Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
My name is Kellen Ferris. I'm VP of Investor Relations at PHINIA. I'm excited to be your host this morning for this morning's event. Thank you for joining us here in New York and all of us here who are joining virtually around the world. Hosting an Investor Day, two days after an historic nor'easter has been a challenge, but we were determined to be here with you today. It's great to see a number of familiar faces in the room, along with some new ones. We appreciate you taking the time to spend the morning with us, especially those of you we've seen quite a bit over the last few months on the conference circuit.
We have a lot we're looking forward to sharing with you all this morning, including how we're thinking about the business, where we see opportunity across our end markets, and how we're positioning the company for long-term value creation. Before we get into it, quickly, I'll quickly take a bit of required housekeeping on the legal side. Today's presentations and material will include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current expectations and assumptions, subject to risks and uncertainties, and factors relating to our business and operations. Factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from the expectations laid out today are more fully described in our 2025 10-K and other SEC filings. Please refer to our cautionary note on forward-looking statements included in today's materials for additional detail.
You'll also hear references to certain non-GAAP financial measures this morning. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of today's presentation materials, which will be available following this event on our investor relations website. You can see in the agenda on the screen, we'll begin with an overview of our strategic vision from Brady, followed by Todd Anderson, who will walk through our product leadership and technology innovation roadmap. From there, Neil Fryer will take you through a market overview of our independent aftermarket business before Pedro Abreu discusses our OE strategies by end market. We'll take a short break, where you'll have the opportunity to visit our booth displays and engage directly with PHINIA leadership, the PHINIA leadership team. Following the break, Chris Gropp will walk through our financial framework and capital discipline priorities.
Brady will return for some closing remarks and will conclude the formal presentation with a Q&A session with members of our leadership team. We expect to wrap up the formal program around 11:45 A.M., followed by a boxed lunch and additional time to connect with the team. If you look at the slide on the screen, we've also included a glossary slide that defines a number of the acronyms used throughout today's presentation. That can be accessed using the QR code, and the slide will also be available in our full presentation deck on our investor relations website. With that, I'll turn it over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Brady Ericson.
Whew! Thank you, Kellen. Welcome. We appreciate your time today and look forward to sharing the progress we've made since the spin, more importantly, where we're headed. Just to level set us, let's take a quick snapshot of PHINIA today. PHINIA is a diversified industrial company with about $3.5 billion in 2025 sales, attractive margins, and solid adjusted free cash flow. Our team of 12,000 employees around the world keeps us close to our customers and the markets that we serve. We have a broad product portfolio. Our brands are strong, helping us open doors to new growth opportunities and to attract top talent. We've been a steady and reliable performer. Let's start our journey by going back to 2023.
Needless to say, the expectations for PHINIA and the broader market environment are very different from when we held our first Investor Day in 2023. We also have a lot more people interested in our story, with so many more people in the room and registered online than we had just a few years ago. Again, thank you for joining us, making it through all the weather. Really appreciate it. Much of what we have outlined has been achieved. A few broad themes stand out. Combustion technology is here to stay. It will play a key role on the path toward carbon neutrality for the broader transportation and industrial markets. Advancements in efficiency, performance, integration with hybrid technologies, and in alternative fuels will keep combustion technology as a core technology in transportation for the rest of the century.
The practicality and utility of a liquefied or gaseous fuel remain strong, from the ease of transporting to storage, being able to utilize an established infrastructure and its energy density. We do expect to help our customers on the journey to carbon neutrality by supporting the transition from carbon-based fossil fuels to lower carbon and zero carbon fuels of tomorrow. Such fuels such as ethanol, methanol, natural gas, synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuel, and hydrogen. We are winning new business and gaining share across all regions, products, and end markets. From expanding our coverage in the independent aftermarket to 500 bar fuel systems for hybrids, long-life, heavy-duty starters and alternators, to ignition systems for natural gas power generation. Our commitment, investment, and focus on combustion products has been key to our customers awarding us new business with both OEM and aftermarket customers.
We've also proven our ability to expand successfully into new end markets, including aerospace and defense, by leveraging our existing capabilities, human capital, and installed manufacturing capacity. To date, we've been awarded three programs, launched two, and received our EN 9100 Aerospace Quality Certification. We're doing this in a disciplined way by expanding our portfolio to these growing markets while not sacrificing our financial performance today. We've also established a track record of financial discipline, consistent operational performance, and capital allocation that focuses on long-term value, creation, and maximizing shareholder returns. We are committed to maintaining this reputation. Let me set the stage for what's to come. Our long-term value creation pillars remain unchanged. I'll provide a quick highlight on each before handing it over to the team to walk you through them in more detail.
Todd Anderson will cover how we will go to market via our product leadership strategy, providing customers with market-leading technology that delivers value, whether this is in the product itself, through our manufacturing processes, system integration, software and calibration, or a full offering of new and reman service parts. Neil and Pedro will cover the broad array of end markets that provide opportunities for us to deliver stable growth. The diversity of our end markets, regions, customers, and products will provide us the opportunity to deliver consistent growth and reliable free cash flow through this decade and beyond. Chris Gropp take you through how we have and will continue to maintain our financial discipline, whether it's evaluating opportunities based on economic value added, using our internal hurdle rate of 15%, our focus on cash generation, or our capital allocation decisions.
We feel our strategy, execution, and discipline will deliver long-term value creation and strong total shareholder returns. A quick reminder of what we shared a few weeks ago during our earnings call and issued in our 10-K. First, to improve operational efficiency and reduce administrative efforts, we moved some of our OES sales from our aftermarket segment to the fuel system segment. Second, we've changed our cash conversion calculation, which better aligns with industry norms. It's not a change in our cash generation expectations, just a different formula. Third, we provided greater end-market segmentation with the addition of off-highway, industrial, and other, which will include construction and agricultural machinery, vocational vehicles, marine, industrial applications, power generation, aerospace and defense, and various other applications. We provided additional breakdowns of our segments. Much of this is in the appendix.
Let me give you a quick overview of each of the pillars before I hand it over to the team. Our go-to-market strategy is unchanged: deliver products and services that create tangible value for our customers, whether it's through efficiency, performance, durability, or cost. We leverage our proprietary manufacturing capabilities, including precision machining to submicron tolerances, diamond-like coatings, and laser drilling and ablation to differentiate ourselves. We complement our products and processes with robust system integration, software, and calibration support. Finally, in order to keep these applications running cleaner and longer, we provide service support with new and remanufactured components, technical training, inventory management, and test equipment. All of this brings that extra level of support that makes us a critical supplier partner. Here is how we've expanded segmentation of the end markets we serve, starting with our largest end-use segment, which is service.
This includes both new and remanufactured products for distribution through our OE partners, dealerships or OES, and various independent aftermarket channels or IAM. It then goes from light passenger vehicle to light commercial vehicle, to medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles, and finally to the fast-growing off-highway, industrial, and other segments. Neil and Pedro will walk you through each area, providing insight into the market drivers, opportunities, and competitive landscape and how we will differentiate ourselves and grow. Here is an overview of the diversity of our business across regions, customers, and end markets. It provides resiliency as each has its own unique cycles and dynamics. Our efforts to grow in new and emerging markets are bearing fruit as we leverage our existing manufacturing and human capital. This has allowed us to continue to deliver strong margins and cash flow today, while positioning us for higher growth in the future.
This is core to our expectation of being a stable and consistent performer under various economic conditions, performing as a diversified industrial company. After solid performance through 2023, broad cyclical declines across several industries temporarily pushed us outside our target average sales CAGR range. Although we don't see much recovery in the markets we serve in 2026, we do expect PHINIA to outgrow the market and get back into the range, albeit on the low side. As economies in these industries recover, we continue to expand into new end markets, and with our increasing market penetration, we expect to move higher in the range. At the midpoint of the sales CAGR range, we expect to grow sales to $4.2 billion by the end of the decade. To be clear, $4.2 billion in 2030 assumes no M&A or other portfolio adjustments.
I'll also come back to this $4.2 billion in my closing. Financial discipline remains a foundational and key pillar of our strategy. We are focused on increasing economic value on a year-over-year basis and strong cash flow generation, both of which anchor our annual incentive programs. With an internal hurdle rate of 15%, expected cash conversion of over 40%, moderate leverage, and ample liquidity, we believe we are well-positioned to perform consistently through industry and economic cycles. This same financial discipline guides our capital allocation decisions. First, we allocate the necessary capital to support, protect, and grow our core business. Second, is ensuring we deliver on our dividend commitments. From there, we look to utilize the remaining capital to further enhance shareholder returns.
Given our valuation, we have prioritized share repurchases, buying back more than 9.8 million shares, or nearly 21% of our total number of shares outstanding at spin, at an average price of just above $44. Adding in the $109 million of dividends, we've returned over a half a billion dollars to shareholders. We also completed our first acquisition. It was at a valuation that made sense when compared to our own valuation, was synergistic with our portfolio, helps us grow into new markets with new customers, and would strengthen our long-term growth outlook. We will continue to allocate capital in a way that we feel will drive long-term shareholder value and maximize shareholder returns. We believe our execution over the last few years provides a good template of what to expect moving forward.
The prior three pillars of product leadership, stable growth, and financial discipline are all focused on our final pillar: delivering strong shareholder returns over the long term. Now, let's see how we've been doing. The first thing that needs to be said is a big thank you to all of our PHINIA employees who've helped deliver reliable and consistent results. Without it, we would not have seen the returns shown here. We also need to thank our customers who put their trust in us, suppliers who partner with us, and our investors who are enjoying the journey with us. I say with us on purpose, because when I travel around the world meeting with our teams, they are just as interested in our stock price as our investors, whether they own shares or not.
They ask what drives our stock price, what we need to do better, and why is stock price appreciation important. My response is that our stock has been performing well because of all of their hard work and dedication, delivering consistent and reliable results. We need to continue to drive efficiency in everything we do to help increase economic value and free cash flow. Strong share price appreciation creates a more secure work environment, opens up new opportunities, and gives us the right to continue to invest in our business, both organically and through acquisitions. It's a testament to the results we're delivering and the trust our investors have in us. Our culture of financial discipline, PHINIA values, and our GOLD operating model, globally optimized and locally driven, keeps us grounded, resilient, and adaptable to overcome challenges and quickly grab opportunities.
It is because of this strong foundation that we are confident in the direction we are headed and welcome those who want to join the journey with us. With that, I'll hand it over to Todd to take us through the first pillar, product leadership.
