All right, welcome back. I am up here to tell you a little bit about our upcoming conferences. We have our Specialty Chemicals Conference on March 20, which is a Thursday, which will be here at the Harvard Club, followed by our Waste Conference on April 3, also a Thursday here at the Harvard Club. That is our 11th annual. And then we will be back here on June 5 for our Media Conference, which will also take a sports investing panel. So without further ado, we are excited about the afternoon slate of companies. Coming up now will be my colleague, Justin Bergner, to introduce Enpro.
Thank you, Miles. Pleased to present our next company and presenters, Enpro, and with Enpro today joining us, we have CFO Joe Bruderek and James Gentile, VP of Investor Relations. Enpro is a leading industrial technology company using materials science to push boundaries in semiconductor, life sciences and other technology-enabled sectors, operating across two segments: Sealing Technologies and Advanced Surface Technologies. We're delighted to have CFO Joe Bruderek with us, who became Enpro's CFO last April, replacing the loved and recently retired Milt Childress. Joe joined Enpro from Momentive Performance Materials, where he worked before and after its ownership by GE, with numerous roles over a 20-year-or-so career with GE. I've enjoyed getting to know Joe, and as well, James Gentile, VP of Investor Relations, who's been with Enpro for a number of years now.
Enpro has 21 million shares, trading about $192 a share, about a $4 billion market cap, $400 million net debt, and a $4.4 billion enterprise value. Enpro will be sharing a few slides, and then we'll launch into a discussion. So Joe and James, feel free to take it away. I assume, are you going to screen share the slides on your end?
Yes, we will. Yeah, thanks, Justin, and thanks to the Gabelli team. I've been a longstanding shareholder of Enpro and been very supportive over the years. So I appreciate the support, and thank you. Really happy to be here today representing Enpro. I thought a good way to start here. I'll kind of talk about Enpro 3.0, which is the recent phase of Enpro's longstanding value creation journey. We've been talking about this internally for a little while. We kicked it off within the last six months or so at our leadership conference with about 100 of our top leaders across the company. Then last week, more recently, in our earnings release, had the opportunity to talk about Enpro 3.0 and the next phase of value creation for the company.
So with that, I'll kind of talk a little bit about our history just briefly and how we got to where we are before I spotlight sort of the growth algorithm of Enpro. So if you go back, Enpro was originally created as a spinoff from Goodrich in 2002. And Goodrich kind of took its heavier industrial businesses and a lot of its legacy liabilities and spun that off into its own public company in 2002. And during that period, from really 2002 to 2017, Enpro was dealing with the hangover of those legacy liabilities, the largest of which was pretty sizable asbestos-containing liability. A lot of that never was really operated underneath Enpro but was part of the spin and ultimately Enpro's responsibility. So we successfully resolved all of those asbestos liabilities in 2017 in kind of a landmark case, very successfully, and finally had that behind us.
At the time, though, Enpro still had a little bit more cyclical, heavier capital-intensive businesses, lower growth, as an enterprise kind of below 15% EBITDA, and once we resolved the asbestos liabilities, had the opportunity to kind of set a strategic path for the next phase, which was really to lay out what we wanted the portfolio to look like strategically as we went forward, so really, from the period of 2017 until recently in 2024, we embarked on a very successful strategic portfolio transformation and optimization journey, so over the course of that period, we set out what it means to be in the next phase of Enpro and identified the businesses both within the portfolio and that would soon come from outside the portfolio that fit our strategic criteria. So what does that mean?
That means a heavy engineering content, a small percentage of overall customer spend, but extremely critical to their end process, a high critical safety component to what they do, a strong outperform capability as far as growth rate goes, and then an aftermarket or some sort of aftermarket or recurring revenue stream. So over the course of that period, we divested about $1 billion worth of businesses that were good businesses in and of themselves. They just didn't fit that journey and that criteria with where we're going. So we took those $1 billion worth of proceeds and our balance sheet capability and made a series of acquisitions into businesses that fit the criteria, the largest of which now is the foundation in the creation of our AST segment, so the Advanced Surface Technologies segment.
