Great. So, good morning, everybody. Welcome to Regal Rexnord's 2024 Investor Day. I'm Rob Barry, Vice President, Investor Relations. On behalf of everybody at Regal Rexnord, welcome, and thank you for spending some time with us this morning to get to know about the company. As we get underway, let me just review the agenda. We'll start out with our CEO, Louis Pinkham, providing an overview of our company and our strategy, in particular how we're planning to accelerate profitable organic growth. Following Louis, we'll have Jerry Morton, who runs our IPS business, Industrial Powertrain Solutions. After that, we'll take a break at around 10:00 A.M. for 10 minutes. After the break, Brooke Lang, who runs our Power Efficiency Solutions business, or PES, will present, followed by Kevin Zaba, who runs Automation and Motion Control.
Please note that after each of the segment presentations, we will do, time allowing, up to 10 minutes of segment-specific Q&A. That Q&A will be just for those in the room here, and I'll moderate it, and then lastly, after Kevin, Rob Rehard, our CFO, will present, after which we will have a general Q&A session. During that time, we'll also be taking questions from those who are joining us virtually, and those online can feel free to submit those questions, either through the online portal or you could also email me directly, robert.barry@regalrexnord.com. Just a couple of housekeeping items.
I will direct you to our forward-looking statements, and then also, just as a matter of safety, in the event that we have an alarm, we will just stay in place and await further instructions. If there is a need to evacuate, you will go out the doors that you came in, in the back of the room, all the way directly to the back left of the lobby and down Stairway F. With that, I will turn it over to Louis.
Great. Thanks, Rob. And good morning to those who are here in person and to those who are joining virtually. Thank you for spending time to learn more about the transformation of Regal Rexnord, which we have been executing with intention over the past five years to create a portfolio capable of delivering stronger organic growth, higher margins, and more cash flow than at any time in our history. The significant value creation potential of our transformed portfolio will be the focus of our presentation today.
Some of the defining characteristics of the powerful enterprise we have created are listed on the left-hand side of this slide: high exposure to secular markets, with roughly 50% of our sales in markets with meaningful secular growth tailwinds, technology-differentiated products and solutions that reflect longstanding leadership in the markets we serve, years of leveraging an 80/20 mindset to focus on products where we have the most compelling value proposition, and a robust pipeline of new products informed by voice of the customer and weighted to secular markets, leading brands and channel positions, which in combination with a large installed base of our products make our businesses more durable by driving strong customer loyalty and supporting higher margin aftermarket sales.
About 40% of our sales are tied to the aftermarket, which helps make our business more resilient. An advantaged global manufacturing footprint and supply chain that helps ensure supply resiliency for our customers. But more importantly, an advantaged go-to-market with the scale and scope of our commercial team. These factors contribute to making our portfolio highly cash-generative. In short, a powerful enterprise. As we think about the future, it is really about three factors listed on the right-hand side of this slide. It starts with organic growth, in particular outgrowth. We expect increasingly consistent above-market growth, leveraging the attributes of our transformed portfolio and go-to-market. Our segment leaders will bring this story to life in their presentations, and Rob will quantify the impacts at an enterprise level.
But the bottom line is that we expect to be well-positioned to consistently outgrow our end markets with a target of 50% outgrowth through the cycle. Next, strong margins. We are firmly on track to achieving top quartile margins. Despite encountering significant end-market headwinds over the last two years, we have a clear line of sight to achieving our previous targets of 40% gross margins and 25% EBITDA margins exiting 2025 by successfully executing our many 80/20 and lean initiatives, along with our M&A synergies. Finally, cash flow. What ultimately drives valuation?
We have a clear line of sight to generating over $1 billion of annual free cash flow starting in 2026, which we see translating to a low to mid-teens free cash flow margin, top quartile performance across industrials. In the near term, this strong cash flow supports sizable equity value creation through delivering. Somewhat longer term, it supports meaningful value creation through stock repurchases and bolt-on M&A. We began a strategic and operational transformation journey in 2019, soon after I became CEO. So I looked at 2018 to baseline our performance. In that year, Legacy Regal was approximately $3.6 billion in sales, with 27% gross margins, 15% EBITDA margins, and an 8% free cash flow margin.
Our portfolio was 77% weighted to electric motors, with the remaining 23% in power transmission. Customer concentration was high, at about 24% of sales from our top 10 OEM customers. Early in my tenure, our leadership team and the board made intentional decisions to do more in power transmission, expand into the strategically adjacent industrial automation space, and restructure our motors business to focus on wider moat, higher margin, premium efficiency motors, and air-moving products.