Thank you, Brady. I'm glad to discuss PHINIA's foundational value of product leadership. Our focus on product leadership drives us to deliver innovative solutions to the industry, which add value to our customers and bring profitable business to PHINIA. Supported by a global team of around 1,600 engineers, scientists, and technicians, our roots go deep with over a century of experience as a global product leader. We demonstrate product leadership in four major categories: product, process, system software calibration, and services. Product leadership results in PHINIA innovation or commercialized creativity that adds value to our customers as we supply customized solutions that meet specific market needs. It is supported by core competencies in innovative design, technology development, world-class manufacturing processes, high-performance components, and full system solutions, underpinned with experienced software programmers, system integrators, calibration, and controls engineers.
These activities have resulted in a strong and growing intellectual property portfolio, with over 350 patents granted since PHINIA was formed. With these competencies, we're able to design, develop, validate, and provide technical support in every region in the world, close to customers in regional markets. Oh, thanks. Extends beyond our OE portfolio and business to service part needs, whether in independent aftermarket or OE service parts. Our technology development process is tied to product line strategies that are informed by customers, market, operational teams. Product line strategy teams are the foundation of our technology roadmap and an adaptive avenue to define targeted growth areas unique to each product line. Our approach gathers information from customer reviews, tech days, and industry events, commercial team input on opportunities, and advanced research development ideas.
These 3 areas provide information which help define the technology roadmap per product line. In support of a continually changing market, we have detailed product roadmaps for each product line. In our technology planning and resource allocation, we look across product lines with agility to flex resources and focus based on market needs. These cross-functional global teams ensure we have input from across the globe, all areas are aligned: technology, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, finance. This approach ensures that we do not do technology development in a vacuum and focuses our technical innovation on providing real business value. PHINIA operates across a diverse and resilient range of markets with a comprehensive product and system portfolio. We focus our growth efforts on our commercial and industrial portfolios, still have a sizable share in the light vehicle market, especially in hybrids.
We have a balanced global technical footprint and are recognized as industry experts in our product categories, including both traditional fuels of gasoline and diesel, as well as alternative fuels such as biofuels, hydrogen, ethanol, and others. We have flexibility in our technology development and product portfolio, which is a key differentiator for PHINIA and supports and protects our future growth while providing a level of protection against competitive threats. We expect reliance on gasoline and diesel-fueled ICE systems to continue for light vehicles in the short and medium term. Commercial vehicles and other demanding segments will continue to depend on ICE technologies for the longer term, even through the rest of the century. We continually invest a healthy level of funding to our R&D efforts at approximately 6% of sales on a gross basis.
This includes investment in current products, efficiency improvements, customer programs, advanced development, and future technology. Our investments in alternative fuel technologies support the transition to lower carbon and zero-carbon fuels. In fact, 89% of our R&D budget is spent on efficiency improvements. Alternative fuels is a great example of this, including hydrogen. We leverage our existing technology and skills to supply alternative fuel solutions, including our recent acquisition of SEM, adding ignition systems as a complementary product line. In supporting each market area are our skills and expertise in system integration, software, and calibration, an increasingly rare competency in the industry that's required to realize the full performance of high-quality products. Over 1/3 of our revenue in 2024 and 2025 comes from service in the OES and independent aftermarket channels.
We continue to build our technology footprint in these markets with strong new-to-range releases and product programs. PHINIA's products and processes contain advanced precision technology to operate in extreme environment that's inherent with fuel systems. From operating pressures of 40,000 PSI, that's almost 3x the pressure seen in the deepest part of the ocean, to the need to cycle in milliseconds for a vehicle which is operating over 1.6 million km, our product must have the highest standards of quality and precision. One key factor is the submicron tolerances of our products and manufacturing processes. For scale, if we consider the chart on the right of the slide, the rope-looking item represents the size of a human hair. Our tolerances can be less than 1 micron or 1 millionth of a meter, reflected by the red arrow in the lower left of this chart.
somewhere between wildfire smoke and the coronavirus. As an example, the heart of one of our products is the nozzle control valve. The pin for this valve is made from hardened and coated alloy steel, and while smaller than a pencil lead, it has over 20 key control characteristics for manufacturing and product performance, and is produced at high volume with tolerances less than 1 micron. Our teams do an excellent job at making these reliably at high and low volumes, having outstanding single-digit parts per million quality performance. You'll have an opportunity to explore this more deeply in our product booth. For our parts to operate durably for billions of cycles, we incorporate a diamond-like carbon, or DLC, coating in key areas of the parts. This process has evolved and continues to evolve as product requirements become even more demanding.
We have significant experience, skills, and competencies, including high-volume production manufacturing processes in the DLC coating process. The example shown on the right depicts a production equipment and a schematic of multiple layers of hardened coating, which is applied to specific features in the valve guide shown in the fixture on the right. We require high technology and precision, not only in our products, but also in our manufacturing processes. Another example of our proprietary high-technology production process is that of laser ablation. We accomplish this process through the use of highly precise femtolasers to remove exactly the amount of material needed in the right places without touching the part, with no resulting burrs or metal chips remaining. As an example, we produce precisely controlled parallelism on key injector features, which results in better performance and durability.
This innovation enables us to use lab precision metrology repeatedly in our high-volume production processes for tens of thousands of parts every week. Another example of PHINIA's process innovations are our laser drilling techniques, where conventional drilling processes struggle to produce consistent holes in hardened steel that are less than 100 micrometers. We regularly use laser drilling to make precise holes less than that in repeatable and consistent ways. This allows our design engineers to incorporate features to drive fuel efficiency and product performance in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. As a result of this competency, we have a competitive advantage in what is possible for our suite of products and solutions.
Not only do we produce market-leading products and develop high-technology processes, but using our software, system integration, and calibration and testing services allows us to offer full turnkey solutions to the markets that we serve. This key differentiator creates tight customer relationships and provides value to customers, including those who may have underinvested in this combustion area and need additional support and guidance. Supported by hundreds of experienced software and calibration engineers across multiple regions, our software, system integration, and calibration expertise enables full turnkey solutions. Linking our strong OE technology to our excellent aftermarket service organization provides a first-to-market advantage in many production introductions. Our aftermarket service team is strongly focused on meeting market needs and delivering excellent service to our customers wherever they are around the world.
Key customer groups are technicians who work with our products every day, and distribution partners who make sure that the parts they need are available for them when they need them. We have extensive training material available for technicians through our Masters of Motion and Garage 360 programs, which have hundreds of YouTube training videos and an online learning platform for longer-form digital training courses. We also offer in-person training and certification programs for our loyal customers in facilities around the world. Consequently, our service team has intimate market and customer knowledge to guide our advanced technology development efforts. The result is a leadership position in the aftermarket, with high levels of market coverage in key product lines identified in cataloging systems, which makes it easy to identify the right part for any given repair every time.
With thousands of new to range releases every year, we demonstrate product lifecycle management, including many first-to-market releases for new vehicle service parts that keep our customers ahead of the competition. All these embedded activities and processes support our competitive advantage and lead to stable, sustainable growth. In addition to strong technology competencies, PHINIA's technical leadership is evident in multiple ways. First, we've significantly contributed to the industry by researching and publishing publicly available emissions booklets for both heavy-duty and light vehicle emission standards around the world. We've collaborated with other industry partners in this effort. Second, as a leader in the industry, PHINIA is keenly aware of the impact of global emissions regulations. Through 2025 and continuing in 2026, we've seen changes in these regulations and follow closely the developments for emissions legislation across multiple regions.
PHINIA employees create, publish, and share technical papers and studies, which are presented at industry conferences and audience events with government agencies around the world. This includes, but is not limited to U.S., EPA, and CARB, the European Commission, the France Ministry of Technology, the UK Minister of Transportation, the UK Advanced Propulsion Centre, the Korea Hydrogen Consortium, and others. Third, our focus on intellectual property, consisting of both patents and trade secrets in product technology and manufacturing processes, further increases the strength of our organization. This is across all markets, and I'm pleased to share that we've been granted over 350 patents in the first two years of PHINIA's existence, supported by over 200 inventors, which builds on our approximately 2,000 active patent portfolio. We flex our technology and resources across multiple markets and fuels.
This includes the ability to design, develop, source, validate, produce, sell, and service in region, ensuring that we're meeting the local regional needs with flexibility while remaining consistent with our global standards. Consider PHINIA's legacy, traditional fuel engineering and manufacturing resources and assets. These tools for internal combustion engines provide significant value and competitive advantage. In addition, we can shift resources and assets from traditional fuels, solutions, and locations to future alternative fuel systems to other markets, including aerospace, and realign production locations. Let me share four examples of this flexibility. First, gasoline product designs have been utilized to move technology forward with ethanol in compressed natural gas fuels. Second, our team in Blois, France, have utilized historical diesel resources to support other markets in marine, industrial, stationary power generation, and aerospace.
Third, production assets have been reallocated from Europe to China and the Americas to streamline our footprint and provide in-region support to a changing marketplace. Fourth, software system integration and calibration skills and services have been allocated to multiple programs across regions, product lines, and markets in support of achieving business growth and value. This seamless flexibility of product technology and manufacturing processes strongly supports the position of PHINIA in the market. Well, all of these prior efforts that I've talked about only matter if they turn into new business and growth. Building on strong new product launches and portfolio expansion in 2024 and 2025, PHINIA has actionable plans to continue this performance. Product launches will continue in 2026 and beyond. Fuel systems are strengthened via our GDI 500 bar system and alternative fuels.
Growth in ignition systems, which leverages synergies with fuel systems, will take place. We'll expand into new end markets, including aerospace, power generation, marine. We'll provide full system solutions to an industry which has reduced skill and capacity. Further product line expansion in other areas such as 24 volt starters and alternators, brushless motors, fuel delivery modules. With PHINIA's value of product leadership, we have strong future opportunities for sustained growth, protected by a broad and resilient product portfolio. I'll hand it over to my friend and colleague, Neil Fryer.
Thank you, Todd, and good day, everybody. I'm now gonna review the addressable markets that make up PHINIA's continued growth opportunity. As you can see from the chart, we have five key segments, and we look at the evolution from 2024 to 2035, working upwards from the bottom of the chart. First, service, which consists of original equipment service and independent aftermarket. It's PHINIA's largest addressable market, representing over 60% of the total in 2024 and growing to 68% by 2035. This growth is driven by three global tailwinds: an increasing number of vehicles in operation, rising average vehicle age, and more miles driven per vehicle. Next, light passenger vehicles, which are a declining market because of electrification trends.
