Right, if we can take our seats. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our 2025 Investor Day. I'm Pat Davidson, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations at Oshkosh Corporation. Thank you very much for joining us today. We're glad you've chosen to spend some time. It is a great time to be here at Oshkosh. This is our first Investor Day in a little over three years, and we're very excited to be back. We're here to share who we are, what we're building, how we're creating value through innovation, culture, and disciplined execution. Our focus: growing revenue, improving margins, and delivering shareholder value. Before we get started, we've got our forward-looking statements, right? I want to highlight that this presentation contains statements that we believe to be forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law.
These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. We probably all know that, but we invite you to review our risk factors and consider them when you evaluate our company as an investment. I also want to make one comment. On your tables, we have got this sort of funky-looking brick block thing. This is charging, right? If any of you get low on the battery on your computer, your phone, or whatever, there is USB, there are three-prong plugs, so please use this. We all kind of looked at them. They are kind of interesting. I did want to make one more announcement before I hit our speakers, and that is we had a press release earlier this week where we made two announcements. First, we have renamed our defense segment, transport, right? It is a better fit. It more accurately reflects the business we have.
Secondly, more importantly, Steve Nordlund, who comes to us from Boeing Corporation after 25 years of experience, will be heading up that segment. He's held senior roles at Boeing and also started a technology company that they successfully sold. Steve brings strong, strong people-first leadership and execution focus. Until then, John will continue to run the segment and will be discussing it here today. Our presenters, John Pfeifer, President and CEO, will talk about our strategy, our focus on the future, and what differentiates Oshkosh. Jayq Iyengar, who I think a few of you have gotten to speak with today, she's our Chief Technology Officer and Strategic Sourcing Officer. She's going to talk about our advanced technologies and the innovations that we're doing. Mahesh Narang, President of our Access segment, will discuss the company and our resilience and what we're doing at the Access segment.
We're going to have a short 10-minute break. Following the break, we'll come back in. John will hit defense for us right there. I just did it, didn't I? Transport. We're going to talk transport and what we're doing to improve the performance. Mike Pack will then come on and talk about our vocational segment and what he's doing with capacity to feed very, very strong demand. Matt Field will follow up, Mike, with our financial targets and talk about capital allocation, which we all know is a very popular part of the Investor Day. After that, we'll have about 30 minutes or so of Q&A, and you'll have an opportunity to ask questions here in the room and online. After the Q&A, we do have box lunches and a bag for those of you that have attended here in person.
Take that box lunch with you or eat it here. We welcome you to do whatever you like. With that, welcome to our 2025 Investor Day.
Good morning.
Here we are at the New York Stock Exchange, and I will tell you, I love coming to the New York Stock Exchange. I think it's a really, really special place. You know, when I come here, it kind of brings out the feelings of freedom, democracy, free enterprise, capitalism. We really, really are happy to be here. Thank you for joining us. We're excited. We are excited to talk about our business, as always, and we're excited to give you some insight into what we expect and what is happening over the next few years with our business. Let me start by rewinding to 2022. Pat said last time we did one of these was about three years ago. In 2022, we set at that time what was perceived to be some pretty ambitious targets.
I have to point out that we delivered on those targets on our top line, on our operating income, and on our earnings per share targets. One year early, we delivered on them. One year early. We built up momentum, of course, as we always do. We are going to show you what that means, what that momentum means for the future of Oshkosh Corporation. Today, you are going to hear directly from the leaders of our company that are driving Oshkosh forward. Those are people shaping our strategy, driving our operational performance, and leading innovation across the entire enterprise. We are going to outline our vision. We are going to showcase the strength of our products and technologies, and most importantly, show you how we make a difference in the lives of everyday heroes that we all depend on in our communities.
This is all going to drive strong gains in both revenue and operating margin for our shareholders. When I talk about today, it says key takeaways on this slide. There are really two things. If you only take away two things from what I'm going to tell you the next few minutes, it's this. You're going to see strong revenue growth through 2028, and you're going to see transformative margin expansion. Strong revenue growth, transformative margin expansion. Let's start with growth. We're positioned to deliver meaningful gains driven by strong execution of just, if you just look at our existing backlog, especially that's true in vocational and in transport. These are large multi-year programs that are really already in motion, and they're a major engine that drives that top-line growth. At the same time, we're executing with a lot of discipline.
We are transforming our model to unlock 200-400 basis points of margin expansion. That's not dependent. That is not dependent on any outsized expectation of something that's going to happen, some sort of an assumption. It's grounded in work that's already underway, and there's even some upside when you look at favorable macro trends, and you'll see some of that in our presentation. If you walk away with just two things: revenue growth, transformative margin expansion. Here on this slide, there's some foundational pillars that really power our momentum and drive the growth and the margin expansion. We bring, when we come, we bring the full strength of our enterprise to every single challenge that we have. You'll see that throughout today's presentation. We have a united strategy.
We're focused on real solutions and committed to driving real value to the people that we serve in the end markets that we serve. They're the reason that we're executing today these foundational pillars and they're the reason that we're really confident in what comes next for our business. Quick glance as to where we are right now in time in 2025. We're about an $11 billion publicly traded. We're on the Fortune 500 list. We are an industrial technology company. We have more than 108 years of innovation, and we have been solving complex challenges for the world's most critical industries. Underscore the word critical. Our business is structured to serve critical markets, markets that communities that we all live and work in, they can't live without what we do.
It's job sites, city streets, defense missions, airports, all of these contributing to the momentum and the story that you're going to hear about as we go forward this morning. We have about 18,000 team members that power that work, and those 18,000 team members are really united by a single purpose. I always have to talk about our purpose because of how powerful it is. We make a difference in the lives of people in communities who build, serve, and protect communities around the world. These are the people that are doing the toughest work in challenging environments. We are completely focused on making that work safe, safer every day that goes by, intuitive for the operator doing the tough work or for the fleet owner, if that's the case, and absolutely more productive with every day that goes by because productivity is critical in our communities.
That purpose also shapes our culture. It defines how we lead, how we work, how we show up for one another, and most importantly, for our customers. It is also reflected in the core values that we have as a company and we have as a management team. It guides us across the entire organization. It is why people choose Oshkosh, and it is also why they stay with Oshkosh. They believe in what we are building, and they believe that they are helping shape what comes next. We have been on a journey the past several years. If you go from the left side of this slide, I will talk about the left side first. Before 2022, what we saw was the opportunity to really leverage competitive advantages across our enterprise. We saw the opportunity in that period of time to move faster and to scale competitive advantages.
There are a lot of examples of this. If you look at, say, the Pierce business, we did the Ascendant Aerial, which has been a blockbuster product for Pierce. That Ascendant Aerial was developed by leveraging technology and competitive advantage that we had across the enterprise. You look at major program milestones. Like you all know, we won the NGDV for the U.S. Postal Service. The U.S. Postal Service NGDV program was designed and developed using the full might and technology across the enterprise of the organization. Those were examples of the foundation of something a little bit bigger. We get into the 2022 to 2025 period of time, the most recent period of time.
We made deliberate moves to do something even more to become an industrial technology company where we leverage technology and develop technology that can be used across the entire enterprise, which really helps us drive resilience in our business. Here is what kind of happened during that period of time, the 2022 to 2025 period. We activated our M&A pipeline. You saw some of that happen. We reorganized our segments to drive much sharper focus on what we are trying to do. We invested in resiliency in our businesses across the manufacturing footprint, supply chain, and even the overall operating discipline. We focused on the technology vision, scaling our innovation across the enterprise and integrating, here is a key thing we have been doing a lot, integrating software with our vehicles and equipment to unlock new intelligent capabilities.
This is a really powerful time for us because of the software and intelligent product capabilities that we have been building. You combine hardware with software and connectivity, and you really can accelerate how big of a difference you can make in the end markets that you're serving for customers that are doing really important work. Now we're building on that foundation, the right-hand side of the chart. You're going to hear from Jay, our Chief Technology Officer, next. We're going to talk about how we're really leveraging technology advantages in three fundamental areas, not exclusive to these three, but autonomy is a big one. The more autonomous we can make things, the more safer and productive it becomes. Electrification is another big one. Electrification is not right for every single end market, but it's right for a lot of end markets.
Intelligent systems, software and analytics make a big impact across our portfolio. By combining our leading positions in vehicles and equipment with this software and intelligent integration, we're opening new ways to solve real customer friction points and problems. We're doing it in a way that continues to position us as a long-term partner and the number one player in the end markets that we serve. It's purposeful evolution for us. At the center of it all, of course, we always remember who we're serving, and it's the everyday hero that's doing the work every single day in our communities.
Let's talk about that a little bit because we play a critical role, as I've been talking about, mentioned a couple of times, in neighborhoods, in airports, and in job sites that we see all around us every day. You might not always see us. You might not always see Oshkosh and Oshkosh Brands, but we are there. We're working behind the scenes, and we are embedded in everyday life. Our vehicles collect refuse and recycling. Our vehicles deliver mail and packages. Our vehicles put out fires. Our vehicles lift material to build homes, hospitals, and schools. Our vehicles support travel, powering airport ground operations. In moments of crisis, it's there. That's the power of our portfolio, and that's the power of Oshkosh Corporation. We're not just showing up today. We're shaping what comes next.
That's at the airports, in the neighborhoods, and in the job sites. If you went to the CES show in Las Vegas in January, we were at the CES show. We had a pretty big display at the CES show. You saw us unveil at CES the way that we see the future of the markets that we're serving. You saw us unveil the airport of the future. You saw us unveil the job site of the future. You saw us unveil the neighborhood of the future and how we're transforming these end markets that are so important to all of us. This is an example of why we are a different kind of company as we go into the future. Let me talk about those three. You'll hear about this throughout today's presentations from our entire executive management team.
I'm going to start with the airport of the future. I know every single one of us, every single one of us can relate to this. Let me put our minds in place here. Just think about this. You've just landed at an airport. The good news is you've landed on time. You're stuck at the gate. That never happens, right? No, never happens. The jet bridge isn't ready. A cart of some kind blocks the path of the airplane. Ground crews are improvising. Frustration builds. Every extra minute at the gate or trying to struggle to get to the gate not only costs airlines money and quite a lot of money, but it also delays travelers, you and I, from getting to where we need to be. That is the challenge. Now picture this.
Every jet bridge, every vehicle, every piece of equipment is automated, in some cases electrified and connected, and it is all working together through a single intelligent system with the goal of the perfect aircraft turn every time. That is the breakthrough that we are solving. With our advanced jet bridges, a full suite of ground support equipment, and our iOPS, Intelligent Connected System, we are uniquely positioned to enable faster, more efficient aircraft turns. The result is fewer delays and superior service for travelers and lower costs, higher uptime, and better performance for our customers. Our customers want this technology that we are bringing to them, and the uptake is high. This is the airport of the future. Mike is going to talk more about it when he comes up to talk about our vocational business. Now let's go to our neighborhood.
We all hear the sounds and the sights and the sounds of our neighborhoods every day. Refuse trucks are stopping at every house. Fire engines race to the scene of an emergency. Delivery vans weave in and out of streets through our neighborhoods. It's all a familiar scene to us, but for the people who are behind the wheel, it's long, demanding shifts, in most cases, noisy, outdated, and uncomfortable vehicles and a job that's increasingly difficult for our customers, the fleet owners, to fill. That's a challenge. Now imagine the same neighborhood. It's just as active, of course, but it's safe, it's quiet, it's clean for people in the communities, people around the vehicles, and for the operator at work, the experience is comfortable by design. It's intuitive. It's simple to use, and it's productive. That's a breakthrough.
Features like our AI-powered bin and contamination detection or advanced safety systems like our Collision Avoidance Mitigation System, these systems deliver real impact for our customers and for the users of the equipment. If you look at the NGDV to the Pierce Volterra electric fire truck to the McNeilus Volterra electric RCV, innovations like HARR-E that we showcased at CES, we're building solutions to protect people and property, keeping neighborhoods safe, quiet, clean, and helping customers retain and boost productivity. Boosting productivity is ultimately critical. That's what customers want to pay for. That's what they want us to be doing and investing in. We're not just reshaping how communities function. We're rethinking how that work is done. We're thinking about how the building of communities as well. I'll go to the job site of the future. Job sites, when you look at them, they're everywhere.
They always will be everywhere. They're tough environments to drive productivity and safety. Every job site is different. Crews are waiting on materials. Machines are sitting idle. Workers search for tools or equipment, materials that are uncertain where things are and whether a piece of equipment is ready to run. It's difficult to know what's needed on job sites to track usage and to stay ahead of maintenance. This all is reflected in lost time, lost productivity, and ultimately higher costs than there should be for construction companies. That's the challenge that we're focused on continuing to solve. Now imagine a job site that works very differently, where every machine and every element is connected via software and intelligence. What I'm talking about, the connectivity of this, I'm talking about people, equipment, tools, even material. Think about pallets of material at a construction site.