So back within our Technetics business, which today sits in Sealing, we carved out a piece of the business that had a nice edge-welded bellows component that was holding the wafer in place during the chip production process. And over the course of that period, we were able to grow that quite nicely. And then our key customers were asking us, "What are other things you can do within the in-chamber environment based on your engineering capability and leadership position there?" And that led us to identify other areas within the chip manufacturing process that we could invest in and bring into the Enpro portfolio to mean more to our key customers in that chip production in-chamber process. And so that really led us to the acquisition of LeanTeq, which brought a nice cleaning, coating, and a little bit of aftermarket refurbishment component of our business.
NxEdge, which brought a very strong technical critical in-chamber tool design and manufacturing capability. And then we also invested in an optic or filter business, Alluxa, during that time period. And the carve-out from Technetics and those three acquisitions really make up what is today AST. Also, at the same time, on the businesses that we divested within sealing, we kept the best of whatever was sealing. So that is today making up Garlock, STEMCO, and Technetics. And it left us with a very powerful and critical Sealing Technologies portfolio that we've invested behind and supplemented with additional bolt-on acquisitions in food and pharma and more recently test and measurement over the course of the year. So as part of the portfolio transformation, we saw a significant value creation in that time period.
We also set on a margin expansion journey within the sealing businesses over that time period as well, so we increased our gross margins over 1,000 basis points and our EBITDA margins substantially within the Sealing Technologies segment to over 30%, which is where it is today, so really good strategic value pricing, good portfolio optimization work, 80/20 product line optimization, asset optimization, operational excellence, continuous improvement type work, extremely successful margin expansion and value creation in the Enpro 2.0 phase, so that's sort of where we sit now with a series of businesses and a very strong portfolio that have a stronger margin profile, a good free cash flow generation profile, and strong cash flow return on investment profile. Our overall EBITDA margins are. In this year, we passed over 24%, and again, generating strong free cash flow and a good return on invested capital.
Now we have an optimized portfolio, a stronger margin profile, and enhanced the next evolution, which is not a giant pivot from where we've been. It's just an end, right? We're going to invest in area, continue to invest in areas, and put our foot on the accelerator now as we move into Enpro 3.0, which is all about accelerating profitable growth. Profitable growth behind our stronger margin profiles and an optimized set of businesses and really turning ourselves into a true industrial technology earnings compounder. We laid out sort of the growth algorithm in that over the last couple of communications as well, which is now a portfolio with the ability to grow mid-single digits sustainably, so five, six, seven% over the course of a three- to five-year period through multiple cycles, economic and industrial cycles, with a very strong free cash flow profile.
And that is really the Sealing business being able to grow mid-single digits longer term and our AST business growing at high single digits, not low double digits over a period of time as well. At these optimized profiles from a return and cash flow perspective, that's going to lead to outsized earnings improvement. And we also talked about the fact that our two segments are capable of being 30% EBITDA segments through multiple parts of the cycle. So you look at Sealing Technologies, they're already there. We're generating low 30% EBITDA margins in Sealing world-class businesses. And now it's about accelerating the growth capabilities and investing behind organic growth there. On AST, we've performed at that 30% level in the past, but that was really the peak of the semiconductor cycle.
So we're focused on bracketing that 30% EBITDA margin range, ± 250 basis points or so based on volume and mix throughout the course of the entire semiconductor cycle. And so that's going to be a similar playbook to what we've deployed within Sealing Technologies and applying those same levers into AST. So there is some element of market recovery in the semiconductor business that will lead to that 30% range. But then we're going to add in strategic value pricing, operational excellence, good 80/20 work, portfolio optimization, asset optimization. And we have a much stronger portfolio with two segments capable of delivering 30% EBITDA. That also gives us, with our free cash flow profile, a significant amount of capacity to invest behind M&A, which we have a track record of doing and creating value through strong acquisitions.
Not only our cash on our balance sheet, but our strong leverage profile, we're now in the 1.5% range or so from a leverage standpoint, and we have the ability to invest to kick up that growth rate another three, four, five points a year to deliver high double digits sustainably over time. So the company's really excited for Enpro 3.0. The team is very much aligned behind what we're doing. And again, we have a track record of delivering on what we say we're going to do, delivering value creation and margin expansion. And now we just add in this profitable growth element to be able to deliver mid-single organically and high double digits with M&A over a period of time. So happy to ask whatever questions are on your mind. I'll kick it back to you, Justin, and happy to answer any questions, James and I.