As the deadlines for eliminating sales of internal combustion engines are relaxed in Europe and North America, we see growth opportunities in the midterm, driven by higher GDI penetration rates, which Pedro will talk about later in the presentation. The light commercial vehicle market shows electric vehicle impact as well, owing to growth in the sales of battery electric last-mile delivery vehicles, which travel limited mileage routes and usually return to the same point at the end of each day. Medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. There's growth in this market in the midterm before the market starts to decline with increased electrification. We expect that city buses will be the main driver of electrification, while long-haul, on-highway trucks continue to use internal combustion engines for years to come.
We expect to see opportunities for our alternative fuel products in this segment through the 2030s, although the relative long-term market share for different zero-emission technologies is not yet clear. Finally, the GOLD section of each column shows tangible opportunities as we expand into new end markets with our core technology. Historically, we focused on on-highway applications. Tighter emissions regulations for sectors such as agriculture, construction, marine, industrial, and aviation are creating new opportunities for our fueling technology. When we look at all the markets we serve, PHINIA's total addressable market will grow to $121 billion, despite the impact of declining light passenger vehicle sales, and we know that there are still more opportunities to explore in adjacent markets. Now, let me turn to the service market in more detail.
The total market, including products like tires, lubricants, and crash parts, is worth well over $1 trillion globally. PHINIA's addressable market totals $66 billion of that with the product portfolio we have today. The core offered market, that's the market for the products in our portfolio in all the territories we sell them into today, is worth $41 billion, which is a sizable opportunity to capture market share in itself, and expanding our market reach will fuel further growth.
The size of the saleable market, the long life cycles of our products, the tailwinds I mentioned earlier, and slower than previously expected electric vehicle penetration all favor us in the independent aftermarket, and we've defined plans to take advantage of this, which I would now like to talk through. Before I do that, let me show you a video explaining our go-to-market approach.
I'd like to clarify that everything you saw in the video and everything I'll discuss in the next few minutes is focused on the independent aftermarket. You see here the products we sell. Our offer is built out from the PHINIA Fuel Systems OE programs for diesel and gas fueling that you see on the left-hand side of the chart. We supplement the offer with the additional products on the right-hand side of the chart: vehicle electronics and chassis products. In the center, you see workshop solutions, which help to create demand for our products. These offerings keep us top of mind with technicians, so that they're more likely to look for Delco, Delphi or Delco Remy products to complete a repair or maintenance job.
We take the portfolio to market through a global distribution network that puts inventory close to customers, over 4,000 customers across the globe. That way, we can deliver excellent off-the-shelf availability to retailers, warehouse distributors, and online players wherever they are. We operate globally, with about half our sales in Europe and 40% in the Americas, the rest of the world accounting for the remaining 10%. We make sure that we're set up to meet the differing needs of our customers in those regions, day in, day out. Remanufacturing is an important part of the program as well. Reman diesel fuel injection products and starters and alternators have been part of our business for many years.
They're a way to deliver cost-effective solutions to vehicle owners right through the life cycle, as well as being sustainable solutions that reduce waste and energy use compared to new replacement parts. Our product sourcing is balanced between fuel systems, aftermarket manufacturing, and third-party suppliers to build ranges that can cover over 95% of the vehicles on the road in each category. Fuel system starters and alternators and aftermarket parts manufactured internally account for approximately 50% of sales. The remainder comes from products sourced from third-party suppliers. Our strong customer relationships in the independent aftermarket across multiple channels, such as international buying groups, individual wholesalers, retailers, and online players, help us gain share of wallet and capture new opportunities. We also leverage our independent aftermarket competencies in supply chain and product management to deliver value to manufacturer service programs for certain original equipment customers.
Our mission as an aftermarket business is to deliver best-in-class products, services, and customer experience, solving the challenges of today and preparing for a cleaner tomorrow. You heard Todd talk about precision manufactured fuel systems products that help our OEM customers meet increasingly stringent emissions requirements. When we sell these products in the aftermarket, we aim to make sure that vehicles continue to perform the way they did the day they left the production line, so that emissions are minimized. Similarly, third-party source products we sell are produced to our exacting standards, so that fitting one of our products to a vehicle ensures it performs as it was designed to throughout its life. We take the products to market with the trusted brands, Delphi, Delco Remy, and Hartridge, which have many years of original equipment heritage.
A key criterion for technicians is whether they can fit and forget the parts they use every day. They don't want customers to come back because replacement parts aren't fit for purpose, and they know they can trust our brands and solutions. Our business model is built on the 3 pillars I just talked about: the portfolio, the sourcing approach, and brands customers can trust. To win in the market, we take a customer-centric approach. We have 2 target customer groups, our distribution partners and the technicians who fit our products to vehicles every day. 5 key areas of product leadership, a core PHINIA value, deliver what distribution partners need. First, we aim to have market-leading coverage in the categories we offer, targeting to have the widest range of any competitor for the vehicles on the road.
This way, we provide complete solutions to our customers, so they don't need supplementary supply sources to complete their product offerings. Second, we strive to be first to market with products for new vehicles, so that our distribution partners are always able to offer repair and maintenance solutions for every vehicle that a technician may encounter in their daily work. Third, our product lifecycle management teams are focused on making sure we offer solutions for vehicles right through their lifetimes. The average age of vehicles in operation globally is in excess of 12 years in many markets, so we aim to cover both newly introduced vehicles and those that have been on the road for 25 years or more, in some cases. Fourth, cataloging excellence.
Distribution partners and technicians need to be able to identify the correct part for any given repair first time, so an easy-to-use, accurate, and comprehensive catalog is central to their requirements. Finally, when products are in the catalog, it's key to be able to deliver them to the customer who needs them as soon as possible, anywhere in the world. This drives our obsession with off-the-shelf availability from our warehouses. Together, these five pillars cement customer relationships with distribution partners. At the same time, we work to create demand for our products, and this is where training and workshop solutions come in. We want our product brands, Delphi and Delco Remy, to be top of mind for technicians. We communicate directly with them, offering advice on solving problems with the vehicles they encounter in their daily work.
We launched a communication program specific to technicians in Europe in 2022, which is now being rolled out across all regions where we operate around the world. I've covered our value propositions and customer performance, both of which are sounding well. I want to talk about the markets and aftermarket agility. As I mentioned, the average age of vehicles in operation is over 12 years. Where available, that's what they're doing. This means we're dealing with trends in what we expect customers to need and how they treat them. Age of vehicles in the progress must satisfy the original equipment manufacturer who wants a value for money repair. We've worked on developing a value proposition for private label programs targeted at those customers. In the same way, our remanufactured products can deliver OE performance at lower cost.
Together, these offerings allow us to remain competitive in supplying parts for older vehicles. At the same time, we're rapidly expanding our coverage for newer vehicles. PHINIA's propulsion-agnostic chassis parts programs feature extensive coverage for battery, electric, and hybrid cars, plus light commercial vehicles. Last year, we introduced over 4,300 new part numbers in these categories to remain competitive. That's 75% of the new products we introduced overall. We've also capitalized on rapid development by Chinese vehicle manufacturers in markets across the globe to reinforce our first-to-market credentials. There are about 220 million vehicles produced by Chinese OEMs in operation today. That's almost 15% of the vehicles in operation in the world.
We've focused engineering and product development on introducing products for these vehicles, which are capturing market share in South and Central America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, that we can satisfy demand as it develops. This is what aftermarket agility means. We respond to emerging aftermarket trends to stay relevant and ahead of competition. We've outgrown the IAM, independent aftermarket, since 2022, through greater penetration of the markets we sell to, by extending our reach to underserved markets, and by selectively extending the product offer where we have a right to win. Market penetration includes capturing a greater share of wallet with our existing customer base, winning business with new customers, and broadening our market coverage within product categories to complete our offer. To expand our market, we focus on selling the existing product portfolio in new geographies.
As I mentioned earlier, we don't sell all of the portfolio in every region today, so we're executing plans to introduce selected ranges into those regions. We're also working to enter channels such as e-commerce, where we have not served them in the past. We expand our product offer by remanufacturing competitive products, building on our strong supplier relationships to cover new product categories, and by identifying opportunities to manufacture more products in-house, using existing capabilities and production capacity more efficiently. We also see opportunities to grow inorganically. We look at them critically. With our clear opportunities to grow organically, we would be very selective about any acquisitions. We've already proved that we can deliver organic growth with a low-risk model, and I want to talk about how we do that.
We launch a new product range in one new region at a time, limiting financial exposure and the risk of management distraction. We only move on to other regions once execution is successful and we see that we have traction. Here's an example. Steering and suspension is a significant product category that was not historically offered in North America. We entered the market with our European range to cover import vehicles in the US and Canada. Based on positive customer feedback, we took the decision to expand and offer a full range covering domestic, Asian, and European vehicles, leveraging our existing supply base to create market coverage and the strength of the Delphi brand to enter the market through existing distribution channels.
In our latest step towards becoming a full solution provider in this category, we launched a severe duty program of steering and suspension for work trucks and last mile delivery vehicles in late 2025, with the goal of penetrating a market segment that demands specific, harder-wearing, longer-life products than the OE equivalents. Steering and suspension sales in the region have increased year-over-year since 2019, and now represents 16% of our independent aftermarket sales in North America. With the full year impact of a recent new business win, we expect this to be close to 20% in 2026. We've now started to launch steering and suspension in South America using the same approach. What I've shown you today is PHINIA's approach to winning in the independent aftermarket.
We stand out as a strong competitor because we're global, and we combine Tier One supplier expertise and technology with the agility of an aftermarket specialist supplier. Our customers know they can trust our strong go-to-market brands and rely on our product management, marketing, and supply chain capability to deliver what they want consistently every day. Our fuel systems product ranges and starters and alternators have longevity in the aftermarket because of long product life cycles. Together with our propulsion-agnostic products, they're well-positioned to make us a relevant supplier for all types of vehicles in future. We're a profitable growth engine with significant organic opportunities to grow, which can be supplemented by selective acquisitions if the conditions are right. We've delivered profitable growth through the last three years, and are positioned to continue to grow above market to the end of this decade and beyond. Thank you.
Now I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Pedro, to talk about OE strategies.
Good morning, all. Neil has took us through the PHINIA total addressable market, and more deeply, its aftermarket outlook. We are now going to briefly review PHINIA's strategies for its OE business. I will be presenting you with an overview of the 4 different OE markets we operate in. We will start with light passenger vehicles, followed by light commercial vehicles, then on-highway, heavy-duty, and medium-duty commercial vehicles, and lastly, off-highway, industrial, and other applications. In each of them, I will be highlighting their main developments, their competitive landscape, major key developments, and PHINIA roadmap to address them, as well as our estimates for future sales. Future sales estimates will rely on an aspirational target to become a $5 billion company in the years to come.