Crews and operators will know exactly what's available, where it is, what it needs. This is all the breakthrough in productivity on job sites. Our equipment, if you look at JLG equipment, just take the JLG equipment, it's usually or always the first on the site and the last to leave the site. With ClearSky Smart Fleet technology, it can connect people, tools, materials, and equipment across the entire job site to deliver real-time analytics and real-time actionable insights for our customers. Remote operation and autonomous features are also important. They enhance safety, reduce training time, increase uptime, increase productivity. Predictive diagnostics are also really important as well. We want to make sure that it's known exactly what needs to happen before anything bad actually does happen. That's another element of our ClearSky intelligence system. The result is a job site that's connected, versatile, and far more productive.
This is the job site of the future. It's powered by Oshkosh Innovation. You'll see more and hear more about this this morning when Mahesh talks about our fantastic access segment. Supporting long-term trends, we've talked about our strong demand, the significant backlog that we're executing against today that's driving, that alone is driving growth for our business and across the business. These trends, the trends on the slide go beyond our backlog. They represent long-term structural demand across markets, and they align directly with where we are focused at Oshkosh. These are not short-term spikes. They are long-term demand drivers, and they are tied to technology because what we're driving in terms of technology drives demand, and it drives shifts in how work gets done. That's where we stand out at Oshkosh Corporation with all of our businesses.
Across infrastructure, fleet, air travel, demand is accelerating for high-performance, connected, and tech-enabled equipment that's driven by the need, again, for productivity advancements. The future is right there with what we're developing. You'll hear more about these technologies, again, from Jay, our CTO, when she comes up. What is our right to win at Oshkosh? What are the competitive advantages that we see? What are the strengths that we have as a company? What matters most, first and foremost, is how we show up for our customers and why they choose us. We think about that every day. The advantages that we have, in many cases, have been built for over 100 years, and we continue to build on them every day. I think they all start with technology. We have the most advanced technology. It's relevant for our end markets.
We have a technological lead pretty much in every end market we serve, and we innovate with the everyday hero in mind. You always have to keep the end user in mind if you're going to do the right thing. This includes a vast portfolio of intellectual property. We have more than 1,000 very, very powerful patents. We've also got brand strength that drives a premium in all of our end markets. Our brands are highly recognized brands. They are sought-after brands. They are preferred brands. In some cases, our brands are so strong that they actually have become household words in their end markets. I mean, you can look at the picture I've got on the slide here, right? I mean, that's not a doctored photograph. We see firefighters all over the country with our firebrand Pierce tattooed on their arm. That's not an unreal thing.
That's a real photograph. I mean, that shows you the power of our brands. The brands mean quality. They mean performance. They mean uptime. We know that we can get uptime because the after-sales service is so strong, and the reliability is there for us to do tough work. That's why the brands are so strong. We also have a manufacturing footprint, which we think is a big advantage for us. More importantly, we've got advanced capabilities as well as the capacity to get trucks delivered to serve customers at scale. This footprint gives us a lot of versatility, the footprint that we have, even to adapt to things that come at us. Like today, we all know tariffs are coming at us. Every day, there's a little bit of new news about tariffs.
We've got a manufacturing footprint that gives us a level of versatility to respond to those kinds of changes that we need to respond to. This is something that smaller competitors, from a manufacturing standpoint, simply cannot match. They can't match the flexibility. They can't match the capacity. In many cases, they can't match the execution. I think perhaps what might be most important is we've got the people. People are everything in any organization, certainly a big business like ours. We have incredible engineering talent, really, really strong technical expertise across our engineering groups, incredible management talent. And we're aligned around a strategy, and we're all focused on execution for those everyday heroes. These are real lasting competitive advantages that I've talked about. Again, communities cannot function without us. And we're going to be here to serve them for another 100 years as we've surpassed our first 100.
Our strategy is clear. We're focused and aligned across our entire enterprise. We call it innovate, serve, and advance. This is really how we turn purpose into action. This is not a new strategy. Many of you, if not all of you, have heard it before, but it's been delivering for us year after year. It's designed to scale with us well into the future. You'll see this chart continue to pop up over the next period of time this morning. Let me just give you the lay of the land on this. It starts with innovate. We're an innovation company. We're an engineering company. We're a technology company. This is the first pillar of our strategy, shaping tomorrow with technology that solves real-world problems. It's how we stay ahead, and it's how we drive customer delight.
What that means is that we drive premium margins because of our innovation capability. It means safe, smart, and productive equipment so everyday heroes can do their job better with every day that goes by. We go further now. We go further now as I'm standing here today with intelligent connectivity and software. This makes the vehicle or the machine and everything around it intuitive, safe, and efficient, more so than it's ever been. Later today, Mahesh is going to talk more about connected products with ClearSky Smart Fleet. Mike will talk more about our iOPS technology. This is part of that intelligent connectivity breakthrough that I've been talking about in terms of software capability. In electrification, our vehicles are purpose-built for a full shift on a single charge. This helps manage operating costs, promote safety, and deliver an exceptional operator experience.
Now, I want to make something really clear for all of us with electrification. You see, I hear a lot of different things about electrification. Some people have even turned it into a political issue. With us, electrification only means one thing. If we believe that we can provide a significant economic benefit to a customer, we will electrify a vehicle. When we see that we can drive real total cost of ownership and a customer is willing to pay for that superior propulsion system and the performance and the productivity that it provides, we will do it. That is where you see us doing it. There are real gains to be had in some of our end markets, most of them route-based, where we drive real returns for customers by electrifying. That is when we electrify. There are also other ancillary benefits. It is cleaner. It is quieter.
It is all about driving economic benefit for our customer. Autonomy and active safety. Autonomy is a real skill for us. We have got incredible engineering around autonomy. Autonomous functionality drives productivity. Our customers want productivity. You can take JetDock, going back to the airport of the future, using onboard sensors to align aircraft automatically speeds up turnarounds and makes it better for everybody involved. This is how we innovate. It is purpose-built technology. Serve is the second pillar. It is how we build stronger customer relationships, and it is how we build a more resilient business by supporting customers throughout the entire product lifecycle. Some of our products last 20 years. A lot of them last 20 years. We deliver parts, service. Now, we have gone way beyond it. We are delivering connected software that supports uptime and extends performance.
This creates value for us and for our shareholders at every stage of ownership, not just at the original sale. It generates stable, high-margin, and recurring revenue streams as a result of this activity. ClearSky and Smart, which is an intelligent product software, iOPS technology software in our airport businesses, all helps our customers drive better productivity, drives the airport, the job site of the future. This is a big part of how we're serving customers better throughout that entire lifecycle of the products. You're going to hear about how each one of our segments is also driving continued fundamental difference in our aftermarket lifecycle serve strategy. This is true for our McNeilus dealer network, for how we've structured the NGDV or the postal aftermarket. Those postal vehicles will be in the market for 20 years.
How are we going to make sure we're serving the duty cycle of those vehicles every year that goes by? Even JLG, which has superior service in the end markets that they serve, how are they driving better after-sales service year after year? This is how we deliver on serve. It's about standing with our customers, and that means real value for shareholders. Advance. When we see the opportunity where we can take advantage of our existing capabilities and take them into a new end market that has substandard solutions, we call that advancement. Advance is the third pillar of our strategy. It's kind of about scaling our reach into adjacent markets with everyday heroes who need a better solution.
This includes a great example, our AeroTech acquisition, where we brought Oshkosh innovation to airport ground support, which unlocks a major opportunity in a growing mission-critical industry where our technology and AeroTech's business is a perfect fit. It also includes advancement, for example, into agriculture. This brings JLG's innovations to a new everyday hero, the farmer. We've strengthened our European footprint through this strategy with our acquisitions of both Hinowa in Italy and AUSA in Spain. It expands our capabilities and gives customer access in key markets. Mahesh is going to talk a little bit more about these businesses later this morning. Of course, one of our bigger advancements recently, we're in production. They're delivering mail with a Next Generation Delivery Vehicle for the U.S. Postal Service. This is another example of our step into an advancement strategy into last-mile delivery.
We have provided the most advanced last-mile delivery vehicle ever designed anywhere in any country in the world, and we've designed the first one for United States Postal Carriers. This is how we advanced. It's disciplined, targeted areas where we can make a real difference. We have a purpose-built portfolio. We serve the most critical end markets that allow our communities to operate, and we're united by that purpose to make a difference in people's lives who do the toughest work. This purpose fuels that strategy I just talked about, innovate, serve, advance, and it drives our commitment to strong, sustainable returns for our shareholders. We operate as a team. We share technology across our enterprise. We scale innovation and drive performance. You'll see that reflected here in how we deliver across segments today. We believe that we have a very compelling investment thesis.
I want to button up my opening remarks here. I open with two primary points: revenue growth and transformative margin expansion. We're growing our top line with strong backlogs and healthy demand for our products, and there is strong visibility and sustained momentum. We are driving more resilient transformation of our operating margins. We have a balanced portfolio, robust contributions from all of our segments, and positioning to continue to accelerate significant free cash flow. We are not just built to compete. We're built to lead and drive sustainable value for our shareholders over time. With that introduction to today, I want to introduce Jay Iyengar, our Executive Vice President and Chief Technology and Strategic Sourcing Officer, to the stage. Thank you.
John, thank you for the kind introduction. Good morning. Hope you can hear me. I am delighted to be here. I met some of you at CES and glad to see you again. Welcome. Thank you for coming. Before I begin, a quick introduction. I come from a diverse industrial technology background from automotive. I grew up in the auto industry, automotive to aerospace to ag and construction. I have been a part of technology-driven transformations of those sectors, bringing into market several new technologies into production and delivering on the business growth. Here at Oshkosh, I have the privilege of overseeing one of the key growth pillars that John talked about. Innovation is driving our revenue and growth and shaping the future.
You will see this come to life as we in the airport of the future, the neighborhood of the future, and the job site of the future, all delivering a future that is safer, more efficient, and more productive. I'm excited to share some details here with you today, so let's jump in. We take a practical and a very pragmatic approach to innovation. My three key messages for today. One, we always start off with the why, right? Our innovations are always centered around customers, both operators of our vehicles and our business customers. We start by listening, observing, and understanding through close collaboration. We engineer very targeted solutions to address their pain points. Second, it's the what. John mentioned this. It's the electrification, autonomy, and active safety and intelligent connected products fueled by AI.
I'll talk about that later, are all focused on unlocking significant customer value and hence delivering growth for Oshkosh. Think of it as purpose-engineered technology for our purpose-built vehicles. The third is the how, right? It's our enterprise scale and our approach. Through our harmonized technology stacks, we share proven architecture, hardware, and software as appropriate across all our products. Additionally, we leverage strategic tech partners to deliver high-impact solutions with precision and speed. What sets us apart? Our competitive advantage to me starts with our DNA, right? A strong engineering team with a long legacy of innovation, which has the scale and the bench strength and the deep expertise in multiple core engineering domains. We share technology and expertise across our portfolio of market-leading products.
have established centers of excellence, enterprise-wide centers of excellence in our core tech pillars to ensure effective sharing of technology and know-how. We are also tech entrepreneurs. Our Pratt Miller organization is a technology powerhouse driving disruptive innovation. With all of this, we excel both in disciplined product execution, design and execution, and technology development. Lastly, we recognize innovation does not always solely happen within our four walls. We follow an open innovation framework. We partner with top tech innovators, startups, VC firms, academic institutions, and we leverage our corporate venture capital for tech scouting. All of this helps us drive speed, agility, and helps us be future-ready. With over a century of experience, I repeat, with over a century of experience, we have pioneered numerous firsts as demonstrated by our rich patent portfolio.
The majority of our 1,300 patents, 1,300-plus patents, are concentrated in key domains that help drive growth for Oshkosh, such as electrification, autonomy, connectivity, and mobility. It's important to note that these patents are applied directly on our products, helping create meaningful differentiation. I'll share some examples of what that is as I go through my presentation. Recently, IEEE, I'm sure how many of you know IEEE, it's the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the largest technical professional organization in the world, released a report in their Spectrum magazine on the patent power ranking of companies in various sectors. They actually assessed the patent portfolio of global companies to identify the most influential IP holders, right? The metric used for this study was not about the number of patents, but a measure of impact the patents have on the company's growth and business.
We are very proud. Let me repeat that. I'm actually ecstatic to have been recognized as the number two-ranked company in the automotive sector among global automotive companies, including major OEMs. To me, this external recognition proves what drives us, creating breakthrough innovation that makes a real difference in delivering growth. Speaking of growth, technology-driven transformation happens when the efforts are aligned in the right direction. Our customers, including those who operate our products, drive our vehicles, are at the center of everything that we innovate. They engage with us, our business customers, and those who actually operate our vehicles engage with us throughout the product lifecycle. It all starts with a thorough VOC, Voice of the Customer, which includes getting insights into both their spoken and unspoken needs and pain points and their priority of needs of each of these customer types.