Thank you, Joe, for that great overview, and congratulations to the whole Enpro team on the portfolio transformation over the last five years, which is increasingly recognized by the market with your share price performance, $1 billion of divestitures, close to $2 billion of acquisitions. I know largely before your time, but you did a very good job of reviewing it. Just maybe a couple of questions sort of on the transformation of Enpro. A lot of the M&A in the semiconductor space was very strategic, very well regarded, ex-ante, I guess, ex-post. You've been hit by the challenges in the semiconductor down cycle. Just help me understand, and James, feel free to jump in. In terms of the M&A, what's worked really well? Maybe what didn't work as well as intended? And what have you learned over this near $2 billion of outlays to augment the business?
Yeah, thanks, Justin. So you go back to what did we set out to do, right? We had this strong position in our edge-welded bellows business around helping keep the wafer in place. And so I talked about the strategic thesis on what we were trying to do. So we're trying to accumulate a portfolio that would allow us to mean more within the in-chamber environment and create a series of capabilities that would operate within the entire life cycle of those in-chamber tools.
So that brought us the ability to design, prototype, manufacture new parts and new critical in-chamber tools that were going into the chamber itself, and then operate within the aftermarket cycle as well, be able to refurbish those tools, recoat them, clean them, and do that through multiple cycles so that we could put together a vertical integration play there on the entire life cycle of the critical parts. And right now, we have a portfolio that can do that, right? We make the heart and lungs of some of the key in-chamber tools, and then we have the ability to help support our customers in the aftermarket component of that as well. So from that, we assembled the portfolio that we set out to assemble. We're very happy with the capabilities that we have, and it's been very well recognized by our key customers in this space.
Now, what you can't control is the timing of when assets are becoming available or are actionable. And to your point, right, we can't control that. But the reality is that acquisitions were extremely successful in giving us what we were looking to do. And we're set up well to be able to capitalize on the long-term growth rates of the semiconductor industry and all of the growth drivers as we move to more advanced nodes and high bandwidth memory and more advanced capabilities within the chamber environment.
Thank you. Your strategy was just one of the many kind of linear opportunities for us to expand our positions using what we call Enpro-style businesses. These are strong, excellent pricing power-driven, high competitive advantage opportunities that enjoy some secular tailwind that are high consequence of failure, low percentage of total customer spend, but absolutely critical to our customers' capability.
So when you kind of think about the linearity of the Enpro portfolio over the last 20 years, you have a situation where we find these niche opportunities to use our applied engineering and technological capabilities using material science and actually kind of expand our aperture, both organically and through acquisition. Through 1.0 and 2.0, there were elements within that Sealing Technologies business that demonstrated that. And what you're seeing now is just this compelling compounding flywheel situation that are leveraging where we're strongest and where we have the best advantages to offer our customers higher yield, safety components, environmental protection, and all of these very, very important attributes. And if you look forward as we enter 3.0, we have growth nodes in a variety of end markets. Like you saw in 2024, we acquired Advanced Micro Instruments or AMI for $210 million.
That was our first foray into gas analyzers and a portfolio of sensors that give us more intelligence into our customers' processes and leveraging where we're sitting in their supply chain through Garlock and areas of Technetics where we have a little bit more intelligence in these incredible customer processes that they come and trust us. So as we look forward, I think we have the portfolio that we would like in our semiconductor strategy. That took hard work. We drew those strategic roadmaps. We identified those novel capabilities that we wanted to bring in-house. And now we have the opportunity to do that in areas such as aerospace and space capabilities, sustainable power generation. We are the reference on most of the nuclear power plants in the world where we offer critical sealing capabilities.
And now we have another growth node driven by AMI that will give us just more intelligence in that test and measurement analyzer and sensor supply chain. So putting all together, when we look at the organic trajectory, which is compelling on its own, and the capacity that we have on the balance sheet for strategic acquisitions without the use of excess leverage, we're going to continue to expand our capabilities horizontally to become still small, but very important partners with our customers.