Through organic and inorganic efforts, merging with Rexnord PMC, acquiring Altra, and divesting our Industrial Systems business, we transformed into a business that in 2023, presented here considering a full year of owning Altra and excluding Industrial Systems, generated $6.2 billion in sales at 36% gross margins, 22% EBITDA margins, and an 11% free cash flow margin. Notably, our customer concentration over this period fell to 11%, and today no single OEM customer represents more than 2.4% of our sales. Many factors were critical in this transformation, but if I had to choose one, it would be our adoption of 80/20.
For those of you who may be less familiar, 80/20 is about evaluating customers and products by sales and margin, and then focusing the majority of resources on the highest-value customers and products, what we refer to as our 80s. When we first started to leverage 80/20 back in 2019, we focused on our 80s customers and products, which resulted in some intentionally pruned business. Today, 80/20 is all about growth. It's about overserving our 80s customers and over-investing in our 80s products they value to gain wallet share, and it's about finding new customers that resemble our current 80s, what we refer to as our perfect prospects.
Said another way, instead of valuing all customers and products equally, we now differentiate based on the fit between what customers value and are willing to pay for and what we offer. We measure this fit with gross margin. For this reason, gross margin is a key metric for how we run the business. Again, it reflects the value customers see in our products. The 900 basis points improvement we achieved from 2018 to 2023, of which about 600 basis points is organic, reflects our increasingly differentiated offering as well as some solid operational execution, and again, we are on track to deliver nearly 38% gross margin this year.
Taken together, it is clear we have an organization positioned for stronger growth, especially in secular markets. Over the last five years, we have clearly repositioned our business to achieve top quartile performance. Our organizational structure moved from centralized to decentralized, from one where all decisions were made in Beloit, Wisconsin, to one where we have 14 business units that sit behind our three segments, led by a P&L leader with full responsibility for and control over the performance of their business.
Since 2018, we have reduced our global operational footprint by approximately 18%, and we expect a further decline of at least 15% as we continue to execute our synergies. Whereas in the past, the business experienced significant SKU proliferation in an effort to serve all customers, we have leveraged 80/20 to rationalize our portfolio through significant product line simplification. We have also driven a strategic shift from selling components to designing and engineering integrated solutions, representing a low single-digit % of our sales in 2018 up to a high single-digit % this year, and targeted to reach a high teens % by 2027.
We stood up a professional product management team that has shifted our new product development mindset from an "if we build it, they will come" approach to one that demands clear, quantifiable value propositions informed by the customer and guided by 80/20. One way to measure our progress is rising new product vitality, which was about 5% back in 2008, is roughly 10% today, and is expected to double to 20% in 2027. We have also been making significant investments in digital to provide customers a robust online purchasing experience along the entire quote-to-cash value chain.
In short, we have positioned the business to achieve more profitable growth, and based on this transformation journey, this is who we are today. We have three segments listed on the left: our premium efficiency motors and air-moving business, Power Efficiency Solutions, or PES. This segment represents the majority of our Legacy Regal business, our power transmission business, Industrial Powertrain Solutions, or IPS, and our Automation and Motion Control business, or AMC. Some key metrics already covered are listed on the right-hand side of this slide.
The pie charts below show our portfolio is weighted to automation and power transmission, and by geography to North America, but with a meaningful presence in Europe. At Regal Rexnord, we believe that best-in-class strategic execution starts with great talent, and therefore we focus on strategy than structure. Do we have the organizational structure in place necessary to effectively execute our strategy? In the last five years, we have added a lot of new talent to the Regal Rexnord team, but I am excited that we have also been building our internal bench, and so increasingly we are filling open roles from within. Legacy talent with deep product, customer, and domain expertise, along with new perspectives and subject matter expertise from new talent, is a powerful combination. This dynamic is evident in our executive leadership team.
Today, you will get to hear from our three segment leaders in addition to myself and Rob. Other members of our executive team are here as well and will be available over lunch. These include Cheryl Lewis, our CHRO, Hugo Dubovoy, our General Counsel, and Tom Dixon, our CDIO, and Justin Baier, our SVP of Strategy and Business Development. Our transformation journey to date would not have been as successful without our Regal Rexnord values. Our values serve as unwavering guideposts for how we run the business and given all the changes in our portfolio, our values and culture have been critical to us executing two extremely successful M&A integrations, to achieving our synergies, and to harnessing the power of the combined organizations. The engagement of our associates is also critical to our success.