As an example, a job site operator working at height, their most important priority is to prioritize safety. Environmental workers, the refuse collection workers, and the last-mile delivery, they value productivity, ergonomics, and comfort because their vehicle is essentially their office. They spend an entire day in their vehicles. Across the board, TCO, total cost of ownership, remains the critical factor in decision-making, and that's what drives the business case for our technology and our products. It's important to note that we take a wide-lens approach. John touched on this. We focus beyond the vehicle, supporting our customers through the entire product lifecycle, from planning, deployment to service, aftermarket, ensuring that we are entitled to a full lifecycle revenue. You also heard this from John, right?
We are very unique in the sense that our unmatched product portfolio, where we serve end markets with multiple products, right, and our technology strength positions us very well to go up in value chain and to transform entire end markets. Throughout the course of today's session and in between speakers, you will see videos that depict our vision of such end market transformations. Airport of the Future, which maximizes revenue opportunity for airlines by keeping aircraft in the air longer with what we call as a perfect aircraft turn from landing to takeoff at the airport gates. The Neighborhood of the Future, which is quiet, environmentally friendly, safe, clean, where all the essential services are efficiently coordinated. Job Site of the Future, which redefines productivity by connecting and streamlining jobs to be done in an otherwise very chaotic environment.
To me, a true technology company is defined by its ability to envision and shape the future, and that's what we do at Oshkosh every single day. Now let's look at how we scale technology and bring that to life. I mentioned this earlier. Our technology stacks are the foundation of our ability to scale. Through a harmonized tech stack, we share proven architectures. Hardware and software are appropriate across all our products. We intentionally retain ownership or form strategic partnership using our open innovation framework of the elements of our technology stack, all with the intent of driving meaningful product differentiation and maintaining competitive advantage. Next, we'll explore each of the core technology areas for a deeper look at how they're powering our portfolio, starting with electrification. We bring decades of proven electrification experience, starting in the mid-1990s and continuing to lead the industry today.
Our expertise spans from low-voltage systems, advanced battery technologies, and hydrogen fuel cells, and architectures from hybrids, range extenders, to all the way to full battery electric vehicles. Our purpose-built route-based vehicles with frequent start-stops are ideal applications for electrification. We are now concurrently launching four production electrified platforms across our product portfolio, demonstrating the scale of Oshkosh. While each platform is tailored to its specific application, they leverage common know-how and expertise, systems, and components as appropriate, highlighting our modular approach. Next, I'll share a real-world example of electrification in action. This is the Pierce Volterra electric refuse collection vehicle, eRCV, built on the success of the Pierce Volterra fire truck, sharing a common electrification platform. In this case, early in the design, we engaged directly with our customer, Republic Services, to understand their duty cycle and mission.
With these insights, we tailored a solution to meet their operational and business needs. We also deployed early prototypes in their fleet for real-world testing, which helped us refine and arrive at a final design-validated solution. As the industry's very first fully integrated electric refuse truck, it delivers a full day's range on a single charge. The vehicles leave in the morning, and they can come back after a full day's work, and they do not need to be charged in between. The vehicle's advanced driver assistance systems provide safety equivalent to a modern automobile, supporting our customers to attract and retain driver operators. The Volterra eRCV boosts efficiency, cuts maintenance cost, and sets new standards in mobility, ergonomics, and driver comfort. We also built a comprehensive TCO, total cost of ownership, model to support the deployment plans and to validate real-world benefits.
The eRCV is backed by 90-plus patents. Let me repeat that. The eRCV is backed by 90-plus patents, highlighting our innovation leadership. You will hear more about the business value of eRCV and Volterra from Mike when he comes up on stage. Looking ahead, the first part of the eRCV is electrifying the propulsion system. We are going beyond that. Looking ahead, we are introducing the electric zero radius arm. I am going to use the word ESRA. It is a pretty cool thing to say. I am referring to the arm that picks up the refuse bin that you see on the side loader. ESRA replaces traditional hydraulics with electric actuation, making the system lighter, quieter, more energy efficient, and easier to maintain.
When you combine this with AI-powered bin detection, the Cart Seeker technology that I'll talk about later, it can reduce the route times by up to 45 minutes per vehicle per day. That is real measurable efficiency for our fleet operators and for our customers. Next, let's dive into how we are advancing autonomy and active safety. Our work in autonomy began in the early 2000s through collaboration with the U.S. military, where we pioneered by-wire systems and laid the groundwork for advanced driver safety technologies and off-road autonomy. Our work in defense applications has given us the head start in autonomy and continues to keep us at the cutting edge even today. Our key differentiators in this space, right?
We are focused on targeted deployment of autonomy, what we refer to as moments of autonomy, right, with the intent of automating and simplifying complex vehicle operations, our jobs to be done, again, designed with the customer value as the guiding post. Our advanced driver assistant ADAS systems, such as automatic emergency braking, 360 camera, cross-traffic alert, are rapidly becoming a standard feature across all of our products. These are purpose-designed for the specific application, ensuring optimized design and overall system cost. Our perception and motion planning, which is a key element of autonomous systems, is a software stack built on AI and machine learning algorithms, and they support cross-application deployment, scaling across a range of our use cases. With thousands of miles of real-world testing across successive development cycles, our solutions are grounded in real-world validation and engineered for high reliability.
Here is a real-world example of autonomous technology in action. John highlighted this in the Airport of the Future. Most of us who travel have experienced delays waiting for a jet bridge operator. I can tell you jet bridge docking is a complex operation. Just think of the complexity of moving a building, a large building towards an aircraft in a very precise way to a multimillion-dollar aircraft. It's not an easy thing to do. It can be slow at times and requires significant operator training. Our Oshkosh JetDock technology uses advanced sensors and AI to detect the aircraft door, plans the docking path, and autonomously moves the bridge with real-time height adjustment for fast, precise docking. Again, we brought customers in the loop during the development. We collaborated with both airports and airlines to conduct real-world testing of our pre-production pilots at two airport locations.
These trials enabled us to refine targeting, positioning, and auto-parking capabilities, resulting in a final precision docking system that is in production today. Designed for efficiency and safety, JetDock reduces turnaround times, supports cost-effective operations, and mitigates aircraft damage while docking. To me, the future of autonomy, the future of moments of autonomy, holds vast potential from smarter baggage systems, on-demand refuse collection, which we had a demo at CES, to enhanced roadside safety systems, which is a tech transfer from our motorsport technology, autonomous training robots for the military, and productivity solutions for jobs to be done at height in the access segment. The third pillar of our advanced technology theme is the intelligent connected products, a space we've been advancing since the mid-2000s.
Today, every product ships standard with embedded controls, electronics embedded controls, software, and capable of being connected, making the intelligent systems a new baseline. We offer customizable customer portals built on a common cloud platform that provide advanced analytics, over-the-air updates, and real-world diagnostics capabilities. Our analytics turn data into actionable insights, enabling predictive maintenance, increasing uptime, and delivering intelligent fleet management. Together, these systems deliver smarter operations, reduced downtime, and ongoing value. Now I'll share an example of how we are applying intelligent connected technology. John mentioned this. JLG's ClearSky Smart Fleet is the construction industry's first real-time connectivity fleet management platform. It features fully integrated IoT communications with mesh network that ensures seamless machine-to-machine connectivity. It delivers actionable insights across thousands of connected assets, enabling data-driven decisions. The value ClearSky can provide through further connectivity to a chaotic job site is unmatched.
Mahesh will share a video that highlights the ClearSky's value. Connected solutions have the same value proposition across all our applications, whether it's a refuse collection vehicle, a postal NGDV vehicle, a concrete mixer, or iOPS technology that connects the airport ground support equipment all together. What's next? Looking ahead, we envision increasing levels of electronics and software. More functionality, more vehicle functionalities delivered through software, resulting in what we refer to as software-defined vehicle architecture that transforms machine intelligence. We categorize the maturity levels of SDV, ranging from basic functionality to vehicles becoming software platforms, as shown in the bottom left of the slide. As we prepare towards higher levels of SDV, we've developed a proprietary multi-domain edge controller, MDEC, which combines functionality of four controllers into one, helping optimize cost and simplifying SDV architecture. Intelligent products inherently embody machine learning and AI.
In fact, machine learning and AI are applied both in our products and in our operations. A few examples. The CartSeeker, a bin detection in refuse collection vehicles, enables smarter bin pickup, avoiding missed collections, and saves time on routes. The refuse contamination detection uses AI to ensure recycling loads are clean and compliant, improving sorting quality and reduced processing times. Third, operator assistance supports route optimization and safe navigation, enhancing efficiency and reducing driver fatigue. Last but not least, AI-assisted maintenance and service simplifies troubleshooting, accelerates repairs by providing predictive diagnostics and guided repair steps. These innovations are just a small part of our broader commitment to building intelligent products that adapt, learn, and continuously improve. Now that you've got a glimpse into our customer-centric innovation and technology, let me switch gears and talk about our market introductions.
We have developed a comprehensive roadmap across all our product portfolio to bring into production key technologies that I spoke of, both for today and into the future. This roadmap is grounded on unlocking customer value and ensuring TCO, total cost of ownership, benefits. This is how we bring to life our vision of airport of the future, job fair of the future, and neighborhood of the future. You'll hear more about the product introductions from Mahesh, John, and Mike. Of course, we are aligning investments to support our execution plans. From 2022 to 2028, we are committing $3.1 billion in investment in innovation and product development, fueling our vision for a smarter, safer, and more connected solution. In return, we expect to generate $19 billion in revenue and drive a 2,000 basis points increase in our new product vitality index, a clear signal of our accelerating innovation engine.
Most importantly, this investment will power sustainable long-term growth, transforming the industries we serve and delivering unmatched value to our customers and our stakeholders. In closing, we are a high-tech industrial technology company with a legacy of pioneering innovations and delivering on technology-enabled growth. Our customer-centric innovation starts with deep customer engagement and ends with solutions that are tailored, tested, and trusted, setting us apart in the industry. Our open innovation ecosystem gives us access to a broad range of emerging technologies and accelerates solution development. We are leading a holistic transformation of our end markets, reshaping how the value is created and delivered. It is a great time to be working at Oshkosh. With that, I'll turn it over to Mahesh to share access segment update. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Mahesh Narang, and I lead the access segment here at Oshkosh.
I'm honored to lead a team of extremely talented individuals managing iconic brands like JLG. JLG invented the boom lift over 50 years ago and even today continues to set the standards for safety and productivity for our everyday heroes on the job site. I've been in my role for just over 18 months, and I came to Oshkosh after a career spanning 20 years at Cummins. My last role at Cummins was president of the component segment. Access, like many businesses at Cummins, is a very global business with still a lot of room to grow. There are a lot of similarities in what I'm doing in my role at Access with what I did in my past roles at Cummins, like growing share, improving margins, and diversifying to build resilience. I'm excited to be here, and I look forward to our interaction today.
There are three key messages I want to communicate today. The first, we are winning in our core markets with a broad portfolio of product, excellent customer relations, and strong innovation pipeline. The second, we've improved margins with every economic cycle and continue to have strong momentum to continue that journey and meet the goals that John laid out for us. Third, we are building resilience by growing in lifecycle and adjacent markets to reduce the cyclicality we have traditionally seen in our access segment. Our total accessible market for the access segment is about $23 billion. To address this market, we have the broadest product lineup and are innovation leaders in the categories we serve. Both these are huge advantages as we look at the future trends in the market. I'll share a couple.
From an industry standpoint, we are seeing an increasing need by our customers to configure products for specific applications based on the regions they are in. As an example, we recently launched the EC450 Boom that combined technology from our JLG boom with our Hinowa Crawler boom to build a really compact boom for our European customers. Another example is we, again, launched the Micro Scissor Family of scissors configured from our existing portfolio of scissors to meet the needs of the data center market. We are capitalizing on this trend of configuring products from our existing portfolio and feel we have a huge advantage as we approach the different markets. From a technology standpoint, we see an increasing trend for automation and software services.
Imagine trying to find your machine in a yard with hundreds of other machines with just one click, or using our machines to automate jobs to solve the problem of skilled labor. With our ClearSky Smart Fleet technology, which Jay also spoke about, we can do that today. Our broad product range, strong brands, and leadership in innovation are all favorable trends that help us capture the growth in front of us. What gives us a competitive advantage? We have many iconic brands that are renowned for quality and service, which results in better residual value for our equipment. This also helps us get great net promoter scores year after year. Our exceptional product range and exceptional aftermarket support helps with customer stickiness. We are the leaders in innovation in our categories and are transforming our products to becoming software-enabled vehicles to automate jobs for our customers.