This goal is comprised not only of future organic sales, but also includes hypothetical M&A activity focused on the commercial vehicle, aftermarket, and industrial segments. We will start with light passenger vehicles. This market, which is one of the largest ones within the OE automotive industry, is undergoing a major transformation, driven by electrification, shifting consumer preferences, and evolving global production dynamics. The latest industry forecasts highlight rapid growth in hybrid and electric vehicles, strong demand for SUVs, and ongoing adjustments to global supply chain disruptions. As automakers respond to regulatory and trade pressures, seems to be broadly accepted that although growth is rapid, the pace of adoption of battery electric vehicles, or BEVs, has slowed in recent outlooks, resulting in larger-than-expected market shares for both hybrid and pure ICE powertrains for a longer period.
We are seeing smaller competitors exiting, and the larger players are prioritizing other areas, namely electrification. This has allowed us to opportunistically gain share, and we anticipate that we will keep doing so. Pursue of higher efficiency, higher performance, cost-effective, and optimized carbon technologies remain key development trends within this market. PHINIA has the ability, with its portfolio, to support our customers to meet all these needs and trends. Global light vehicle production also continues to adjust to shifting factors, including, among others, U.S. trade policies, supply chain shifts, and regional market dynamics. OEMs are reshoring or regionalizing production to reduce geopolitical risks. PHINIA sees growth opportunities in the short to medium term within this market, specifically from GDI penetration rates, a technology that is key to further improve overall powertrain efficiency on ICE and hybrid vehicles.
We are also seeing the adoption of alternative fuels and declining competition. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see IHS projections for the passenger car market for 2030, split by propulsion type. The bar on the left is a projection from July 2024, and on the right, you can see the exact same data and market, but based on their projection from October 2025, one year and a half later. Between the two projections, the outlook for market share for pure battery electric vehicles in 2030 worldwide decreased 900 basis points from 40% to 31%. ICE and hybrid powertrain share outlook, on the other hand, has increased by the same 900 basis points from 60% to 69%, with GDI increasing 700 basis points from 37% to 44%.
This highlights how the core ICE light vehicle technology will be dominant for a much longer period than was previously assumed. Our strategy remains equal. We want to strive as one of the limited number of global suppliers capable to provide solutions for applications where reliability and emissions compliance are non-negotiable, bearing in mind that enhancements and new challenges might be ahead. We will keep supporting our customers, leveraging our decades of customer intimacy, and enlarging our client base. Within light passenger car segment, BEV adoption will increase in years to come. This is undeniable. Some regions are focusing on lower carbon and zero-carbon fuels are their pathway to carbon neutrality rather than BEV. The reasons vary. Include availability of renewable power, infrastructure challenges, national security, and energy independence.
A clear example of what I just mentioned is PHINIA having been recently nominated in India by three major local OEMs for more than 1 million compressed natural gas injectors per year of brand-new programs to be launched in the next couple of years. Similarly, we have won with brand-new customers, brand-new programs in the recent past, 500 bar GDI applications entering currently into production within the Chinese market. We believe we are well-positioned to increase share within this market. Total Available Market is expected to decrease, with our product portfolio, we pledge to keep supporting our customer needs as well as record of recent nominations withstand our intention to remain with a flat revenue estimation for this segment in the years to come. We will be moving on now into the light commercial vehicle market.
This market is characterized by two main type of vehicles: trucks and vans. Vehicles in this category have a maximum gross vehicle weight of around 3.5 tons. They are mostly dedicated to small business logistics, service fleets, utility services, rental fleets, and last-mile delivery. We are going a decade defined by electrification, rapid e-commerce expansion, and a major shift towards fleet-centric ownership models. While electrification increases, hybrid, gasoline, diesel, and alternative fuels, namely CNG, LPG, ethanol, methanol, and certainly hydrogen, remain highly relevant for certain regions and applications. PHINIA is focused on customers from this segment in Europe, Asia, and Americas, with the majority of its business actually based here in the USA. This includes two prominent US OEMs and their main truck models. The light-duty on-highway commercial vehicle market is a very significant segment of the global commercial vehicle industry.
As I said, driven by e-commerce, urban logistics, and expanding fleet operations. Vans are mainly used by professionals, whilst trucks have a more dual usage, serving for professional and private purposes. Within the van segment, BEV penetration will consistently increase in the years to come, and it expected to come close to a 50% share by 2037, in line with some of the more optimistic outlooks for the passenger car market. For trucks, the market is expected to have a more moderate BEV penetration, peaking shy of 20% in the later years of the next decade. One of our main priorities is obviously to retain our strong U.S. truck market position, which is less exposed to electrification, and we also want to leverage both portfolio and manufacturing assets to target new customers and applications with sustainable longevity.
The total market available to PHINIA is expected to slightly decrease in the next few years, whilst our outlook revenue is for it to remain roughly flat, around half a billion dollars. Our expectation is to maintain absolute revenue at 2025 levels for the years to come. The longer ICE market tail, our minimal exposure to the van segment, and targeted customers and programs for market expansion gains will support this goal. We will now move over into the medium and heavy-duty commercial vehicle segment. PHINIA currently has a range of customers within this market spread across the world. We are building on our reputation for market-leading technology to extend our business into new customers and to increase share of wallet within the ones we already operate with.
Our extended portfolio of fuel injection, fuel handling, starters and alternators, and ignition systems, as well as our capability to integrate this to deliver complete system solutions, distinguishes PHINIA from the majority of its competitors. The majority of our competitors have switched their focus either to electrification, minimizing commitments, and investments to support customers within the ICE landscape. One of the main characteristics of the segment is the non-discretionary nature of purchases by its operators. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see how resilient this market is. The market quickly recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis, as well as rebounding fast from the worldwide COVID disruption in the early 2020s. This market will be clearly dominated by internal combustion engine technology for the decades to come, despite some BEV penetration, especially in China and urban or regional applications.
The overall market is expected to grow in the low single digits year-over-year, with internal combustion engine volumes expected to remain more or less stable at around 3.2 million units per year for at least the next decade. This means internal combustion engines will still represent just shy of 80% of the total commercial vehicle market by 2035. The takeaways is that ICE powered with diesel, as well as with lower carbon and zero carbon alternative fuels, will continue to dominate, with relatively moderate levels of PEV. PHINIA's strategy is to focus on customer needs, as always, deliberate partnerships, and utilizing and optimizing existing assets supported by financially disciplined investments. Tiny incremental improvements in engine efficiency can translate into huge annual savings for the operators when vehicles are traveling hundreds of thousands of miles every year. We have the technology to support these improvements.
Our main goal is to increase share through incremental content per vehicle and by conquering brand-new customers and applications. In an overall flat total addressable market, PHINIA is committed to increase its share within this segment. We have an aspirational target of roughly doubling our revenue in the next years, reaching $1 billion of sales. Lastly, we will be reviewing the off-highway, industrial, and other segments we operate in. In recent years, PHINIA has planted seeds to grow beyond the automotive landscape. As a result, we now have customers from aerospace, marine, stationary engines, agriculture, and industrial backgrounds. This expansion into new end markets with our core technology, existing assets, and engineering know-how was a very logical thing to do. The same drivers for tighter regulations, optimized efficiency, higher performance, and carbon neutrality in off-highway applications are exactly what we have addressed in the on-highway space.
We are perfectly placed to support our off-highway customers that are facing these challenges. PHINIA has an exceptional level of skill and technology in high precision, high-technology machining, and manufacturing, owned over many years of development in the automotive market. We are finding that these are exactly the competencies that customers are looking for in adjacent markets, like aerospace and industrial applications. These sectors are lower volume than automotive, but are characterized by higher content per vehicle, and they highly value our automotive experience and standards. Significant market growth expected in this segment for the next 10 years, with civil aircraft production expected to double and defense spending increasing with geopolitical tensions. Aerospace engine manufacturers are looking for new partners. There are many small suppliers still in the industry that might become a bottleneck, and that is where our right to play comes in.
We are well-placed to assess this market with our hydraulic components. It aligns perfectly with our existing capabilities. Market we expect to serve operates with similar machining tolerances and requirements as to one we operate in currently. PHINIA expects to more than double its revenue within this segment in the years to come. We have a goal to attain 10% of sales of our aspirational $5 billion target. We expect to go from $200 million of sales in 2025 to $500 million year of sales in the years to come. Two industry sectors that PHINIA is now successfully penetrating are both the aerospace and the power generation markets. In aerospace, PHINIA won recently several fuel component programs with a major global engine manufacturer. We have an objective of reaching $100 million sales by 2030.
We have also been attending, and will continue attending, several air shows, like the Farnborough Airshow, the Paris Air Show, and quite recently, the Aero Americas here in the U.S.A. Goal is to reach out to customers and make them aware of our capabilities. We have been able to promote ourselves, and several customer leads are ongoing with positive prospects. The industry is heavily certified, a hurdle that PHINIA has already overcome. We got the EN 9100 certification some weeks ago and are fully compliant to deliver our products to aero engine builders. Some context from the industry is that the costs involved with resourcing are quite significant. The product sourcing cycles are around 15-20 years, versus a cycle of 3-5 years within the automotive industry.
The level of enthusiasm and number of projects we are working on within this market, encourage us to proceed and assure us our right to play is real. In industrials, PHINIA has gained access to new customers for large stationary engines with the acquisition of SEM in 2025. We are seeing increased demand for these large stationary engines, driven in particular by demands for AI data centers, we are well-positioned to support these kinds of applications. We have also recently supported the launch of a brand-new agro application with an hydrogen engine from a UK customer. Alternative fuels will also play a key role within industrial applications. At the other hand of the scale, the SEM acquisition has also increased our exposure to the small engine market, which continues to grow, especially in South Asia. Time to bring it all together.
After Todd's presentation on product leadership, Neil taking us over the unique growth prospects of our independent aftermarket, and myself briefly sharing information about what PHINIA intends to do in its OE segments, it's time for a wrap-up. We intend to create value, leveraging our technology and our know-how. We aim to use our innovation capabilities, resilience, and adaptability to navigate within legacy markets and pursue new target end markets. Here are just a few examples of our strategy in action. We are continuing to develop the right technologies to help our customers achieve their goals, including launching as worldwide first-to-market gasoline injection at 500 bar with Changan in 2024. Higher pressure in fuel injection means smaller droplets of fuel, which have a higher overall surface area, which burn cleaner and more efficiently.