Great. Yeah, the markets definitely recognize the ultimate earnings power of these acquisitions, even if it's been pushed back by the cycle. Just to delve a bit more into your AST and semiconductor businesses, help us understand the vertical integration strategy?
I realize it's not an overnight strategy, but at what point does this begin to enhance your growth and margins in that business, and how does it enhance your growth and margins in that business?
Yeah, so Justin, as you said, right, and I laid out before, we kind of accumulated a number of capabilities within that in-chamber environment, right? We have the ability to make, manufacture, coat, refurb through the multiple cycles, and so what we're focused on now is that vertical integration pipeline on new platforms and new wins, right, and that's where our teams are focused. When you have a process that's been in place for some time, right, and you establish process of record or the initial spec in position from an OEM standpoint, right, there's not a heavy focus on replacing somebody else in that cycle on just a like-for-like capability.
The majority of our focus is on new wins, right? New platforms, new specifications for the next generation of manufacturing capabilities that our customers are focused on, and so since these capabilities are a little bit newer in our portfolio, right, we're focused on winning there. And they can have long-standing specification cycles that could be two, three years, etc. But we're showing good promise there now on new capability wins. We talked in 2025 in our guidance that the AST segment will be able to grow mid to high single digits or we expect it to grow mid to high single digits. I think the market is not necessarily forecasting that same level of growth, but we are seeing wins behind some of these new platforms, whether they be geographic expansions, new capability expansions, and so that'll happen over time.
But we are seeing some good promising results of the pipelining work and the specification work that we've been doing over the last couple of years. And throughout this entire, we started to see the slowness a little bit later than when we saw some of those chip inventories and the post-COVID downturn kind of rectify themselves. We started to see that weakness kind of two or three quarters after we saw the initial chip drawdown through distribution as demand right-sized following the bolus of demand for computers and communication tools during COVID. Now, as we look forward, first, where we're positioned on the leading edge grew throughout this entire downturn. So that's exciting, but that's still a relatively small portion of the overall global semiconductor capital equipment mosaic.
And as you look forward, you're looking at complex chip architectures, gate-all-around, new processes that are expanding where we have the opportunity to use our technological capabilities and participate more in those new platforms, in addition to linking up the cleaning, coating, and refurbishment capabilities to capture more of that life cycle in a recurring type of fashion. So, as we look forward, we're excited to deliver that kind of mid- to high single-digit growth this year and propel it as the market normalizes into that high single-, at times low double-digit capabilities.
In addition, we've expanded it using our Process of Record and Copy Exact capabilities for leading node advanced cleaning, first in Taiwan, through California, and now in Arizona, where we just finished qualification work for the first phase of that effort as leading-edge chips are now being produced in that Arizona in a small, but it's starting. We have clear, clear advantages there, and we're excited about leveraging our position and investment in Arizona in coming years. In addition, we expanded our capabilities in Singapore as well during that time period and investing in equipment and engineering capabilities to make sure that we're winning our share of those leading new platforms that may harvest in coming periods over the next two or three years.
So we've done what we needed to do to do our best to invest in the areas where we're strongest, very similar to what you've seen manifest itself in the success of the Sealing Technologies segment.
Great. Yeah. I mean, not all semi capabilities are created equal. And it seems like you have a lot of exposure to the advanced node chips. Help us understand how the advanced node and AI intersect and maybe just talk a little bit more about the Arizona plant. What is the initial opportunity there kind of in the early years, and what does that have the potential to be upsized to or expand into?
Yeah. So if you look at the leading edge, right, as James mentioned, our precision cleaning capability is all leading edge.
So that's all 7nm and below with an increasing share as we've gained process of record and demonstrated copy exact capabilities, as James articulated, and now into 3nm . And as we're making inroads as advanced chip manufacturing goes to 2nm and beyond. Right. On the equipment side, on the semiconductor OEM cycle, right, we have exposure to all levels of node architecture. So there is some legacy business there on legacy nodes, and that's the part that's a little bit more cyclical. And then if you look at the pipelining and all the commercial platforms that we're focused on, that's all leading edge capability on new wins and where we're really putting the vertical integration play to work. So then more specifically on Arizona, as we've talked about before, we will invest about $20 million or so in phase one of Arizona.