Lastly, we have an unmatched global footprint, which positions us really well to make the right product at the right cost at the right location. At Oshkosh, as John mentioned, our strategies are organized around three core areas: innovate, serve, and advance. In the next few slides, I will talk about how these apply to the access segment. Let me start with innovate. Jay gave many examples of how Oshkosh is leading in innovation. I'm going to talk about a few that really resonate with the customers I interact with. I'll start with the next generation boom. These new booms are software-enabled machines with advanced sensing. What this does is it helps us achieve precise spatial positioning, really transforming our machines into robotic systems. More so, they are modular and available in diesel, in hybrid, and in electric.
A customer that buys a diesel product today can easily convert it to EV when the technology changes. This helps, again, with the residual value of the product. Our Da Vinci electric scissors are completely electric with no hydraulics. This is extremely helpful in environments where cleanliness standards are really critical, like hospitals. We are super excited about our ClearSky Smart Fleet. Jay spoke about it, John spoke about it, and you saw glimpses of that in the video as I walked up on stage. I'll share a few more on the next slide. We recently launched an aerospace package that stops our machines from touching the plane if an operator gets too close. Our machines take over and prevent damage to the airplane. We are releasing more such packages in different industries where active safety is a key requirement.
Lastly, at CES, we demonstrated that we can have two of our machines talk to each other to automate jobs. You, again, saw some of it in the job site of the future video. We are working on a lot of these pilots to make the future a reality today. Our ClearSky technology is revolutionary. It has two distinct advantages. The first advantage, rather than just enabling a job like taking a person to a height to do the job, is we can now automate tasks, and we can execute jobs. Let me share this through a video. Traditional telematics will provide location services like a dot on a map. With ClearSky Smart Fleet, we can do far connectivity and near connectivity with audio and visual cues to quickly locate the machine in a crowded job site.
We can also do insights like fuel level status, battery status, and many more things that make the assets more productive for our customers. In this example, an operator comes to the site, finds a fault on the machine, and with just a few clicks can access the knowledge article, find what parts are needed, add the parts to the cart to have them delivered the very next day. All this with just a few simple clicks. Here you see one operator operating two machines to solve the problem of skilled labor. We are able to do over-the-air updates on our machines remotely to solve many issues for our customers today. There is also a second big advantage, and John referred to this. We are building connected ecosystems.
Rather than just have a product with two-way communication, we now have an ecosystem that can solve problems for customers beyond just a machine. Again, let me share a video to bring my point home. JLG has a unique advantage that our machines are on the site from groundbreaking till project completion. We have the ability to connect to any Bluetooth device, like tools, like materials, people with hard hats. This enables us to do things beyond just the machine on the job site. As an example, we can put cameras on a machine and send pictures of what is happening on the site. We can inform a supervisor about tools missing on the site. We can even provide project updates to our partners based on the operations being done with our machines.
For us, the future is about building partnerships to increase the monetization potential for us, for our partners, and for our customers. Jay spoke about 120,000 machines connected on ClearSky. We are just reaching scale where we can start monetizing this differentiating technology to solve problems on the job site by creating partnerships and improve safety, productivity, and efficiency. Having spoken about innovation, I'm now going to move to serve. Customer support is core to who we are. We have a number of initiatives to advance the strategy. We are expanding our master parts distribution center in Asia and Europe. What this does is it lowers the cost to serve the customer, and it reduces lead time, resulting in higher lifecycle revenues. We are expanding our remanufacturing and resale options. Again, this helps with residual value of our products.
We are leveraging ClearSky Smart Fleet to increase automation and software services, as well as building digital service tools for rapid service. All these initiatives, while increasing customer satisfaction, bring customers back to us and provide us with lifecycle revenues that are both recurring and resilient. I'll move from serve to advance. I already spoke about how our serve strategy is helping with lifecycle and software services. I'll talk about the remaining two on this slide. We've built a complete lineup of low-pivot boom telehandlers and acquired dumpers from our AUSA and Hinowa acquisitions to have a broad portfolio for the ag market. It's important to note that traditional players operate on the farm, whereas where Access and JLG will play will be in the barn. We will help the farmers in operations like stockpiling, feeding. It's a very complementary play compared to the traditional players.
As an American brand, building American products for our American farmers and solving their problems through automation brings us great pride. We are in the process of building out our dealer network, and the response so far from our customers has been extremely positive. I'm going to quote Brad, who's a fifth-generation farmer. He says, "Since we have this, I don't know how we'd do without it." Our share in North America is extremely high in telehandlers, but we also have a lot of room to grow globally. The same low-pivot telehandlers will be made in our global factories to help us grow the telehandler market globally. Lastly, we've made some good acquisitions over the year, like Jadan, like Hinowa, like AUSA.
We have detailed plans, many initiatives, each small but with good margin, that help us advance our strategy of building our business around the North America rental market in specialty markets that are more resilient. We are targeting significant incremental revenue beyond the North America rental channel through some of these initiatives. As part of advance to be more resilient, it is also important that we improve our cost structure. We have a huge focus on accelerating cost reduction and increasing efficiency. We have strong momentum on material cost reduction. It is in our DNA. We look at it every day, and we work on reducing cost. At the same time, we are doing a lot of work on fit-for-market products or selling the right product at the right cost to our customers. Our future growth is going to be in existing factories.
We are increasing automation where it makes sense to make our factories more efficient. We also have a global footprint, which gives us the speed and agility to adjust to tariffs and disruptions. This is particularly important in today's environment. As an example, in less than a year, we moved our production of booms from China to our factory in Europe in Italy, which helped us completely mitigate the impact of tariffs. We are focused on driving higher margins through the lifecycle by our focus on diversification and accelerating cost reductions. Our transformation is visible in our numbers. Since 2010, we have improved our sales for mid-cycle sales from $3 billion to $4.2 billion. We have improved our operating margin from 11.1% to 12.3%. Our goals for 2028 are sales between $5.3 billion-$5.8 billion and operating margin between 14%-16%.
We've actually done this in the past. It's now about sustaining it through the economic cycle. To reiterate the goals, in 2028, we want to be between $5.3 billion-$5.8 billion in sales and 14%-16% in margins. Even after adjusting for market recovery, like we've seen in the last few years, we are growing at more than GDP and a little more than that in our North America and Europe markets. For the AXS segment, it's about disciplined execution. We've got the playbook. We've got the talent, and we have the technology to get there. I'll wrap up with the same three messages I started my presentation with. We are winning in our key markets with focus on innovation. We are driving disciplined execution to improve margins with every economic cycle. We are building resilience through growth in lifecycle and adjacent markets.
We are focused on execution, and the best is still to come. Thank you.
All right, we're doing pretty well. We're a couple of minutes behind, but not a lot. We are going to take 10 minutes. I got 10:55. All you Apple Watch people, hopefully you're on target with me. We'll do 11:05. 11:05 back in this room, and we'll get started with the second half. Thank you.
He's been just for a day. I roll out of bed in the morning and throw on what I wanted and go. Drink beer with the guys and chase after girls. I kick it with who I wanted, and I never get confronted for it because they stick up for me. If I were a boy, I think I could understand how it feels to love a girl. I swear I'd be a better man.
I'd listen to her because I know how it hurts when you lose the one you wanted because he's taken you for granted and everything you had got destroyed. If I were a boy, I would turn off the phone, tell everyone it's broken so they think that I was sleeping alone. I'd put myself first and make the rules as I go because I know that she'd be faithful waiting for me to come home, to come home. If I were a boy, I think I could understand how it feels to love a girl. I swear I'd be a better man. I'd listen to her because I know how it hurts. When you lose the one you wanted, they'd be taking you for granted and everything you had got destroyed. It's a little too late for you to come back. Say it's just a mistake.
Think I'd forgive you like that if you thought I would wait for you. You thought I'd run. You're just a boy. You don't understand. Yeah, you don't understand how it feels to love a girl. Someday you wish you were a better man. You don't listen to her. You don't care how it hurts until you lose the one you wanted because you've taken her for granted and everything you have got destroyed. You're just a boy. You got a new life, and my brother and you, do you want to talk? We share the last line, and we drink a walk till we want to talk. I go round and round, satellite. I'm spending the waiting for you to pull me in. [audio distortion]
[audio distortion]
[audio distortion] Now that she's back in the atmosphere, it drops a Jupiter in her head. She acts like summer and walks like rain, but minds meant that there's a time to change. Since the return of a stay on the moon, she listens like spring and she talks like June. Tell me, did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all fading and then heaven is overrated?
Tell me, did you fall from a shooting star, one without a permanent scar, and then you missed me while you were looking for yourself out there? Now that she's back from that soul vacation, tracing her way through the constellation, [audio distortion]
The break clock is flashing, so that is time for us to get back in and continue on with the meeting. That said, John Pfeifer will talk about our transport segment.
Hello again. Let's talk now about our transport segment. You may have seen a little bit earlier this week, and then Pat talked about it as we opened the meeting. We have made a decision that we now are calling what used to be Oshkosh Defense, Oshkosh Transport. That reflects the changing nature of the business as well as the overall trajectory of where the growth is coming from in this business as we go forward. Now, as you look at this segment, rest assured, Oshkosh Defense is still part of it. Oshkosh Defense is a powerful brand name.
It is a business that is well known and well respected by the United States Department of Defense and many departments of defense for allied nations that we serve all over the world. It is now a business within this transport segment, which has got a changing nature. Pat also talked about the background of Steve Nordlund, who's joining us in July. He talked a bit about where Steve's coming from. We're really excited to have Steve come on board. Steve is the right leader for this business going forward. More than that, Steve is a great addition to an already strong management team. We're really excited about that as well. We now got key people and key capabilities in place. We're positioned going forward to drive strong performance in a very promising future for this business.
I might add, our backlog supports the growth that I'm talking about. This business, in total, in its totality, what's in it, it's built on a solid foundation. I think that starts with its engineering excellence that we have in this business. It's also known by its customers for reliability, innovation, and really an unwavering commitment to never stopping until we meet the needs of the mission that's there for the customer. Key messages today for our transport segment, three things really to take away from this. Number one, we're improving margins and we are dramatically improving margins. In tactical wheeled vehicles, I'm talking about the Oshkosh Defense tactical wheeled vehicles. This comes through sole source contracts that offer significantly enhanced pricing. It's more than just significantly enhanced pricing. It's also economic protection clauses that protect us going forward, make us more resilient in the future.
Second, we're expanding into what we call modernization adjacencies. This has also got attractive international pieces to the growth trajectory for these modern adjacencies. It allows us to showcase and position ourselves right where the priorities are in terms of where our customer dollars are going. Third, of course, certainly not least, is the beautiful NGDV that you see on the right-hand side of this chart. This positions us not only as a platform for growth, but it is a totally transformational vehicle for the entire delivery industry. Those are the three things to take away from today's message. Now I want to stop. I want to hit pause for just one minute and hit something that I think we will all find is very important. This segment has been underperforming.
We have taken key actions to position it differently and, most importantly, position it for strong and sustainable returns going forward. It starts back to I talked about sole source contracts. It starts with improving profitability through the contracts that we have. That work is done. It has significantly improved pricing on key programs that have the resiliency and are backed by economic price protection clauses. We have refined our focus on modernizing the existing fleet for our customer. It enables us to really deliver critical technology that helps the Department of Defense to deploy the best tools and technologies faster, in many cases without even having to buy a new vehicle. It is in the crosshairs of what their priorities are for those precious DoD dollars. That is what drives margin for our company, those types of modernization programs.
This represents, I might add, a growing opportunity to deliver advanced customized solutions meeting today's challenges really all over the world. It positions Oshkosh Defense for long-term success and sustainable performance. Our competitive advantages, we will always lead through technology and innovation in the end markets that we serve. That's what we do everywhere. Our infrastructure is best in class, and we are certified to the highest manufacturing and quality standards. You heard today Jay talk about the power of our patents. This segment, transport, holds 260 or so of those patents. It really demonstrates the strength of our intellectual property along with the deep expertise, particularly in autonomy. When you think about Jay talked 1,300, I said 260 here. When you think about those 260 that generated from this business, we have a specific capability in autonomous functionality development.
We do a lot of autonomous vehicles. When you hear about the ROGUE-Fires, for example, it's an autonomous vehicle. We are then able to take those patents, and we are able to leverage it across the entire enterprise. We do that all over the place, not just in this business, but it magnifies the meaning when I say there's 260 patents that got generated from this business. Our vehicles really are at the forefront of modernization efforts. This cuts across both the defense business and the delivery business, and it delivers unmatched productivity benefits for our customer. A market snapshot for you. In our defense business, we're seeing dynamic markets shaped by global conflict and battlefield modernization. That drives increased demand for autonomous functionality and versatility that I just talked about. Autonomy, autonomy, autonomy is what is happening in the world of defense today.