We continue to retain our existing customers with major new programs across our product portfolio. We have successfully launched our first aerospace applications and have set ourselves aggressive targets for continued growth. We have made our first acquisition with SEM and extended our ability to access industrial markets. All of this demonstrates that we have the ability to evolve as our markets evolve. We will continue to transition our human capital and capital equipment to focus on CV, aftermarket, adjacent markets, and carbon-neutral fuel technologies as the market demand arises. In summary, PHINIA is deploying an action plan to ensure stable and steady growth across the independent aftermarket and its OEM markets. We will be doing so by nurturing and redeploying resources and assets effectively. We will continually seek new customers, regional and product diversification.
We are committed to leveraging and enhancing our aftermarket business and its strong brands, assume ourselves as a CV top-tier player, maximize and increase share in both light passenger vehicle and light commercial vehicle. We are also targeting new markets like aerospace, industrial, and stationary engines, where we clearly seem to have a right to play. As Neil showed you some minutes ago, PHINIA total addressable market is growing. We expect to be operating in a more than $121 billion market by 2035. We want to strive and grow, and aim to do so by generating value to our shareholders. We are one of very few competitors able to operate with expertise and address strict OEM specifications. Scarcity value for what we do is increasing due to few players' ability to operate with such rigorous and stretched technical challenges.
We are obtaining significant business wins and expect to grow organically in next years due to our technological differentiation factors. We are pursuing targeted end markets while optimizing value in our legacy markets. PHINIA does have a clear, viable path to deliver consistent growth on the years to come. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. We will be doing now a break, and we will be returning at? 10:45. 10:45, we resume. Thank you very much.
... Welcome you all back from our short break we had. Couple more speakers here before the Q&A. With that, I will bring up Chris Gropp, our CFO. Thank you very much.
All right, we're in the home stretch, everybody. Glad everybody's here. I can tell you that for us, it was almost planes, trains, and automobiles to get here today, but we're happy all of you got here. All right, just a reminder, I'm gonna go through, surprise, financial discipline, then we're gonna bring Brady back up to wrap everything up, then the fun part is Q&A. As PHINIA was coming together, even before we knew what the name of the company was going to be, we knew integrity, accountability, and financial discipline were non-negotiable for the company.
We believe our 2025 results speak to that, as the business delivered adjusted diluted earnings per share of $4.96, growth of 28.5% over 2024, and adjusted EBITDA of $478 million on $3.5 billion in sales, or 13.7% adjusted margin. It is our responsibility and commitment to deliver quality, industry-leading parts to our customers, and equally deliver industry-leading returns, regardless of the changes or turmoil in the markets. Our segments have delivered on this, providing 2025 segment-adjusted operating returns of just over 16% from our aftermarket business and just over 11% from our fuel systems business. This amid a backdrop of softness in the CV and LV global market, compounded by hesitation in the market as new government policies were introduced, revised, and absorbed, and now again revised and absorbed.
Our results enabled us to return more than $40 million in dividends to our shareholders in 2025, along with repurchases of $200 million, all while maintaining a consistent, strong balance sheet and solid liquidity. Our diversified end markets have provided stability and results, regardless of market and regulatory dynamics. As we continue to emphasize, if OE markets are down, aftermarket sales remain strong, as our results have demonstrated over the past three years. The resulting stability and balance enable investment into new technologies and industries, as outlined by Todd, Neil, and Pedro, providing a path to future growth and end market diversity. This is reinforced by our 2026 projected sales by region, customer concentration, and end market diversity.
We do all of this underpinned by financial discipline, with data-driven decisions that include reuse and redeployment of existing human and hard capital across regions, helping us maintain a target spend of 3% net R&D, or 6% on a gross basis, as Todd noted, and 4% capital spend. These targets cross product lines and regions to ensure the highest flexibility and product footprint, also as Todd outlined, and targeted return on investment, all while ensuring future profitable growth. As Brady noted, cyclical declines. That's hard to say. Cyclical declines across several markets have meant our organic CAGR has been slightly behind our original expectations. While no one loves a down market, we did outpace market performance by 260 basis points, and the shifts in market provided a window into why our business segments make sense together.
They create balance and drive each other to expand margins. Neil referred to the fact that half of the supply to our aftermarket segment are for products produced internally by PHINIA. This means the bulk of our sales, including aftermarket, we supply from original equipment to service to aftermarket for products in the field, creating a durable, extended life cycle for our systems and products. We're proud of the performance our segments have delivered. Expanded margins on relatively flat revenues that include external dilutive pressures require skill, diligence, and just plain hard work. As we also keep saying, it requires discipline and baseline returns that the entire team understands and works toward. As guided in our Q4 results call, we expect revenue growth in 2026 of just under 4% year-over-year, including FX changes.
Over three years, since 2024, this would result in a 3.4% revenue CAGR. We also project healthy conversion on the additional revenue and solid adjusted EBITDA returns of above half a million on the $3.6 billion in sales. We are confident we have the right teams in place to achieve this through continued diligent, disciplined work from all areas of the business, focus on expansion and diversification into new end markets and products. I think the snow background is sort of appropriate for this week, but that was just a fluke. A key to our success is our people. We have deep technical bench strength within our engineering, operational, and administrative teams.
Our operational and functional teams have continued their disciplined approach to streamline and optimize operations and processes, ensuring footprint of facilities and infrastructure are correctly sized and reside in optimal proximity to customers with the best cost labor force. Near and dear to my heart is the work our administrative teams have taken on since spin. A reminder, shortly after spin, our legal and corporate structure resulted in an effective tax rate that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Impressively high, with an underlying structure that was complicated and unwieldy. I wanna call out to all of our teams and associates who have worked hard and diligently to improve, dropping to 32.5% in 2025, from our 2024 rate of 41.5%.
This financial discipline and perseverance resulted in reduction in cash taxes paid by more than 35%. We're not done. Our IT and operations teams are working together on a multi-year process to streamline our ERP systems into one consolidated platform to drive process consolidation and efficiencies. These teams are also focused on right-sizing the existing infrastructure while expanding AI capabilities to enhance business processes and expertise. Embedded recurring savings opportunities for supply chain and operational productivity are organic daily processes, driven by expert teams, and have resulted in productivity savings, in addition to approximately $60 million in cumulative global supply chain savings from 2023 to 2025. Results of our drive and focus on financial discipline deliver high quality free cash flow and free cash flow conversion against earnings compared to our peers, regardless of peer group considered.
In fact, since inception, the PHINIA results for free cash flow conversion have exceeded industrial, aftermarket, and Tier One peers consistently. We accomplish this by continually driving improvements, streamlining working capital processing, and as noted on the previous slide, striving for simplicity and reasonableness in our structure. All projects, whether driven by the management team or our functional teams, or down to our operations, are analyzed for required return and payback period expected. As Brady noted, and as discussed in our Q4 earnings webcast, we did recast some portions of our segment revenues in 2025, as we streamlined sales and distribution processes to reduce administrative burdens.
In short, we choose to analyze and revise structures continuously to reduce the burden of large one-off restructuring events, redeploying assets efficiently to enable reinvestment of resources in new and expanding products and markets, all leading to a disciplined capital allocation model based upon our strong products and brands, and demonstrated by managing growth and diversifying our portfolio into emerging fuel applications and industries. This occurs while the company returns material amounts of value back to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. We maintain a strong balance sheet, with robust levels of liquidity and low leverage, with continued focus on our priorities of dividends and share repurchases, which accumulated since inception, are approximately 21% of total shares outstanding. In dollar terms, this means share repurchases and dividends back to shareholders of more than half a billion dollars over that period.
With more than $2 billion in cumulative free cash flow projected from 2023 to the end of the decade, we expect to maintain a disciplined, data-driven approach to prioritization of dividends, share repurchases, and growth via strategic, accretive merger and acquisition targets. Every financial decision we make is driven by economic value-added models with minimum levels of return, that ensure we can meet our revenue growth and return on capital targets, which in turn fuels our capital allocation priorities. As a management team, we are proud of what we've accomplished over the past three years, and have worked hard to build trust in our products, our returns, and our commitment to our shareholders, all evidenced by shareholder return of just above 116% over the last years.
Market-leading free cash flow yield and adjusted to learning- diluted earnings per share growth more than 5x that of our peers, yet we feel we still have untapped value. Our financial fundamentals are strong, we believe provide a compelling basis for our stock price. We're at the start of our journey. We expect our results will continue to differentiate us from our peers and move us to a valuation that truly reflects our products and company value. Finally, to reiterate our 2026 guide, which was presented in our Q4 earnings call. The growth landscape is expected to continue to be challenging in 2026, although starting to recover some product lines and markets. We are well-positioned to achieve the targets we laid out almost three years ago, with 2026 sales expected in the range of $3.5 billion-$3.7 billion.
Adjusted EBITDA of $485 million-$525 million, for a return on sales in the range of 13.7%-14.3%. This will in turn lead to adjusted free cash flow in a range of $200 million-$240 million, and an adjusted effective tax rate of 30%-34%. It's been an exciting three years out of the gate as PHINIA, as we enter the next chapter of growth, we look forward to continued success as we focus on profitable revenue growth, product innovation in new markets, business wins, continued disciplined capital allocation, and delivering shareholder value. With that, I told you I'd be short, I am gonna hand it back to Brady to let him wrap things up.
All righty. Thank you, Chris, Todd, Neil, and Pedro. Let's do a quick recap, as well as provide you some insights on where we're headed. As I started with, the others built around, we believe product leadership through product, process, and service puts us in a strong, competitive position to continue to win new business and expand into new markets, leveraging our existing capabilities and capital. The diversity of our regions, customers, products, and industries we serve will provide us with stable and reliable growth opportunities through this decade and beyond. This is also supported by a growing total addressable market, with service and off-highway, industrial, and other making up over 75% of our TAM later this decade. We're also investigating additional markets where we could leverage our capabilities and resources.
Our financial discipline is focused on delivering year-over-year improvements in economic value, generating cash, and being efficient allocators of capital. We've established a solid track record as a consistent and reliable performer. Combine this with our core values and GOLD operating model, we're confident in our ability to deliver long-term shareholder value and maximize shareholder returns. Let's talk about where we're going.
We put this together to show what we expect to deliver over the decade based on the following assumptions: No M&A or other portfolio changes, sales CAGR at the midpoint of our targeted 2%-4% range over the decade, solid EBITDA conversion on incremental sales, maintaining CapEx at 4% and net R&D at 3% of our revenues, driving our adjusted effective tax rate down to a reasonable 27%, cash conversion of 45%, and increasing the net leverage target to 2x EBITDA, given our larger scale and consistent performance. This is provided we see value in doing so. With these assumptions, we would have about $1.9 billion of cash available for capital allocation from 2026 through 2030.