Phase one is all about giving us that precision cleaning capability that we've demonstrated Copy Exact from Taiwan into California and then now into Arizona. There will be other opportunities to build out phase II and phase III over time in Arizona. That is still areas that are still being evaluated for where that may come, whether it be additional cleaning capability or if we decide to put our coating capacity in there to support the Arizona infrastructure or other leading-edge platforms. We have the ability to kind of invest over time and continue to build out the capability. It will be a little bit of a slow burn. We have seen good results so far from our qualification activity.
As we talked about in our third quarter earnings release, we pulled some of that work back into 2024 or ahead into 2024, and we're off and running there. We've recognized first revenue, albeit small, in the fourth quarter of 2024. We expect continued ramp-up and qualification and testing work for us to ramp into commercial volumes and commercial revenues, really starting in the back half of this year, but more materially into 2026 and beyond. Great. We have said, Justin, in total that we think that the Arizona expansion from a multi-year perspective could approximate anywhere between $40-50 million. That's over a multi-year period. In our appropriate kind of disciplined growth capital approach, we expect a minimum of 15% return over a reasonable period of time as each of our growth investments mature.
Got it. Thanks.
I'll take a look at the audience and see if there are any questions here. Otherwise, I'll continue. All right. I'll continue. So one question on the Sealing Tech business. I think everyone's amazed, impressed, somewhat shocked that you've been able to get to low 30s EBITDA margins, and you expect to stay at 30%+ in 2025 and continue at the ±30% level. So just help us gain confidence that this can be a 30% EBITDA margin business in three to five years and none of the current benefits go away or the mix doesn't take us meaningfully back down.
Yeah. I mean, these are world-class businesses that we have in these spaces, right? As I talked about before, through the portfolio optimization work, we really kept the best of the best that was in our portfolio from previous phases.
And so we have very well-positioned product lines that bring significant technical safety and innovation capabilities to our customers in the space. We have long-standing specification positions and a good aftermarket in many of these places. We have worked hard to really capture the value that we bring in those specific value chains. That was really the strategic value pricing work that we have done over there to make sure that we are capturing our value for what we bring to the customers and the end solution. That has proven to be very sustainable. In fact, was there all along. It just took us the work to kind of go out and capture that. At the same time, we have done a lot of pruning in those businesses, right? We have kind of carved off pieces that did not fit our strategic or margin profile.
We've kind of moved up or out some of the individual product lines below that that didn't meet where we were headed. But below that, there was a lot of growth in some of these key nodes that we've been able to build in aerospace space and food and pharma and even within some of our more advanced commercial vehicle applications. And so now, plus we worked hard to get all of that operational efficiency through really strong operational excellence work, continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, etc., etc. So we've got a heritage now of building up that capability. We've got a margin profile that we believe is sustainable. And then we can go out there and say, sustainably, we're now above the 30% mark and the ability to grow from there.
Just running down a minute, Justin. Just on the 2/3 of the Sealing Technologies segment is aftermarket driven by strong MRO specification positions across a number of end markets, very small percentage of total customer spend, but absolutely critical to our customers' processes. We enter every year with 2/3 of visibility with a tremendous installed base with brand recognition, pricing power, and technological capabilities as our customers look to us to solve their most challenging problems.
Thank you. We're running down time. Just maybe quickly, if you could address capital allocation priorities in terms of M&A, would you consider larger deals? Would you ever consider using your stock price, for example, as currency given how well it's done? Just any quick comments on the M&A priorities. We understand all the tools and levers at our disposal, right?
I would say we're not focused on using our equity position to do that, although I wouldn't rule it out and say you can't say we would never do that, but that's not where we're focused. We're focused on using our cash flow, using our balance sheet to invest behind positions of strength and other adjacencies that fit our strategic criteria that we talked about and what it means to be an Enpro business and have the capability or demonstrated ability to deliver the same margin and free cash flow profile. AMI was a perfect example of that. It fits right down the lane with both the strategic, financial, cultural leadership of what it means to be an Enpro business. I see us continuing to do those types of acquisitions over time while we maintain a very responsible balance sheet and leverage position.
Great. Thanks so much, Joe.
Thanks, James. Pleasure to have you guys with us again this year and all the best for Enpro. Great.
Thank you, Justin.
Thanks, Justin.