On the delivery side, the rapid and ongoing rise of e-commerce that we're all part of, that drives the need for different but safe, productive, and clean vehicles to replace what today are outdated vehicles. That is across the entire sector of that end market. They're all outdated vehicles. Our strengths are in autonomy. They're in electrification. They're intelligent connected products, and they are empowered by connectivity and AI. That positions us to really outperform in both of these end markets in this transport segment. Our strategic priorities for the transport segment, they're consistent with the whole organization. We talk about innovation. We talk about serving, and we talk about advance and advancing our market position. Let's start, and we'll talk about innovating to modernize the defense fleets through programs like the Autonomous ROGUE-Fires program that integrates payloads and offers expanded versatility.
This is a view of what future vehicles for the DoD look like there on the left-hand side of the page. Last-mile delivery fleets, they're all aged with obsolete technology. And I'm not just talking about the United States Postal Service fleet. We're delivering the most advanced last-mile delivery vehicle packed with safety and ergonomic features that allow transformation of both safety in the vehicle and around the vehicle and big productivity gains for the last-mile delivery worker. The NGDV platform, specifically for the Postal Service that you see on the right, that's a purpose-built vehicle from the ground up. It's integrated with safety and the flexibility to support that same vehicle comes in either a low-emission internal combustion powertrain or it comes in an electric vehicle powertrain. That ensures readiness for whatever application the United States Postal Service needs to fill.
It gives them the flexibility with the same vehicle for today as well as for whatever comes at them in the near future. We are a full-service partner. Our aftermarket capabilities provide end-to-end support, parts and kits, and life cycle management. We use analytics and process improvements to increase our support and parts sales and service to the DoD. We provide technology upgrades to existing fleets to modernize them that allows more versatility and better use of DoD dollars. The largest fleet of delivery vehicles in the world is the United States Postal Service fleet. These vehicles are used six days a week, up to 10 hours a day, sometimes longer. That is a big-time duty cycle when you think about that. Fifty-two weeks a year, these vehicles are built to last 20 years.
As we upgrade and populate the fleet, we've put the structure in place to support the growing need for life cycle support on those vehicles, which is another very strong business for us and for our shareholders. We're evolving our defense portfolio to meet the demands of modern warfare by advancing to meet the priorities of the DoD. We have a collaborative approach with global partners that enables us to develop tailored solutions and leverage our experience to support the rising demand in new categories. You see how we've evolved on this page that we have up right now. We expand our presence to meet rising international demand for mission-ready capabilities and technologies. At the same time, we've strengthened partnerships, both domestically and globally, to extend the reach of these modernization efforts. Let's talk about the NGDV and the delivery vehicle specifically. This is a clear example.
This vehicle is a clear example of innovation in action. We took our capabilities across our enterprise, and we applied them to a totally new category of everyday hero: the last-mile delivery worker. That starts, first and foremost, with the United States Postal Carrier, the hundreds of thousands of people that do this work. This vehicle is equipped with sensors, cameras, intelligent connectivity solutions. It offers maximum ergonomics, including enhanced visibility, comfort, easy entry and exit. It features new advanced driver safety systems. We built that again on a platform that supports, with one vehicle, either electric or internal combustion, depending on what the specific use case is in a specific region of the United States of America. This is a vehicle that's designed to do the job with the delivery worker, the Postal Carrier, at the center of every single decision that was made.
If you look at the total business here for just this specific vehicle, the USPS last-mile delivery fleet includes 200,000 vehicles. That is just the USPS fleet: 200,000 vehicles. That is just last-mile delivery vehicles. They have got over 130,000 of those of that 200, which is the aging, I should say significantly aging LLVs. That is, again, just the USPS fleet. The NGDV program represents the most significant USPS fleet modernization efforts in decades. It might be ever. With the opportunity, we will deliver up to 165,000 vehicles to deliver what they need to modernize the fleet. Beyond the USPS itself, the parcel delivery market has grown significantly in recent years. We all know why. It is projected to continue to expand at a 6% compounded annual growth rate over the foreseeable horizon. The here and now of this program, you are going to see a video here. This is an actual video.
We're ramping up production, on track to achieve full-rate production by the fourth quarter or in the fourth quarter of 2025. We have built a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant. It's in production now, and it's ramping, as I just talked about. Our new vehicles are already delivering mail in 18 states across the country. That number keeps going up almost every week. As mentioned earlier, we are focused on comprehensive life cycle support for this transformative fleet because it will be in the market, driving productivity for 20 years into the future. Looking ahead, we're targeting our sales in the transport segment to reach approximately $3.1 billion-$3.2 billion by 2028. That's up about $1 billion from where we are today in 2025. With disciplined execution of the contracts on both sides of this business, we expect to more than double the operating margin: 4%-10% by 2028.
To close, this transport segment is positioned for margin growth. It's positioned for modernization relevance, a long-term delivery platform leadership as well. It's a portfolio that reflects the evolving mission landscape, and we're doing it with scale and with speed and credibility that our customers expect. With that, I am now going to introduce to the stage Mike, who's going to talk about our vocational business.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm thrilled to be here today, particularly in my new capacity as Vocational segment president. I've been with Oshkosh for nearly 19 years now. Most recently, I served as Chief Financial Officer up until the point that Matt joined us back in December. It's great to see everyone today.
I know I've had the opportunity to meet many of you over the years, so I had a great time already today having the opportunity to catch up with many of you. Again, very excited for what's ahead for vocational. It's truly an exciting time in our business. We're driving tremendous revenue growth, as you're going to see today, as well as earnings growth. We expect that that strong growth is going to continue into 2028 and beyond. In vocational, we deliver innovative, purpose-built vehicles and equipment. John talked a lot about this. They provide our vehicles provide tangible benefits to our customers, and that's why they keep coming back to us. We do this under market-leading brands: Pierce fire trucks, McNeilus refuse and recycling collection vehicles, as well as Oshkosh AeroTech jet bridges and airport ground support equipment.
Our customers, they provide critical services within our community. That is important because it means we are operating in non-cyclical and growing markets, really supporting those who are doing some of the toughest jobs in our communities. With these volume dynamics or strong market dynamics, we are making investments in capacity. We will talk a lot about capacity today to unlock the significant volume and growth opportunities that we see in our backlog. We ultimately expect that this is going to drive about 20-30% revenue growth from 2025 to 2028. That is beyond the roughly 15% we expect to deliver this year. Importantly, what you are going to hear today is our plan is absolutely grounded with a meaningful portion of our backlog already extending out into 2028.
With that backdrop, let's do a little deeper dive on our vocational end markets. We operate in three markets: municipal, airport, and infrastructure. We're a number one or a strong number two player in each one of these markets that we serve. If you add these three markets together, we believe the market size is about $19 billion per year. Importantly, we do expect that these markets are going to continue to grow over the next several years. Let's talk a little bit more about municipal. We see elevated backlogs in that portion of our business. That's really emanating from the strong demand that we saw coming out of the pandemic. We have great visibility, particularly for fire truck demands with those backlogs.
Beyond the backlogs, there's a lot more to this story because we see aged fleets in our communities, as well as the fact that our products are providing critical services. They are absolutely critical to performing those operations and some of those most dangerous tasks in our communities. Finally, solid municipal finances support that the markets will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Let's shift to airports. We expect the airport markets are going to continue to grow as well. That is strongly tied to air passenger travel dynamics, where we expect strong air passenger travel dynamics growing at mid to high single digits through the end of the decade. We expect the business to be able to grow at least at that rate and perhaps above. Finally, infrastructure.
While it's a smaller portion of our segment, we do expect that those businesses will continue to be nice contributors to our growth. Now, with a bit of a market backdrop, let's switch to what our competitive advantages we have in our markets. I'm really going to talk about three. First, we are the market leader for new technology. Our patented technology provides safety benefits, productivity, as John and Jay talked a lot about, as well as reliability benefits for our customers. Our customers are asking for innovation, particularly that innovation with tangible benefits, and we're delivering every day on that need. Second, we have a best-in-class dealer network. With the critical nature of the work that our customers are performing within our communities, equipment uptime is absolutely crucial.
With our dealer network, with unmatched service footprint and service parts availabilities, really fulfilling that critical need for our customers and ultimately drives repeat business. Finally, third, our products have a lower total cost of ownership relative to the competition. We have extremely sophisticated customers, and they're willing to pay a higher upfront price for that total cost of ownership benefit. Now that you have an overview of our markets and our competitive advantages, let's break it down and do what our strategic priorities are over the next few years that are going to drive profitable growth. You've seen Mahesh and John present this slide before for transport and access. It provides a nice snapshot of our key priorities under each one of these elements of our strategy. I'm going to begin with innovation. Innovations are lifeblood.
We talked a lot about innovation, but customers want technology, again, technology that's driving benefits, productivity, and so on. How are we innovating in vocational for the neighborhoods and airports of the future? I'm going to start with neighborhoods. First, I'm going to start with electrification. Our Volterra suite of electrified trucks, and you see one of our refuse collection vehicles and fire trucks up on the screen, are operating in our neighborhoods today. We're in production. They're working well. They're great for our customers because they're cleaner, they're quieter, and in many cases, they're more safe and more productive than their internal combustion engine counterparts. Second area of innovation for neighborhoods is moments of autonomy and AI.
Our CartSeeker technology uses AI to identify refuse and recycling collection bins, as well as incorporates automation to really take the collection process down to the push of a button. When combined with the electric refuse arm, that next generation arm that Jay talked about, it dramatically speeds the refuse collection process. That's real value for our customers because it means operators can cover more homes in a single shift. Now let's switch to airports. On the airport front, we've also, I'm going to start with electrified products again. We've developed a full suite of electrified products over the past several years, from ground support equipment to our electric Volterra ARFF trucks. That's significant because our customers across the globe, and there's a lot of global airport expansion right now, they're looking for opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint of airports.
Our equipment is a critical contributor to reducing that carbon footprint. The second area that we're innovating with airports is JetDock autonomy that both Jay and John talked about earlier. It provides autonomy to both the jet bridges and cargo loaders. It speeds the process, reduces training. Training is a big deal, as Jay talked about. It's complicated working the jet bridges. Importantly, it also reduces the risk of damage to aircraft, which is a huge issue in the transition and cargo loading operations and so on that can be very, very costly for our customers. Importantly, as we talk about all the technologies on this page, we're developing them once, and we're launching them across Oshkosh Corporation. That's particularly important because it means we can go faster. We get these new solutions in the hands of our customers sooner. They're more reliable.
At the end of the day, we're investing less as a company to get these solutions out into the marketplace. Now I want to switch to serve because we have a tremendous opportunity to grow in the life cycle space in vocational as well. Not only does increased life cycle drive resilient increases in parts, revenue, and margins, but it also has the opportunity to help drive our share because ultimately, winning in life cycle means that we're delivering on that critical uptime need that our customers have and can drive that share for our original equipment. We see three big life cycle growth areas that I'm going to talk about. First is our Pierce dealer network, which has been a competitive advantage in the fire truck industry for many years with the unmatched sales and parts coverage that we offer.
In fact, our Pierce dealers have increased their service locations by over 30% in the past five years alone. One of the key synergies we saw early on of combining Pierce and McNeilus into the vocational segment a few years ago was to really take the great thing that we had with our Pierce dealer network and expand that to McNeilus refuse and recycling customers. We have done just that. What it is allowing us to better do is much better serve those small and medium-sized refuse haulers. Historically, we have underserved that portion of the market. It is opening up a new market for us for our market-leading products. We are already seeing a tremendous benefit from this move with increased order activity. The second area I want to talk about is iOPS, which is our connected solution for airports. Jay and John both talked about it.
What iOPS does is it really tracks hundreds of data points at the airport gate to facilitate decision-making for operators and enhances productivity. It is ultimately all contributing to that perfect aircraft turn that we talk about in that airport of the future. It does not stop just with iOPS. We see a tremendous opportunity with our large installed base to offer retrofit kits of connected solutions that we are developing. Things like our iOPS system I just talked about, or the Collision Avoidance Mitigation System, and other safety systems that we are developing as a company. CAMS, in this case, was developed by Pratt Miller and is now being spread out throughout the company. It is also our refuse contamination scanning detection software or tools is also an opportunity for retrofit. The third area I want to talk about is our airport services business.
You may recall when we acquired AeroTech, one of the things, and we liked a lot of things about AeroTech, one of the things we liked was that about 30%-40% of their business is recurring life cycle business. In that, a big chunk of that is their services business. Our services business, it's really long-term maintenance contracts from everything from baggage handling systems to ground support equipment to jet bridges. We see the opportunity to grow that business. Right now, it's a pretty domestically oriented business here in North America. We see the opportunity to go more global with it. We also see the opportunity to expand the breadth of our offerings. Again, many opportunities in life cycle space to continue to drive growth. Now I'm going to shift gears to advance. We see two big opportunities for advancement.