This comes from $1.3 billion of adjusted free cash flow from operations and another $600 million of debt with the increase in annual adjusted EBITDA dollars and net leverage going to 2x . To be clear, this $1.9 billion is after the roughly 4% of sales for CapEx to support organic sales growth of 3% over the decade. We're also committed to our dividend. With our current dividend and share count, we will need around $225 million of dividends, leaving just under $1.7 billion to allocate over the decade. Of note, we've raised our dividend twice since the spin, but with our share count reduction, our annual obligations have stayed into the $40 million-$47 million range.
We will continue to use our financial discipline and focus on driving long-term shareholder value when allocating this capital, whether it's to drive growth through acquisitions or higher organic growth, or to return additional capital to shareholders through higher dividends and share repurchases. If we don't see good returns from either of these, we're gonna stay patient and maintain either a lower net leverage or higher cash balance and liquidity. Investors have asked how we make our capital allocation decisions. My response is, it's a dynamic process that we review on a quarterly basis internally and with our board of directors. We look at our leverage, our cash balances, cash flow generation forecasts, our market valuation versus our internal valuation, and the acquisition pipeline. When deciding between share repurchases and acquisition, we're always gonna compare valuation multiples, long-term growth expectation, and risks on execution.
Paying a higher multiple for a business that has similar future expectations along with uncertainty is not a decision we would make, as repurchasing shares would deliver the same or more value with less risk. If we decide to repurchase shares, we generally establish an amount we're comfortable with purchasing in the quarter, and we then establish a pricing grid in which we will purchase various amounts on a daily basis. Other structures may also be used. Our decisions are gonna be based on delivering long-term shareholder value and maximizing shareholder returns. Although the assumptions and the math are simple to put on a page, we understand that we must continue to execute well on a quarterly basis, year in and year out, in order to deliver on these expectations.
As we grow organically and look at acquisitions, we're focused on continuing to transition our business and end markets with long-term growth to long-term growth opportunities. Our target business distribution when we reach $5 billion will be to have over 80% of our revenues coming from service, commercial vehicle, off-highway, industrial, and other applications, putting us in a more favorable position for consistent and higher long-term growth. With this as our new foundation, we are projecting the following at $5 billion of revenues. With an improved distribution of sales across higher opportunity end markets, we expect to have higher sales CAGR range moving forward. This will also allow us to drive higher adjusted EBITDA margins, stronger cash conversion, and adjusted free cash flow, while still maintaining a moderate level of debt, moderate level of net leverage and strong liquidity.
Again, this is all about being a consistent, reliable, financially disciplined, and value-focused company. With that, I'd now like to move to move us to the Q&A session. Thank you. First, I'll open up to the floor and see if anybody wants to lead off with a question. I have several questions I can ask up here, just wanted to open it up onto the floor and see if anyone wants to get started. Joe?
Thank you. Joseph Spak from UBS. First question is just on the $5 billion 2030 target, which I know that includes M&A. It's also a number you've given out, I think, in mid 2023. I was wondering if you could help us at a higher level, summarize and understand what's changed. You just sort of spent a good part of the day, you know, messaging that, you know, some of the underlying factors in the markets are actually moving more in your favor, yet that number is pretty similar. It actually looks like maybe even organically, it's a little bit lower.
I understand you're maybe at a lower base 'cause you're maybe a little bit behind, but why sort of a similar level if some of these factors are moving more in your direction?
Yeah, I think there's a couple things. One is, we got a lot of feedback, too, of saying, "In order to get to the $5 billion by 2030, you have to do an acquisition. Are you going to do an acquisition no matter what?" We tried to lay out here, no, we're not gonna do an acquisition. We're only gonna do it if it makes sense and it meets our criteria. That's one of the reasons why we kinda went away from the $5 billion by 2030, you know, as a, as a firm target. Just to give us some more flexibility, if our stock price stays low, and we have good organic opportunities, we'll just continue to buy back shares, if we think that's gonna create more value for our shareholders.
I think from that 2023 timeframe, I think the markets have been a lot lower, too, from those original expectations. Rather than continuing to grow, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, we actually started to kind of plateau a little bit. We have to catch up to that, and that's why that organic CAGR was at the low end or actually outside the 2%-4% range. These are just assumptions based on getting to 3%. I think our close to 4%, forecasted growth in 2026, I think is a good, a good omen for us to get back into that range and hopefully push us towards the high end of the range, you know, towards the end of the decade.
Okay. Just to follow up on that, like if we look at the organic levels, you know, 25-30, the 4.2, it's like a little bit over 3.5% organic growth. I think one of the slides showed your addressable markets is about 1.4%. Can you just help us understand what's sort of driving the performance relative to that? Is it continued market share gains? Is it pricing, or how much is being assumed?
Yeah, it's definitely the market share gains and us entering, you know, that off-highway industrial and other markets. You know, as you kind of noticed, I think it was over 2/3 of it, or 75% of the addressable market in those out years, is coming from aftermarket. If you look at Neil's independent aftermarket in some of the in the appendix, the independent aftermarket grew 6%, 7% for us last year. I think that independent aftermarket will continue to be a strong grower, and I think our growth in the off-highway industrial group is also gonna be very high growth. With CV recovering from a being on a down cycle, I think is also gonna help us quite a bit too.
Neil can address it better, but that does mean some of that growth would be so price, because in aftermarket, there's always gonna be a pricing component that builds into that, so.
Yeah, a little differently to the OE business, we would expect to recover inflation in our pricing year-on-year. We are growing, have been growing at least twice as fast as the market in volume terms, through the last 3 years.
... I think we've walked you through that before as far as the drivers is 1%-2% price, 1%-2%, you know, just the market is growing in the aftermarket with age of fleet and number of vehicles. Neil and his team have been doing a great job on picking up additional share and bringing new product lines to new markets, and that's where we expect them to be in the 3%-6%, and they've been on the high end of that the last couple of years. Right.
Don.
Yeah.
Brian Sponheimer from Gabelli. Just a question more in the near term. We had a pretty substantial aftermarket supplier run into some significant issues this year. Just wondering if you've seen anything change regarding your relationship with your customer base regarding supply chain financing, or any of your payables programs that you otherwise have enjoyed over time?
They want me to.
To split the question a couple of ways. First of all, we've definitely seen opportunities to pick up more business as a result of that supplier failing. We are actively working on a list of new customer acquisitions for some of our products, so that's positive for us. At the moment, we have not seen any change in supply chain financing arrangements. I think that, you know, most of our customers, probably all of our customers, approach that in a very responsible way. We haven't seen a large kind of aftershock from what's happened in the market.
No, ours is fairly minimal because most of that financing is based on the North American and some of the practices there. I mean, you can see it in RK, it's about $160 million a year for us, which is not a big amount. It's only because of the particulars on working capital related to a few of our customers in the North American aftermarket. We don't look to expand that at all.
I know Brian has one. I mean, Jake, sorry. Jake.
Hey, guys, Jake Scholl, BNP. I appreciate the expected end market mix at $5 billion in sales, but obviously, that requires some level of M&A. How should we think about what that would look like in the absence of M&A, organically at $4.2 billion, especially as we think about the industrial and aftermarket businesses?
I mean, I think the Aftermarket and the Industrial, I think we've got a good plan to get there, you know, organically. It may take a little bit longer than 2030 to get to those percentages. Again, our expectation, whether we do M&A or not, we're gonna get there. If we do it organically, it just may be a few years later than 2030. That's really where we're still driving a lot of our new business wins, and the effort of the team. I think we've seen it with the off-highway and Industrial business. It was, I think, 4% in 2024. We're up to 6% in 2025. I think with Chris's numbers, it's gonna go up as a percentage of our sales again in 2026.
I think we've got a pretty good path for that off-highway industrial to get to that 10%. I think Neil's team in the aftermarket and service business has been picking up almost 1% of share of our PHINIA sales as well, so I think they've got a good path. I think those are the two that are probably the, have the most confidence in as far as getting there sooner. I think the other ones, it's gonna depend on some of the cycles. How quickly does CV recover? When do we see that really kind of recovering? Again, on some of them, we're not gonna turn away light passenger vehicle business, if more customers wanna award us more or if battery electric penetration rates continue to go down.
Those are the ones that may have a little bit more kind of flex in between them, in the outer years.
In terms of M&A, I mean, Pedro should really address that, and he basically said it in what he said in what we're targeting.
Yeah, and there, nothing has changed. I think we were very vocal about it, that all our M&A activity is focused around the CV, aftermarket, and industrial arena. No news. We keep on monitoring. Since inception, we have looked more than 100 to 150 opportunities. We keep on our scanning. We're gonna be financially disciplined. If it is the right segment, right fit for our portfolio, right footprint for the right price, there's a lot of rights here that have a lot of tick marks that have to occur. That's why M&A is so difficult. We might move along. If not, we'll stay patient.
Thank you. Then I know it was a lot of work to get the tax rate down pretty significantly last year. Do you guys still think 27% is the right long-term rate once you're fully past this headache?
It's the next hurdle rate to get to. My tax guy is probably online, dying for what I'm gonna say next. No, I mean, we're gonna continue to drive it down, but it just does take a lot of time. I think mid-20s is a good number that we're shooting for. Would we go lower than that? Yes, we're not gonna do something silly to get there. It has to be something that's sustainable, that makes sense, and that is not only lowering the rate, but the cash taxes paid and all of the other things.
I mean, hopefully, you guys have learned from us that we try to be kind of steady and reliable. We're not taking very aggressive positions, both on our taxes, both on our projections and anything else, we're trying to be as consistent and reliable and continue to build on the reputation that we deliver on what we say. Dan?
Thank you. Dan Levy, Barclays. wanted to double-click on the push into the off-highway industrial and other end markets. I know that we're only talking about, you know, your longer-term aspiration is increased, you know, four points of market segment mix. Maybe you could just give us a sense of how truly adjacent these end markets are as far as leveraging the technologies, leveraging the capabilities. I know you're saying that it's, you know, the same core technology, but how much incremental effort is there for you to tap these markets? Maybe you could just give a sense of how you stack up versus some of the competitors here versus your positioning in the core light vehicle and CV space.
Sure. I'll pass that off to Todd in just a second. I guess if you go out there and take a look at some of those injectors, you won't be able to tell the difference between one that's for marine, one that's for JCB and hydrogen, or, you know, a 100% heated tip injector for ethanol in South America or natural gas. It's very much the same, and maybe, Todd, if you can expand on that.
Yes. When we look at those markets, the reason they're adjacent is because they're using similar technology. If you have a combustion engine to power a vehicle or a combustion engine to power a stationary power generation or a boat engine, that technology is quite portable between those different applications. The expertise of our engineers, the manufacturing production processes, are quite similar between them, and then we're able to adjust for system supply or component supply in those adjacent markets based on where the needs are. Quite flexible in terms of technology resources, production resources, and the capability that's required to serve those adjacent markets.
