advantaged position from a product or solution perspective. We also use that same advocacy to help us in the pavement side. We're working with the departments of transportation, educating them on the benefits of warm mix, either environmentally or the length of, you know, extending the life of the road.
There's a very powerful advocacy aspect that ties these two businesses together. There's obviously the quality and engineered materials aspect, but I think the advocacy one is one I wanted to impress because I think it's a little underlooked when people think about Ingevity.
I just wanna squeeze in one more before bumping up on time. You laid out the buckets of that $1 billion of deployable cash. Just your thoughts, I know it was mentioned at the time, no hard line between share repurchase and debt pay down, what you're thinking on that. Once the sales are completed, is there anything you wanna add to this business?
Right. I think the benefit of our business model and cash flow generation is we can do both. We'll be able to pay down debt, be well within the range of our target leverage range, 2-2.5, as well as buy back a lot of shares. As a reminder, that target does not include any proceeds from the divestments. To your point, when we get those divestment proceeds, we'll be able to have even more flexibility. Your question about is there anything we wanna add on to the portfolio, we've already talked about the expectation that at least for the next couple years, M&A is sort of off the table for us. We wanna really focus on executing, see what we can make of our own organic plans in terms of filtration.
We didn't have time to talk about, but we also have some exciting investments in energy storage, see how those play out, and see if there's something there that we can actually grow organically. The one thing I would say is if there is a bolt-on acquisition that could help us accelerate organic growth, that would be obviously something we would strongly consider and have the flexibility to do.
Well, that was a great overview of a lot of changes at the business, and we're very excited to continue to monitor.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.