The first one is international growth, particularly in the airport market, which I touched on a little bit in the last slide. I also am going to talk about capacity expansion to advance with our existing customers. I know that's a big focus area for, and I know many of you are aware of that. We've talked a lot about it on our earnings calls over the past several quarters. I'm going to start with international. What you see is the chart on the right shows that expectation around the global growth of air passenger travel through 2030, again, seeing that mid to high single-digit growth. You also see that the growth trajectory picked right up where it left off prior to the pandemic. The great news is these strong dynamics that we've seen have fueled the construction of more airports across the globe.
It's also contributed to expansion of existing airports. Demand is strong. The great news is we have a comprehensive lineup of products with broad international appeal, whether we're talking about our airport ground support equipment, our jet bridges, or our electric Volterra ARFF trucks. In fact, those Volterra ARFF trucks are already opening the door internationally in new markets that we've not served in the past. We've had great success there and expect that to continue. Today, only about 15%-20% of our airport business is international. Clearly, we see an opportunity to grow that business with our comprehensive lineup of products and, again, with the great growth opportunities in the market. What it comes down to is really targeting the right growth markets and optimizing our go-to-market strategy. The great news is we do have manufacturing and service footprint in Europe and Asia already today.
It's going to come down to better leveraging our existing footprint, targeting some prudent organic expansion for things like jet bridges, where we do not have a lot of international penetration today, as well as potentially leveraging some smaller bolt-on acquisitions to speed the process. The bottom line is we have the right team and strategy to grow in the global airport market. Now I'm going to shift to our biggest growth driver, and that's advancing through capacity expansion. If you look at that 20%-30% revenue growth we expect to deliver over the next three years, about half of that, or about 50% of that, is coming through capacity. You can see the significant growth in our backlog to $6.3 billion at the end of 2024. That's tied to the favorable market dynamics on the right side of the page.
We have the opportunity to unlock meaningful revenue growth and favorable pricing for fire trucks and refuse collection vehicles by making prudent investments in capacity over the next few years. A significant portion of this capacity can be unlocked through operational efficiencies, within our existing footprint, as well as new manufacturing methods, within our existing footprint. That is really what the big focus areas of our investments are going to be targeted towards. As we make the decisions to grow capacity, we have outstanding visibility with a significant number of our fire trucks already extending in backlog out to 2028. Now let's talk about how we prudently expand production capacity. What I want to do is I'm going to start with the great work that we've delivered at McNeilus over the last few years.
What you're seeing on the video behind me is a video of one of our high-flow lines in Dodge Center, Minnesota. We've successfully launched three of these high-flow lines over the last two years, two in Dodge Center, Minnesota, and one in Murphysboro, Tennessee. These lines leverage automated guided vehicles. You see the body on an automated guided vehicle behind me, connected tools and other industry 4.0 technologies. These high-flow lines, they improve the safety of the work for our team members. It improves the quality of the trucks that we produce with a lot of that torque tracking and other tracking mechanisms we have, as well as improves the efficiency of our manufacturing processes, ultimately while driving a significant increase in the volume of trucks that we're producing. We're already seeing a meaningful increase in our output over the last nine to 12 months.
We expect more increases in throughput with the lines we have in place in coming quarters. We do have the opportunity, with the strong demand that we see, to add another high-flow line in Murphysboro, Tennessee, over the next year. Now I want to contrast the final assembly line at McNeilus that you just saw on the previous slide to the work that we're doing at Pierce. Notice the trucks are really tightly packed together in our Pierce facility. Our final assembly process, you can think of it more as a moving bay build process. This is frankly how McNeilus that you just saw in the previous slides with our high-flow lines used to build refuse collection vehicles. What we're doing is we're leveraging those learnings from McNeilus to implement high-flow lines at Pierce over roughly the next 18-24 months.
It's one of those things that it's a process you have to go through. You don't just flip a light switch and you're suddenly producing a lot more trucks. We're going through a methodical process on this to make sure we're doing it right. This represents a major modernization of the manufacturing process. Our confidence is really high given the great work that we're able to deliver at McNeilus. It'll ultimately result in better safety, again, for our team members, better quality of trucks, and dramatically increased throughput to unlock that revenue and pricing that's in our backlog. It's not all about just our final assembly lines to increase production. We're also breaking down other bottlenecks as well. You see here automated paint on the screen, as well as we're adding new high-tech fabrication equipment.
The bottom line is we have the opportunity to continue to add these capabilities over the next few years to improve these bottleneck areas. When you look at fabrication, we're adding new modern multifunction fabrication equipment where one machine is replacing two to three pieces of legacy equipment, and it frees up valuable production space. It does not stop just on the shop floor when we look at capacity. We're also working on design for manufacturing projects within our engineering team. That is ultimately to contribute to reduced manufacturing labor hours, improving the quality of the trucks that we're producing, again, because a lot of that can be built in upfront in the design, but also improving the serviceability of our trucks.
Some of the key focus areas that we're working on right now are the pumphouse plumbing operation for fire trucks, which is one of the most complex areas of a custom fire apparatus, as well as we're working on simplifying our electrical systems. Overall, we're really pleased with our progress to date on our capacity projects and look forward to completing these critical projects over the next couple of years. How do these market dynamics and strategic focus areas translate to our financial results over the next three years? As you can see, we see tremendous growth in sales and operating margins over the next few years. We expect to grow revenues by over 20%-30% from 2025 to 2028. That's on the heels of a 15% increase this year, so tremendous growth.
We also expect to grow our operating margins from about 15% this year in 2025 to 16%-18% by 2028. This is beyond about a 160 basis point improvement we expect to deliver this year. Keep in mind, this is a grounded plan given the great visibility we have to our non-cyclical markets and our strong backlog. In summary, we're excited about the progress in the vocational segment over the past several years and the strong outlook for growth through 2028. We have strong market dynamics for our market-leading products and services. We're investing in capacity to unlock our full growth potential. We're going to continue to invest in technologies that drive safety, productivity, and total cost of ownership benefits for our customers.
Importantly, and I'm going to repeat it one more time, our plan is grounded with our outstanding visibility, and we look forward to delivering on the plan. With that, I'm going to now turn it over to my good friend and Oshkosh CFO, Matt Field. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike. All right. Every CFO loves an investor day. It takes a lot of work. First of all, I just want to thank the team that helped pull this together. It is also the chance for the CFO to be the closer. People actually look forward to when he comes on stage. Thank you for your forbearance. We have published slides that include the financial slides that I'm sharing today. Those are up on our investor relations website as well as the micro site. Please do pull them down if you want to follow along as I present. My name is Matt Field. I'm the CFO at Oshkosh. I've been here about seven months. Prior to my time here at Oshkosh, I was the CFO of an aerospace startup in California.
I spent a couple of decades at Ford in a variety of domestic and international roles. I'm excited to be here and represent the employees and their finance and strategy, but also the employees of the company and the customers we serve. Our employees and customers depend on Oshkosh to do their jobs and then get home safely to their families each and every day. That is what Oshkosh is all about. I know we are here to talk about the financials, but it is the purpose and culture that set Oshkosh apart and are equally important. That is really why I'm here as well. I'm here to be closer to family, but also I saw the growth opportunities that we are sharing today. I am really happy to be there, really happy to dig into the numbers with you.
For me, you're going to hear about three themes throughout my presentation. First, we have an outstanding portfolio of leading businesses with advanced solutions and technologies that are going to drive margin in each and every division. Second, we expect to deliver strong financial performance and EPS growth through improved margin expansion, sales growth, and cash generation. Third, we will maintain a disciplined capital allocation strategy that supports our growth through 2028 and drives value for shareholders. We have a solid financial foundation, and we stand at the cusp of change, a change to the revenue growth trajectory, a change to our margin profile, and a change to our products, which embrace more technology that can be connected, autonomous, and improve the lives of those who do the toughest work. Let's look back at our performance in 2022 and the last time we got together.
John touched on this. In May 2022, we set out ambitious targets for 2025. We achieved many of those targets a year ahead of schedule. We grew revenue $2.4 billion. We doubled operating margin, and we nearly tripled EPS, again, a year ahead of schedule. While RoEC fell short of targets, the investments we made into our business support this next phase of growth. You are going to see some of those investments. I will dig into them in a few slides. You heard from the team about our strategies on the inner wheel, the innovate, serve, and advance initiatives in each of our segments. I am going to focus on the outer wheel, the financial disciplines that support that strategy. First, diversified growth. Through strong backlogs, we have clarity on near-term revenue growth. With the strategic initiatives, we can deliver balanced, resilient returns. Second, healthy margins.
We're driving to expand margins in each and every business, as you heard, through improving our through-cycle profitability with pricing, operational excellence, cost discipline, and innovative products. Lastly, disciplined capital allocation. We will maintain a healthy balance sheet, which allows us to allocate capital to drive long-term growth while also increasing shareholder returns in a thoughtful way. Our long-term annual objectives are rooted in growing faster than market. This is supported by our visibility into robust backlogs and the long-term trends that John mentioned. The initiatives discussed across the company in each of the segments, both organic but also the inorganic ones, we expect to add to that growth rate by 2-4 percentage points. From a profitability perspective, we're at the inflection point to grow our operating margin 50-100 basis points per year based off the concrete steps you've heard us outline today.
These initiatives and the investments in vocational and delivery are expected to generate strong cash flow and deliver an attractive return on capital over the near term. What are the actual targets? How do they roll up for 2028? This is the slide most of you asked about during the break. It is here. Welcome. We expect EPS to nearly double after nearly tripling since 2022. With sales of $13 billion-$14 billion at a company level, that represents a sales annual growth rate of 7%-10%. That revenue is generated across the years with backlogs that already extend into 2028. Based off the delivery of those units and existing orders in two-thirds of our segments, the check is literally in the mail when we build them.
As we add capacity and ship units, we already have the orders to support them in two of our three segments through many of these years. Access growth is modest relative to 2024 after a down year this year. Adjusted operating income of 12%-14% represents an increase of 200-400 basis points. This reflects an improved mix of business, a robust vocational segment, reasonable returns in transport, and improved margins and margin resiliency in access. These are all based off clearly defined and achievable plans, with cash conversion expected to be about 90% or above through the cycle. I should note these comparisons for 2025 reflect our initial January 30th guidance, which was pre-tariff. We feel this provides a more comprehensive and clear baseline for variance understanding. How does the revenue stack up?
Revenue growth through 2028, over 50% of that is supported with existing contracts and backlogs, including NGDV, capacity actions, and pricing, including the economic price adjustments that John referenced earlier. Market growth and share gains reflect the action plans discussed today, notably in international growth and in the aftermarket segments. You can see on the right that the growth is sizable but also balanced across each segment, with all contributing to growing our revenue across the period. Turning to adjusted operating income, this reflects strong improvements from scale benefits, cost reductions, favorable price-cost dynamics offset by further investment in new product development. On the right, you can see how that breaks out by segment, which you actually saw earlier, but still.
It has a sizable contribution from transport as it returns again to past margins that we've seen, the impact of vocational capacity, and then resilience in the access segment. Cash flow, you see a return to strong cash conversion after a relatively low performance over the last couple of years. Our performance in the last couple of years reflects working capital, investments in new products, as well as prepayments on fire trucks, which have turned around, which have a kind of a long cycle. We received significant prepayments in the past, and now we're building those trucks. We had negative customer advances in the recent past. The 90+% cash conversion reflects a robust performance outlook and return to strong cash flow.
In fact, this conversion could be over 100% if those customer advances actually returned to what we saw in the past when our backlog in Pierce was closer to 18-20 months. We do think that's possible at the end of the period. Overall, this reflects a very diversified portfolio, a revenue and margin growth across the business that creates a business that's strong and better together with technology leadership and industry-leading brands, with an operating margin of 12%-14%, a robust non-cyclical vocational segment with returns in the upper teens, a more resilient access segment with returns in the mid-teens, and a defense segment at about 10%, which is what we've seen with past performance. More importantly, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this slide, this is a very different portfolio of businesses from when we were here last time.
It's a company transformation. On the left, you can see the portfolio of revenue by segment. On the right, adjusted operating income with the data in 2002 and our projections for 2022, sorry, and our projections for 2028. On the revenue side, you can see vocational is now expected to be 36% as we execute against our backlog and have our capacity actions. You see a much more dramatic shift in our operating income on the right. There you see a balanced operating income basis for the company with vocational and access at 42% and transport at 16%. What's notable on this slide is that compared to 2022, access was 60% of our adjusted operating income. Much more balanced adjusted operating income into the future. Now I want to turn to our strategy for capital allocation.