Again, maybe, Todd, you can expand a little bit on, as an example, if you're going from a gasoline to 100% ethanol or a methanol, it's very corrosive. The design is pretty much the same, but we may have to add a DLC coating or a different material to it to adjust for the corrosive nature of it. Depending on the viscosity or the energy density, the holes, rather than 60 microns, may be 80 microns to allow greater flow. Those are the small little changes that are needed in order to then adapt to those new markets. Todd?
Yeah. Yeah, that's precisely right. Whether it's materials or internal geometry, different flow rates, we adjust those for different vehicle engines, and we can also adjust those for different alternative fuels or different applications. It does come down to understanding what the material requirements are, what the flow requirements are, and being able to adapt the design. The basic principles are the same principles that we're using across these different applications. It's the adjustments where our expertise and our knowledge kicks in to be able to do that seamlessly, regardless of what market is being served.
Okay. Thank you. As a follow-up, just want to double-click then on another end market shift that you have, and your mix of light passenger vehicle and light commercial vehicle on highway are going to shrink, but you're telling us that revenue is gonna be flat today versus the out years. There's a share component here. What's the confidence that the share gains will continue to increase, and just the positioning versus some of your competitors that enable you to get that higher share?
Yeah, I mean, we're actually seeing, as you guys know, we're probably seeing a little bit of tailwind. One is, because the BEV penetration rates are shrinking, so that's giving us a little bit of tailwind. As you guys know, we have a lot of confidence on the business that we win today. Doesn't launch for another few years and is gonna continue to 2030 and 2032. We have really good visibility on the market share gains that we're having and how that's gonna have an impact on our business through 2030. We generally have a pretty good idea, you know, over the next three, four years of that trend.
Again, when we actually go through this, and Pedro leads it, you know, on an annual basis, we'll do a bottoms-up analysis on all the different programs that are available, what's coming, you know, our success rate on keeping our incumbent business, as well as, you know, potential success rate on some conquests. We've, we feel very confident in us being able to continue to deliver that market share gain based on the new business wins we've already had and continue to see.
Some of it depends on the region and the customers, 'cause just remember, our landscape in Asia Pacific is that we were always on the local, domestic China suppliers who are no longer staying domestic. They're expanding. I think most people saw that BYD is increasing tremendously, and they're one of our customers. You know, in our top four is one of the domestic China OEs. As that expands, and whether it's expanding in Asia Pacific or it's moving into another region, we're on those products. Yeah, that's part of it.
Yeah, if I can add, it's an internal KPI. Weekly, we have what we call a business case review, and weekly, we review three, four, five responses to requests from quotations from our end customers. There's a lot of activity of sourcing, resourcing on light passenger and light commercial vehicle. We keep on responding to those customer requests worldwide, and our success rates are encouraging. We're really confident that increasing market share and maintaining absolute revenue till the ends of the decade, beginnings of the next one, is...
It's, we're comfortable with it. It's okay.
I have one that came in. Can you talk about the latest changes relating to tariffs and how it affects your 2026 outlook?
Well, which day?
True.
Tariffs. I mean, the latest changes with the tariffs that are coming off, the other tariffs coming on, it's immaterial in the change in terms of how that's gonna look. It's a tiny bit, we think, of a windfall. It depends because, you know, if you look at our 2025, we really got payback or that pass-through for all of it. If we get pass-through back on any and any tariffs, which we're not sure about, and my legal guy is staring at me, he's probably going, "Don't go there." You know, 'cause that outlook on getting back the tariffs is interesting. If we did get them back, I'm absolutely sure we would have to pass them on. You're just talking about the difference in the old tariff scheme to the new tariff scheme. It's immaterial.
It's very small.
Another one got emailed to me. On the slide showing 2024 to 2026 growth, can you address the slower EBITDA CAGR compared to the sales CAGR?
Yeah, that one again goes back to the tariffs and FX. If you go from 2024 to 2025, if you remember at the end of the first quarter of 2025, which seems like a long time ago, which was, but just a year, we did have a big change that was when the tariffs were introduced. That was when FX, dollar weakened. We did have a big change there, like every other company. Those had dilutive effects on our results for the rest of the year 'cause they've remained fairly steady throughout there. You get into this year, even we're gonna convert, including the dilutive effect of tariffs and FX, at 20%. If you take those out, our conversion is almost double that. It's better.
It's last year, you have a good bit of dilutive effect because you have three quarters of the FX changes and the tariffs. That's what creates that bit of a difference, because you've got sales on sales with that are tariff, that are basically hollow sales passing through.
Bobby?
Thank you. Hey, Bobby Brooks from Northland. One question I wanted to ask on the expansion into the power generation space. Wanted to get a little bit more granular in terms of kinda what the products are, what the products you guys are using or selling to supply that, and kinda what type of gen sets is the focus centered on? Is that all coming from the SEM acquisition? Just wanna get a better picture of kind of the opportunity as a whole.
Yeah, it's kind of both. I know a lot of people wanna talk about it, but it's pretty much anybody who's on combustion is probably also on power gen. It still has a fuel injection system. It's just sometimes, if we sell to a Volvo Penta or a large, you know, customer, sometimes we don't know if it's going into a truck, a mining truck, or into power generation 'cause it's the same technology. We've been supplying that market for a lot of years. I think there was the story I'll explain to folks, a few years ago, we had this huge demand on one of our mechanical pumps, and we didn't know why.
I mean, it's a 30-year-old technology. The volume shot up. It was because they were doing all these backup power generators with Cat Perkins for 5G cell towers. We had a spike for a few years. It was great business. Then it kind of tapered back down to what it was again. We're on a lot of these backup and power gen. I think it's gonna be both with pumps, injectors, and now probably on some of the larger things, that's what the SEM is on some of those ignitions for natural gas. Unless, Todd, you wanna expand on some of those applications?
I would add that in the combustion engine part of a stationary power gen, whether, as Brady mentioned, it's injectors, pumps, or rails, now with SEM, we have the ignition portion of it. Many of those customers are looking not just on traditional fuels, but also on alternative fuels as well, and that's where some of our technology flexibility can come in, whether it's natural gas or some alternative fuels that are being used in the stationary power generation also. Those would apply, as mentioned, whether it's for telecom, for data centers, even for water management, and we've been supplying those through various OEs for a number of years and continue to grow in that space.
Got it. Thank you. You've had a lot of success breaking into the aerospace and defense end market, and you've mentioned how that's given you confidence that that's the right approach. Are there any markets where you might have initially thought were ripe for entry, but now, after a couple of years of trying to penetrate them, it's not as compelling? The reverse of that, are there any industries where you initially didn't think might be compelling that now, fast-forward two years, are more compelling to try to break into?
I guess I'm not.
Yeah, I may mention one that I would say is not now, but maybe in the future, is medical. Medical has very precision fluid management requirements, and we do very precise fluid management. It does make a logical fit. To your question, we haven't made a significant inroad there. Part of that, because we have these other adjacent markets which are taking focus and attention to grow in. I think that's probably the only one that I can think of specifically that we've looked at and have not pursued aggressively at this time, but may, at some point in the future, make a good connection.
I think a lot of it's gonna be: can we leverage our existing manufacturing processes and skills? As Todd mentioned around fluid management, that's gonna be one of the core competencies of our skills, whether that's electrical motors, electrical controls, ECUs, calibration software. Those are kind of our core competencies of the company, we're gonna be selective on where we see opportunities to grow. I'm not aware of one that we've started and then didn't go back. I think it may have been a little bit on hydrogen. You know, I think we were investing a little bit in hydrogen, but most of that was being subsidized either by our customers or through grants. We've dialed that back a little bit, but we actually used a lot of that lessons learned for natural gas and other applications.
We've dialed that back, and then we put more on aerospace and defense, and so we can easily kinda move it around. The one commitment that we have is that we're not gonna sacrifice our financials to go after a medical or go after an aerospace and defense. We're holding to our 3% net R&D or 4% of CapEx and being that consistent, reliable performer. We're not gonna saying, "Hey, trust us, we're gonna invest all this money, and we're gonna sacrifice our margins in hopes of something coming in two or three years." That's not who we are, and that's not what we're gonna do. We're gonna maintain our financial discipline, and I think the aerospace is a good example.
You know, we had one location in France that kinda said, "Hey, we think we have some capabilities," and they were starting to plant some seeds with aerospace, probably what, Todd, seven, eight years ago?
Yeah.
For some of the first interaction.
Yeah.
They planted those seeds, and they waited and waited and just did a small amount, then it started to pick up, we kinda said: Well, this is really interesting. We're gaining some traction. Now, let's really kinda put some additional resources on it and really start driving it. That's where we've seen some of the success. You'll see that both on the OE side, you'll see that on the aftermarket side, that we plant some seeds, and we see which one starts to grow. One starts to grow, we really start planting a bunch of those seeds you know, around the organization.
Brady, I may just piggyback just briefly on the importance of what Brady mentioned in controller capability, software systems capability. We've done engine control units for a number of years and have what's an increasingly rare skill set in combustion to be able to provide that to customers. That extends not only to engine control units, but controllers for other elements on vehicle or on engine. Powertrain domain controllers, we've been able to move forward with a key customer in that area, as well as other control units that are used. That leverages this extensive software systems integration calibration capability that we have, which really adds value regardless of what market we're moving into.
If I could just squeeze in one more question. I really like, Brady, your the framing that you used of, like, planting the seeds and seeing which ones to sprout. Kinda piggybacking on that, could you just maybe give us a sense of what, how many seeds are kinda planted today within aerospace that might be starting to sprout comparatively to what that was in entering 2025 or entering 2024?
I mean, there's quite a few. There's not, what, four or five major engine manufacturers to deal with, so there's not a bunch that we need to go chasing. We're talking to all of them. I think with the, with us getting our quality, aerospace quality certification and them understanding that we're launching with one of the top five engine manufacturers in the world, gives us a lot of credibility, and that's opened up a lot of doors. I think that's what I think both Pedro and Todd kind of highlighted is there's a lot of discussion, and I would be disappointed if we don't have additional announcements with additional players, you know, this year.
Thank you.
I have one that got emailed to me from somebody online: How much of the shift toward 80% revenue from service, commercial vehicle, and off-highway is organic versus M&A, M&A-driven? What's the timeline and sequencing of that shift, and is that driven more by growth in these segments or intentional decline in LPV?