This starts with a strong investment-grade balance sheet, followed by organic growth, which is our highest return. The capacity, the innovation we've discussed are drivers for our future growth. Next, returning money to shareholders, especially if that's our next best return of our investments from our historically low multiples that we've seen in the market recently. That is a priority for us. Lastly is M&A. Through an always-on pipeline, which we'll discuss, is the other element of our capital allocation. Let's talk about our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is in excellent shape. Debt's manageable, maturities are well staggered, and we have ample liquidity for investment, both organic and inorganic, but also to manage any uncertainties in the market. Our capital allocation strategy starts from the strong balance sheet, and we pursue a disciplined capital allocation over time.
What you can see here is we're preserving about 15% to reflect the paydown of the debt, which is the revolver and the term loan. We could choose to refinance that, but we felt it was prudent to plan for that in our capital allocation over the next three years. Forty-five to 55% is investing in growing our business and returning 30%-40% for shareholder distributions. This may vary any one year. For instance, this year we're investing significantly in organic growth through some of the capacity actions. In 2023, we acquired AeroTech, and you saw it shift more towards M&A. We are focused on growing this business while supporting shareholders and growing dividends with regular share repurchases. Let's double-click on our recent spending on organics and shareholder actions.
Our investment in organic growth, this shows the last six years of investment in organic growth. You can see a considerable step up since 2022 as we invested in new products. Over the past six years, we've invested $2.7 billion in facilities, equipment, and new product development. Again, much of it in the last three years, which is in part why you saw that lower cash conversion. This investment profile also results in large impact products like the NGDV, the Volterra line at Pierce and McNeilus, and some of the products Mahesh mentioned, like the micro scissor and a new 60-foot articulated boom, as well as capacity investments across the segments. We've also had consistent dedication to return cash to shareholders.
This slide shows the last 11 years of share buybacks on the left, where we've bought back $1.6 billion of shares and reduced our share count by 23%. We want to remind you we still have board approval for an additional 10 million shares outstanding for repurchase purposes. We've also consistently increased our dividends for the last 11 years, nearly tripling them with over $800 million distributed to shareholders. We will continue to be aggressive on both fronts, especially if we see returns to shareholders at multiples like today are the best investment without starving our growth opportunities. Turning to M&A, inorganic investment has been a critical element of our growth strategy. We have a focused and disciplined, always-on pipeline where we follow key criteria rigorously.
We look for opportunities in markets where we have the right to win and follow our rigorous and defined criteria, both strategic and financial. We've deployed this over the last couple of years very successfully to drive growth. You can see at the bottom a couple of those examples where we're going to dig a little deeper. On this slide, it shows our track record of acquisitions since 2021, starting with Pratt Miller. We also show how we hold ourselves accountable against the metrics we use to make our decisions. You'll see some specifics, areas where we're on track or in process with the check mark and areas where we're underway with more work to do with the circle. Three detailed examples. Hinowa, this was and is still an Italian specialty equipment maker where we had partnered over many years.
As that relationship evolved and the market developed, we felt it was right to acquire Hinowa. This broadened the business for access, but also provided an opportunity for us to improve their parts business. We continue to integrate them with JLG Online Express. More importantly, though, is the example Mahesh talked about earlier. It is the financial improvements this opportunity provided for us to localize production quickly for booms that had been built previously in China in response to European duties. Secondly, AeroTech. We completed this acquisition in August of 2023. This was the second largest acquisition in the history of Oshkosh. This was a category expansion. You heard Mike talk about it quite considerably into the airport products. This has been a fantastic acquisition for us with strong results, and we continue to identify and we continue to capture synergies over an extended period of time.
AUSA is our latest acquisition, which we acquired late in 2024. A Spanish specialty equipment manufacturer allowed us to expand into the agriculture section. There has been a good acquisition. We've focused on enhancing the business and capturing margins. Now, if you look at our history and figures and projections, we're on a journey of continuous improvement. We're excited about the future and the growth ahead. I just want to look back at some of the metrics, however, and focus on our performance since 2022 and provide relative perspective. This slide shows our performance relative to a subset of peers. You can see our sales grew 900 basis points higher than our selected peer group. Adjusted operating income grew higher as well, with average adjusted operating income in line with the peer group. Let me note, we're committed to do better here.
You've heard us talk about that a lot. Looking at returns, we had better returns as measured by ROIC. On the far right, you can see our multiple. You can see our valuation has lagged relative to those performance metrics. I say this not to complain, although it's notable on the slide, but it's really to share our belief on why not only are we a compelling investment as a company, but we're a compelling investment for our market valuation. Our belief is that by consistently executing on the plans you heard us share today and our financial objectives, that will result in greater recognition in the market. In summary, I want to reiterate the key elements of our financial strategy that's driving EPS to nearly double to $18-$22 per share.
We have a strong portfolio of businesses, all contributing meaningfully to our growth through existing backlogs and strong brands in strong industries. We are expanding margins through pricing, new contracts with EPA price protections, and cost actions. We have a disciplined capital allocation with a solid balance of organic investment, shareholder reinvestments, and M&A to drive strong shareholder returns over the near term and the long term. With that, I want to hand it over to John for closing comments. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Matt. What you have seen and heard today makes one thing clear. We have momentum at Oshkosh. Strong backlogs, large multi-year programs. We are driving sustained top-line growth near that 10% that Matt just laid out on a compound annual growth rate, 200 to 400 basis points of margin expansion. We are backed by a powerful portfolio of leading brands, sharp focus on innovation, and, as Matt just explained, a disciplined capital allocation strategy. We remain committed to everyday heroes because the work they do is essential, and we will be helping them do it in a way that is even more safe, more intuitive, and more productive. You have heard from the team. We are sharing market-leading innovations and best practices across our entire enterprise, demonstrating that we as a company are truly better together. I want to thank you again for your attention today.
Pat, I'm going to turn it over to you to be the moderator for our Q&A session.
Thanks, John.
Thanks, John. While we gather our chairs up here so we can have the whole team of five, I'll remind the folks that are listening online on the webcast, within the Open-Xchange platform, you have the opportunity to ask questions. I have a couple queued up here right now. When we go here in the room, we're going to go for about 30 minutes here. We'll run a couple of minutes behind. We'll do our best to answer all of them. We will keep it to one question. We won't have the follow-up like our earnings call. If you have a question and you want to ask another one, kind of we'll go around the room, all right? That said, mic runners, I think there's a bunch of you back there. Yep, Jamie. We'll go with Jamie Cook. I'll still ask everybody.
I won't call all your names. I'll ask you to state your name and your question. Thanks.
[audio distortion]
John, just within changing the name from defense to transport, just wondering if you could give us an update on the opportunity for last-mile delivery opportunities there outside of wins outside of the Postal Service Award. Where are we? Could we get something by 2028? And just sort of what's embedded in the revenue target, the $3 billion-plus revenue target for 2028? Thank you.
[audio distortion] is what we've won, meaning it's in delivery. It's United States Postal Service. We are a very focused company. We believe that we should focus on the job at hand as priority one. We have a lot of opportunities. We talked about that 6% compounded annual growth rate of the total market for last-mile delivery. It's a big growing market because of the way we as consumers are all behaving today. We intend to continue to participate in it. We are going to be very prudent about how we take on the next opportunity. We've got the biggest opportunity that there is right now with the United States Postal Service. There will be more opportunities to come, but they are not in our numbers to 2028.
All right, if we can come up front here, Kim, the front table.
I'm struck. One of the reasons we all believe in lean thinking and continuous improvement is that it generates the free cash flow that you can reinvest for growth and progress and marketing and feel in the street and everything else. Why should we have confidence that you can go from a 50% free cash flow conversion to 90% in such a short period of time? I understand the business about prepayments, but is there something else that's going to be materially different over the next couple of years?
Yeah, there's two fundamental elements. One, you could see it on the side of the investment. Our investments in NGDV specifically, the way we account for those, those go through working capital. It creates negative working capital in that cycle. With that investment behind us, that won't happen again. That will generate greater free cash flow as we have operating returns. That's one element. The other element is we've grown our inventories over the last couple of years as we've grown. We'll work to optimize those as we further expand. Really through those, we see a higher degree of cash conversion on a go-forward basis than we had previously.
Let's go, Kim, to the middle table. Steve Fisher here. I guess I'm helping out in the names, huh?
Thanks. Wanted to just ask you what you have embedded in your forecast for non-product revenues. I know you talked about all the connected assets that you have, and you're getting to the point where you're ready to be commercializing some of these things through partnerships. You put up the $19 billion kind of revenue number. How much is in there for sort of non-products? It's more services, subscriptions. How important is that to the margin opportunity?
From a margin perspective, it's largely immaterial, I would say. It's a small portion of our revenues today. It will grow. The better benefit of those things is the connectivity and stickiness it gets in terms of our products. It makes our products more compelling to have more of them, like on the job site, as Mahesh talked about, or through ordering parts directly because it's just easier to do, or whether that's providing refuse trucks more broadly or with more repeat orders.
Let's stay at that same table, Kim. Kim, I think either you or Jennifer maybe stay close because we'll have some here early on.
Hi, thank you. Thanks for taking my question. Andrew Garcia with Morgan Stanley. Just wanted to touch a little bit more on margins. As you mentioned, I think the 13%-14% target. Can you talk about that in terms of cadence over the years? There are obviously some investments that you're making in the business, whether it's capacity or technology. Just how we should think about the improvement. I think you laid out 50-100 basis points per year, but should we expect it kind of steadily flowing each year? Or is there something between market growth, normalization, as well as investments that maybe suggests it's more kind of 2027, 2028?
Sure. And just to correct the number, so it's $13 billion-$14 billion in revenue and 12%-14% margin. So that's our 2028 target. Obviously, many of the initiatives you've heard us talk about are gradual and over time. So the capacity actions in vocational, that will be more gradual and over time. Like NGDV in the transport segment, that's ramping up this year, so we expect that to be at full rate production. That will really be almost a step function change for 2026. It really depends on the elements. We're not going to provide 2026 guidance yet, but I would just think about those kind of levers as you think about calendarization.
Yeah, just to clarify it a little bit, access is performing at a very high level. So the growth there comes mostly from transport and from vocational. And that's where you're going to see the step change happen in those operating margins.
Hi, Chad Dillard from Bernstein. I just want to go back to the access business. It sounds like you're guiding to a little bit over a billion-dollar increase to 2028. I was hoping you could break it out between how much is driven by market versus idiosyncratic. Within that, can you talk a little bit more about how you're thinking about the growth in ag and then on the international side?
Do you want to take kind of the operational stuff, and then I'll touch on some of the financial elements?
Yep. Why don't you go ahead?
All right. Fundamentally, on the revenue side, it's about two-thirds market. Again, this is a down market year is how we see it. Then one-third on kind of share and all the other international elements of that is how to think about generally the growth over this period in access. I'll let Mahesh talk about some of the operational stuff that support that.
Yeah. As he mentioned, there is some market recovery, and one-third is non-market growth, which is in the three initiatives we spoke about: life cycle, ag, and the specialty brands. I would put them roughly equal. One-third, one-third, one-third is approximate mix, I would say, for the growth in those areas.
Center table here.
Hi, Mike Schlitzky of DA Davidson. Want to follow up on your ag comments just now, just a moment ago. Maybe just share a little bit of detail for us about how you plan to get into the ag market from a channel perspective. Sometimes farmers are used to going to certain kinds of dealers to find their equipment, and there's not always a nearby URI or Herc Rentals location in their area. Just some thoughts about how that might play out, first of all. Secondly, you mentioned international, trying to build some of those new telehandlers in international markets. Do you feel like the opportunity actually is larger internationally, especially in Europe with a lot more dairy and livestock than it is maybe in the U.S.?
Yeah. On the ag market, we've already started building out a dealer network. With the farming community, you have to sell the product. You have to go through dealers because they require good service. We are signing up new dealers every month. Because the product is complementary, we can generally partner with the dealer network of ag partners, which is why I mentioned we work in the barn, whereas John Deere or the other brands work on the farm. Our network, we can leverage some of the network that is available. For us, it's about identifying the right partners because when you sign a dealer network, you stay with them for a long period of time. Bringing them up to speed with training and development to make sure they can take care of the farmer the way we want it.
We have a growth roadmap, and we are executing on it. As far as international growth is concerned, globally, high-pivot telehandlers are more popular. In North America, high-pivot telehandlers are more popular. We now have low-pivot telehandlers. Europe is a big market. We were there in Europe some years back, but we did not have the right cost structure. We did not have the right infrastructure. We have done an acquisition with AUSA, and we focus a lot on improving our cost structure. That gives us a lot more confidence that we will be able to be competitive as we go back into those markets. We have the product and, again, learning a lot from our AUSA acquisition, which already has telehandlers today. That has been helpful.
Hi, this is Tami Zakaria from JP Morgan. I saw a price bar in the Bridge chart for the consolidated sales target in one of the slides. Could you give a little more color on which segments have what level of pricing baked in? I'm just curious whether maybe vocational may have more pricing opportunity than, let's say, access. Any color would be helpful.