I think there's a pathway to do it organically. It just may take longer than 2030. As I mentioned earlier, we're not turning down good business on the light passenger vehicle or light commercial vehicle. It's just we see that market's a little more challenged. If they give us a good return and a good, you know, it's a good program, we're gonna support and invest in light passenger vehicle as well. It's just what we see in the market, of those dynamics of it being a bit challenged. The opportunities that we see in CV and aftermarket and off-highway industrial are real, and we see significant growth in those areas, and so we just see those areas growing much faster than the light passenger vehicle.
Another one that came in online: How do you see the Indian market as it's the only large, high-growth market kind of out there? This question says. What are your strategies in India?
Yeah, I mean, we're clearly present in India. We've got a wholly owned location as well as a joint venture in India that's unconsolidated. We continue to see good, solid growth. As Pedro mentioned, you know, we've just been awarded three from three different OEMs on natural gas.
... we'll be launching those over the next few years. As you mentioned, you know, India is one of the few locations that still sees combustion engine growth, you know, through this decade and beyond. We've got multiple locations, manufacturing locations. We have an engineering tech center there, both for IT support as well as, you know, software and calibration and application support for customers. I go there on a regular basis, and so does the rest of our team. We see as a, as a nice growth opportunity on alternative fuels. They're probably the most advanced on natural gas, both on light vehicle, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles. They have a lot of interest in hydrogen as well, and ethanol applications. We're very present there, and we continue to grow there well.
You brought up hydrogen. This one came in online. Just, Todd, this question is for you. 89% of R&D is focused on efficiency improvements. How does that evolve as alternative fuels scale?
Part of the efficiency improvement is with alternative fuels, and part of it is with traditional fuels. As we improve efficiency with our traditional fuels of gasoline or diesel, whether it's improved performance or fuel economy, that's an innovative part of our development activity. Then part of it is with alternative fuels. I think that percentage roughly will stay about the same as we move forward. There just may be a shift within it from traditional fuels to alternative, depending on the market transition in our customers' roadmaps.
Todd, what's the 11% made of?
The 11% is for existing, component supply, product supply, supporting our plants. Some of this foundational engineering activity that supports our manufacturing and operations, to continue to deliver the results that we saw earlier.
Thanks.
I guess, is that flex... Sorry, Federico.
Thank you. Federico Merendi, Wolfe Research. So you have a strong presence in the aftermarket segment, right? Most of it, most of your sales from what I recall, are North America and Europe. Is there an opportunity in APAC, given that basically, the vehicles in operations are growing, and I guess that maybe they're still on the younger side, but they will also age over time? On the top of that, do you think that's an area where you can actually see M&A going through to help you to boost your presence in the region? Lastly, could you remind us of what percentage of the aftermarket is exposed to light vehicle, passenger light vehicle, commercial, and medium, heavy duty?
Yeah, I think there's. Neil, if you want to hit the Asia-Pacific opportunity and what we're doing there, and then I'll hit the last one.
Yes, Asia-Pacific is an area that we're really focusing on in our business development. I would really say that we need to think about it as two separate markets. One is China, which is half of the regional opportunity, and the other half is the rest of the markets in Asia-Pacific. We see lots of opportunity across those markets outside China, and we have the team focused on those. As I talked about in my presentation, the key success factors are making sure you have the right range, making sure you are first to market, and you give the right logistics support. We're really setting ourselves up to do that.
China is a slightly different market, but our strong OE position with the domestic Chinese manufacturers, I think, gives us opportunity in the longer term, as we see our GDI systems and other products coming into the market there, and starting to fail. It's one of the areas we really wanna work on and has, I would say, you know, been an area that hasn't developed as quickly as we would have liked in the past. That's the focus we have.
Yeah, well, I think there's a couple unique things with Asia market. One is, our starter and alternator business is primarily a North America CV business. We don't have a lot of presence there, so that's always gonna make it a little bit smaller. I think the other side of it, on the GDI side, we were a little bit later getting into that market, and we're just ramping up now. Once those vehicles get a little bit older as well, I think we'll have more opportunity to grow with that business. M&A in Asia, it's challenging. We've looked at a few, but again, it's getting the right technology and the right fit, and not having unknown things.
When you're purchasing in China with a local Chinese company, there comes a lot of different risks that have kept us kind of away from that market in general. I think the split was the last question. I think you're roughly about 50/50 between, say, light vehicle and commercial vehicle in our aftermarket segment.
Thank you.
Got another one here. This one's for Pedro. Medium duty and heavy duty is targeted to grow to over 20% at $5 billion. Is that share gain, market growth, or mix shift? What pricing pressure exists in this segment?
Yeah, good question. It's a mix of all. We're being successful in gaining new customers and extending our product portfolio in existing ones, so we're gaining market share. CV has been performing relatively weak in the past years. We expect it to somehow take off and recover. On our aspirational target, we also have a portion allocated to the CV section. So it is actually a blend of all the three points.
You had indicated increasing net leverage to 2x could be appropriate. Under what conditions would you execute that?
Where it adds shareholder value, I guess. One, as you saw on there, I think as we continue to get credibility and stability and get a little bit larger in size, similar to how we went from 1 to 1.5, we're gonna do it on a conservative basis as we start to get consistent results. I think also, if you'll see, too, even though we may increase from 1.5 to 2, our debt cost may not go up that much. The last time when we did the refinancing, we actually went from 1 to 1.5, but our debt service costs actually stayed flat because our interest rates dropped. If you see where our debt's trading right now, it's another 150 basis points below what we went out with.
We'll look at that, probably not, you know, this year because it's the first one is a 5 non-call 2, and it's a little expensive to do right now. If we go and get additional debt, it's probably at least 150 basis points lower. It's becoming a lot more attractive for us to look at that, but we're only gonna do it if we think there's a good use of that cash. Same thing with the 2.0. I think as we get closer to $4 billion on a consistent basis and our margins continue to convert and increase, we could probably afford to go to 2x and still be in a very, you know, reasonable net leverage and debt service cost position.
Again, going to 2x only makes sense if we think we can create additional shareholder value. Is that through an acquisition at a great price that makes sense to our current valuation? If our multiple drops again, and we're opportunistically buy back a bunch of shares because the share price is well below where we think is fair value, we could do that too. I think you saw that over the last few years when we refinanced the last time, we took out a little bit extra cash. I think cash on hand went close to $500 million as we increased our net leverage target to 1.5, and most of that money was used in the share repurchase program, which I think was a really good return for investors.
You know, at an average share price of $44, seemed like a pretty wise thing to do. We're gonna continue to be opportunistic. When we see good opportunities to buy back our shares, we'll buy back our shares. If the price goes to $120, we may back off a little bit and look at other opportunities may open up. Again, I can't say I'm just gonna do one or the other. It all kind of depends, and it's gonna change every quarter.
How should we think about incremental margin on revenue growth in 2026?
20%. Well, 20%, and that's including FX, and that's what we always strive for. I tell Neil his incremental should be a little higher than fuel systems, we do a blended average of about 20%. As we said, we are expecting that this year on the additional revenue, but if you strip out FX and tariff changes year-over-year, it's actually higher than that.
I mean, I think both on the up and down side, that's a good number to kind of use that 20% expectation on EBITDA. I think to Chris's point, we're actually showing a little bit higher, that's primarily because of some of the IT and restructuring that we've done. We're starting to get some benefits there. Our supply chain team has done a really good job on some of the productivity in the plants, we're actually seeing some, I guess, what people like to call the self-help, things that are coming through as well that's helping us. We're gonna continue to drive those things, but I think a consistent number is in that 20% on the upside and downside for a conversion number on incremental sales in a more standard environment.
I'll have a couple more that just came in. We might have touched on this one a little bit, but you're targeting $100 million of aerospace revenue by 2030. Can you explain what the revenue ramp profile looks like that? Then in aerospace and defense, how do you compete against tier one incumbent suppliers?
Yeah, I mean, as Pedro said, it's a little bit aspirational. We don't have that one as clear as we have on the light vehicle side for market share gains. What we're seeing in that space is we're generally being able to win the business and launch it within 12-18 months after winning the business. The last one that we just announced, I think, launches in 2027. Excuse me. Our view is that we'll be able to continue with that ramp. The other thing to remind folks is in a lot of these applications, we're just getting 50% of the volume, at this point because they're kind of letting us enter the market. They're gonna see how we perform.
If we execute well, our expectation is that we'll be able to then take over 100% of the volume, and that may then allow us to ramp up a little bit faster. That's on the organic side. I think there's a lot of, you know, interesting opportunities for us to continue to grow on that, on the organic side. The second part was?
How do you compete against tier one?
Competing against.
-suppliers.
The tier ones. I think what the feedback that we get from our these aerospace customers is really around they have a lot of small mom-and-pop shops or small medium enterprises that are doing machine components, and they're having struggles. They're not being reinvested. Their second, third generation may not be all that interested in them. We're picking up some of that business because we have a lot of component manufacturing skill sets, whether it's with DLC, laser drilling, machining, ablation. What they also like from us, not only can we do the components, but we can also do the assembly and the complete system. They tend to have two groups of suppliers, ones that do components and ones that do complete systems, and we actually have the capability to do both.
What that enables us to do is to do things a lot faster for them and adapt to their needs very quickly. That's one of the things I think the aerospace side struggles with, is the speed. I think I shared this with people before on this first program launch that we had. We were actually ahead of schedule on PPAP and ready to go into production, and they didn't know what to do with us because they'd never had a supplier that was on time, let alone early, with a launch. It's that type of reputation that we're building with them, and that's why we continue to pick up additional business and why we have confidence that we'll continue to win moving forward.
Yeah. Yeah.
Neil, during your part of the presentation, there was a nice graph of what I think what was called out as, like, $41 billion in core market opportunities. Just wanted to understand that a bit better. Is that $41 billion in sales opportunity a year? Just wanna understand kinda what that encompass.
That was the total addressable market for all the products that you saw in our portfolio everywhere in the world. As I mentioned in the presentation, we don't necessarily sell all of the products in every market in the world. One of the opportunities we have is to do that geographic expansion, and to penetrate those markets. If we did sell $41 billion, that would be 100% market share, which would be great, but probably not realistic. You know, it certainly is an opportunity that helps us towards that target of $2 billion, aftermarket revenue from organic growth, is simply making sure that we take all the opportunities we have with the products that we have in the portfolio today.
I don't wanna keep everyone here longer than they need to be. We'll wrap with the Q&A there. If anyone has any questions that didn't get asked, feel free to shoot me an email at kferris@phinia.com, or you can contact us through our investor relations website. Again, thank you all for coming, battling the weather. It's great to see you here in person, and we look forward to seeing you out at some conferences in the future and being at your conferences in the future. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you very much.