Sure. That price bar, I think of it as primarily two segments. It is the vocational segment as the pricing in the backlog comes to fruition. It is the transport segment, primarily around the tactical wheeled vehicles that John mentioned, as the EPA price adjustments kick in as we build under those new contracts. I think of it as a little more than two-thirds vocational, a little one-third defense transport.
Transport.
We're going to have a quarter drive pretty soon.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Tim Thein from Raymond James. Maybe one for Mike, just on the new capacity contributing such a big percentage of the revenue growth, just how you're thinking about the flow through on that from a profitability perspective and to the extent you've baked any sort of cushion to the extent sometimes you have normal issues just as you start up new capacity. How conservative or not you are in terms of baking in the implied incremental related to that capacity ramp. Thank you.
Yeah, Tim, I think as we typically do, we took a prudent approach. We just got finished delivering a pretty significant volume increase. You saw the video at McNeilus. I think we're doing a lot of the same things. It gives us a confidence level around modeling that. I do think that with the initiatives we have in place, we are between both McNeilus and on the fire side, we're adding, sort of, if from a unit-level perspective, about mid to high 20s % increase in capacity over the next three years. That is going to come on. There'll be some lumpiness to it, but in general, I would expect it to be fairly linear over the next couple of years.
Let me go to an online one here. I'm just kind of building on vocational, Mike. They ask about fire apparatus.
Current revenue run rate's about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion. They're asking what's embedded in 2028. They're also asking if of that growth embedded, how would you sort of compare price versus volume?
Yeah, I think that we're not going to get into breaking down each one of the individual businesses right now because we're dealing with a range still at this point. Just in general, in my prepared remarks, I said about 50% of our revenue growth baked in is capacity related. Then about a third is price. The balance is sort of market conditions and mix. That gives you an idea of what we expect over the next few years. Was there a second part to that? Did I get both of them?
Yeah, you got it. Okay. Front table here, Kim. Our first follow-up, all right?
I can't see the back of the room, so please, ransom research. How important is what I'm going to call lean thinking to Oshkosh in a formal discipline, programmatic way? And are you using Hoshin Kanri anywhere?
We use lean principles all over the business. We use 80/20 simplification principles in terms of refining our focus as well, combined with lean thinking principles. I will say, as I sit up here, Matt talked about the opportunity with cash flow with regard to our inventory. When we went through the supply chain constraint period of time, that was a very difficult period to go through when you're operating lean principles and you have disruptions that are completely unexpected in your normal supply chain that's been established for years, quite frankly. We are still working our way back to operating in the same lean way that we've historically always operated at post that supply chain constraint period. Our operating case, we've always prided ourselves on having great manufacturing capability, having flexibility with the nature of where we produce what to meet the needs of our customers.
I think that that's the thing I'll call out the most is that we still have, this is a big opportunity in front of us that we know how to go and get to get our operations back to the lean nature where they were prior to supply chain disruption entering the marketplace over the 2021 to and even into 2023 period.
[audio distortion]
You're talking about the kind of a Danaher style strategy deployment methodology?
[audio distortion]
I'm not sure specifically what you're referring to, but we primarily use 80/20 philosophy to focus where our biggest opportunities are.
Maybe just two follow-ups. Again, Andrew Garcia with Morgan Stanley. One on capital allocation. I think M&A is 10-20% of the capital allocation. Can you talk about maybe just expand areas of interest, whether it's technology, whether it's specific segments where you're really looking to deploy that? If you could just follow up on that, just 2025, lots has changed, even though you just spoke shortly ago after a quarter. Policy implications, any changes to how you're thinking about 2025 results and outlook?
We're not updating our 2025 versus our last earnings call. It is consistent with the last earnings call. Your question was primarily about M&A activity, correct?
Yeah, target.
If you look at Matt laid out kind of a timeline of different M&A work that we've done over the past few years, we're a very we have an always-on mentality, which means that we're always paying attention to where we might have opportunity. We are very prudent as well. We don't make emotional decisions. We make careful, well-thought-out decisions when we believe the timing is right. We like to acquire where we believe there are significant synergies in applying our technological capability or capabilities in total to an end market that has, as I said, has a substandard solution. We saw that in some of the areas where I talked about AeroTech and the amount of technological fit that there is between us and the AeroTech business, it's pretty significant. We'll continue to get synergistic benefits from that acquisition for many years in the future.
Of the things we talked about today, we're just scratching the surface about what's really possible as we continue to unfold the synergies there. Mostly it's about near adjacencies. We can apply our technological capability and get big impacts on synergies over long periods of time. That's what we look at.
We'll do an online one here. Mahesh on ClearSky, can you provide some more detail on ClearSky Smart Fleet's current adoption rates and future potential?
Yeah. Today we have about 120,000 assets on ClearSky. Generally, we're launching it by country or by region. Generally, within a couple of years of launching, we've seen an adoption somewhere between 60-70%. Resubscription rates, so year-on-year resubscribing, are about 95%. Really high adoption when we look at the benefit that we provide to customers.
Thank you. Thank you. Mike Feniger, Bank of America.
John, just to ask about the Postal Service contract. There were some headlines coming into the year. Where are we on the Postal Service contract in terms of the mix of what you guys are expecting, if there's any change at all? In terms of getting to that full run rate by the fourth quarter, what's your confidence level of hitting that? What are the obstacles that you have to kind of keep an eye on to kind of get there? Just lastly, there's been some headlines around steel, aluminum. I know some of your segments, it feels like there's a lot of protection there. Could you guys just remind us, steel, aluminum, how big of that is in terms of the COGS? How do you guys kind of price that? How should we be thinking about that going forward?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I'll talk about the NGDV and let Matt comment on steel and aluminum tariffs. NGDV, we're in production today. Every week that goes by, we produce more vehicles than the week before. It's a specific, highly engineered vehicle. We do this all the time. It's what we do in our business. Launching production of a brand new product is always hard. If it were easy, anybody would do it. It's not easy. It's hard. We're going through the grind. We're confident we're going to be where we need to be because our customer needs us to be at that full rate production in the fourth quarter. We talk to the U.S. Postal Service all the time about where we are and what our progress is. We're confident we'll be there. We've done it many times before with other products.
When you hear the terms of the mix for the Postal Service, we've always maintained for the U.S. Postal Service, "Look, we did something very revolutionary for you. We designed one vehicle that can take two completely different propulsion systems. Nobody else did that. Nobody else offered them that type of versatility." We have always maintained, "We'll supply you with whatever mix you want." We maintain that today. Right now, with the order releases we've received, the mix is still consistent. It's about 70% battery electric, 30% internal combustion. We're building to the mix that they've given us to this point in time. Is that mix going to change in the future with the following releases? Possibly. I don't know. I'll also say, "Don't believe everything you read in the press sometimes.
Just let me touch on the steel and aluminum. Steel and aluminum, as we've talked about on prior calls, we've got all our steel prices, steel buys locked in this year, aluminum this year, and in some cases in the next year. That's across all the segments. There are some esoteric steels we use that are imported. We're still trying to digest some of the latest announcements that came out last Friday. Most of that's consistent with what we talked about on the, I think, fourth quarter calls when we spoke about that mostly.
Gentlemen got two consecutive here, so first and second.
Hi, Chad Dillard from Bernstein again. Just going back to the transport margin guidance, 4% for this year going to 10% by 2028. I was hoping you could help us think through the glide path on that and just how to think about the impact on the renegotiations on the contract, the NGDV ramp, and then what are you embedding in terms of mix of ICE versus EV?
Yeah. On the path to 2028, most of it is at the mix that we have right now on the current releases. That's 70/30 because of the current, when I say releases, I'm talking about we've got a contract that goes to 165,000 units, and they give us order releases against that contract. The releases we've gotten so far go through most of the period to 2028. That's why I say most of it's 70/30 mix. If you look at the glide path from 4% to 10%, it's two fundamental things. We'll be at full production on NGDV next year. That's a big step change for margin. Then you've got the new contracts with the bigger programs that we have with the DoD.
Those new contracts go into place from the end of 2025 through kind of the end of 2026 is when we start to ship against those new contracts. Those also have a material impact on that step change in margin. Those are the two biggest movers.
Hi, David Raso from Evercore ISI. Just a quick question. Obviously, your confidence is strong in 2028 given how much you feel is already in backlog. I'm just curious, if you're that confident in the targets, why would we not be buying back a lot more shares? I mean, you're trading at five times your target in 2028. You're doing almost $1 billion in free cash flow by the end of the cycle, which right there would cover the $10 million authorizations. We're just curious how you'd answer that question.
Yeah, I'll answer. Maybe Matt wants to answer it too. We talked about the M&A question, right? Right now, and we have been always on process, we'll continue to maintain that. When our multiple is where it is, I was going to just be frank with you. When our multiple is where it is, share buybacks are a lot more attractive than going out and doing other things with the cash flows of the company. I guess I'm agreeing with your question. We have a very attractive multiple to do share buybacks, and we recognize that. That's what I'll say.
Yeah. I'll just build off some of the data that's in the slides. In the slides, it shows we've bought back shares to $63 million. Obviously, that had a projection of share price in it. If we find that the projection of share price we had built into the model is incorrect and that share price remains at lower multiples, then what you would see is mathematically we would have bought back more shares. We do remain committed to aggressive share repurchase if we see that as the best use of capital.
[audio distortion] We were at a meeting, you guided for 25, it was 7.5 times. The stock's only at 10% since then. We're looking at pro earnings a lot again. Now the stock's at five times the target. I guess what is the impetus to get over the hump to say the market's not reflecting the confidence we have, and there is no better alternative to buying the stock? I'm just curious how far has the board really addressed that? It's proving that the stock's not yet rewarding your numbers or your confidence with anchors.
There is a couple of things to look at in that relative to the guidance we have provided. One is we do see better cash conversion going forward. That obviously provides adequate cash to do things like aggressive share repurchases. That is kind of the couple of pieces we think through as we allocate capital.
Let me do an online one, and we'll gather maybe what might be the last one or two here in the room. Asking about the Vitality Index. Back in 2022, we guided for about 600 basis points in Vitality Index revenues. We're now calling for an additional 14% up to 20%. What are the main drivers of that increase?
Do you want to answer, John?
Yeah, I can take this question. Let Matt jump in as well. It's all about the new products. I mean, I shared with you, we talked about many, many new products and technologies coming across all our product portfolio, whether it's an NGDV vehicle, which is actually increasing and going to full volume production end of the year. We're in the middle of launching Pierce Volterra, and we're in the middle of launching eRCV vehicles, many new products coming in from Access business.
Ag telehandlers.
Yeah, of course.
Micros or loops.
I can go on and on. I think it's a five-year Vitality Index that we measure. All the numbers are very much grounded on what we know today and what we are going to be launching and their volume projections.
Yeah. No, you hit exactly right. The only thing to note is look at the slide, look at where we've invested and how we've stepped up our investment in the last three years. Really, those products are coming to market. Jay's slide has all the new products that are coming in kind of over time. You have some big high-value products like the Volterras in vocational, but also the products in NGDV.
Many new things in the AeroTech business too.
Yeah. It's really that investment coming forth over there.
Very ripe and rich with new products.
That's a good segue, actually. Let's do this online, and then maybe we'll finish up over here. So AeroTech, right? How do you grow the Jetway Bridge business internationally? What are the challenges, and what are you doing to address them, Mike?
Yeah. I think right now, our product is fit for the international market because if you do look internationally, a lot more of the boarding bridges tend to have glass sides on them. We have that product line. In fact, more and more bridges in the United States are that designed. We have the product. We do not have a manufacturing footprint. From time to time, we have done some international work there with some shorter-term contract manufacturing relationships. We see the opportunity over the next few years with our footprint and, again, some prudent organic expansion. Really, it comes down to it is not efficient shipping that much air by sea. We do envision doing some more manufacturing globally. Again, we have some footprint that we can leverage for that.
We'll take our last question here.
Okay. Just one for Mahesh. Just in terms of your forecast from a revenue perspective, we're thinking about replacement demand and just what you're hearing from your customers. We're obviously 2018, 2019 were pretty big volume years. Just how much, I guess, comfort or what is baked into your forecast with the assumed support from replacement demand?
We haven't guided for 2026 as yet because we start talking to customers in Q4, and we'll bring the forecast at that time. For 2028, what I would say is we are assuming the market is not at a trough. It's not at a peak. It's somewhere between mid-cycle to peak. So that's how we forecasted our numbers.
Okay. So that wraps up the Q&A, everyone. We really appreciate you coming out and spending some time with us. Obviously, you can follow up with Victoria and myself after the meeting, I guess, back in our offices and things. We do have the lunches out there, so please grab one, take it with you. There are a couple of standing tables you can stand and eat. And we have a bag with some Oshkosh items in it that I think you'll find enjoyable. So thanks very much for attending, both online and in person. Have a good one and safe travels.