We measure our progress here as we do with all our strategic initiatives with KPIs, a data-driven approach. This includes our now biannual associate engagement survey, the latest results from which are highlighted on this slide. We are proud of these results, which are on average more than 500 basis points above the manufacturing norm. This gives me confidence that we can successfully execute our strategic objectives. The Regal Rexnord Business System, or RBS, is our philosophy for continuous improvement, and it applies as much to helping us grow as it does to making us more efficient and improving our cost position. Our 80/20 framework and our lean tools go hand in hand. At a high level, 80/20 directs us to the most valuable opportunities, and lean allows us to pursue them efficiently and productively.
Removing waste, variation, and overburden from our processes not only raises our efficiency and lowers cost, but improves service to our customers, which helps us grow. Our RBS philosophy is summarized by the image on this slide and is meant to be read from the center out. It is aligned with our Regal Rexnord values. We focus on the success of our key three stakeholders: our customers, our associates, and our investors. We maximize shareholder value through lean transformation and leveraging an 80/20 growth mindset. We focus on safety, quality, delivery, and cost in that order, which leads to growth. The engine to drive this methodology is our people, planning, process, and performance cycle, fundamental to which is having the right people in the right seats and achieving engagement across the entire enterprise.
What is critical is that this approach is data-driven, team-oriented, and highly structured. When you look at achievements such as 900 basis points of gross margin improvement in the last five years, RBS had a large role to play, and it will continue to as we drive towards our future objectives. In May of this year, we announced an evolved business purpose to reflect our strategic portfolio transformation. We create a better tomorrow with sustainable solutions that power, transmit, and control motion. Our new purpose emphasizes our transformed portfolio is now characterized by more technology-differentiated products and solutions, many that help end users reduce their environmental impact. Our purpose also captures the unifying characteristic of our new portfolio, which centers on motion. High-efficiency electric motors and air-moving solutions provide the power to create motion.
A portfolio of highly engineered power transmission components and solutions efficiently transmits motion to power industrial applications, while the Automation and Motion Control portfolio controls motion in a wide range of applications. Sustainability, social factors that include diversity, engagement, and inclusion, and good governance are all integral characteristics of our culture and our business strategy. Our goal is to achieve carbon neutrality across Scope 1 and 2 by 2032. And in the first year after setting this target, we achieved a 15.5% year-over-year reduction in our absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Performance we are proud of. We expect to achieve a further 10% reduction in emissions this year. Sustainability is also a critical component of our growth strategy. More than ever before, our customers want products that improve the sustainability of their products and of their operations.
As you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, about 60% of our products offering today directly or indirectly supports making our end users' applications more environmentally friendly, something I and our associates are proud of and characteristic of a product portfolio that our customers highly value. I spoke earlier about the critical importance of great talent, of engaged talent, of building teams of associates with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and also creating an environment where associates can leverage those perspectives to help us achieve our business objectives. Our engagement survey results and our operational transformation provide evidence that Regal Rexnord is such an environment.
Lastly, good governance. It is the bedrock of delivering strong, risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders. Leading raters who assess such metrics give Regal Rexnord consistently high scores. To learn more about our progress and initiatives around environmentalism, social factors, and governance, please reference the latest edition of our annual sustainability report, which we published last week. The strength of our enterprise is underpinned by significant competitive advantages. We have a flexible global manufacturing footprint, which has been a growth enabler for us, allowing us to serve our customers at times, such as through COVID, when others could not.
As we look ahead and contemplate risks related to global protectionist measures, such as tariffs, our manufacturing advantages take on a renewed relevance for our customers. We believe our broad portfolio of power transmission components, Automation and Motion Control solutions, and premium efficiency electric motors is unmatched, giving Regal Rexnord unique powertrain design capabilities. Similarly, we have broad go-to-market scale and scope with over 2,000 sales associates and sales support roles.
Our ability to serve our customers globally is a competitive advantage. Our scaled go-to-market also allows us to monetize our new products to an extent few, if any, of our competitors can match. Our sales into end markets with secular demand tailwinds is approximately 50%, which bolsters our growth outlook and makes our performance more durable. We have powerful brands. Many are decades or even a century old. Our brands are recognized, trusted emblems of quality, reliability, technology, and energy efficiency. They are valuable assets that differentiate us. Lastly, deep domain expertise has long been an asset of Regal. Having a deep understanding of our customer needs specific to the end markets in which they operate is evident in our gross margins and in our leading market positions.
In combination with the other advantages I discussed, our domain expertise will be a key driver to us moving up the value chain from component provider to trusted partner designing and engineering valued solutions. I hope you now have a better understanding of who we are, of our culture, and of how we've transformed Regal Rexnord over the last five years. Now let's get into more detail on our growth strategy. The diagram on the left-hand side of this slide provides a high-level summary for how we think about our growth strategy, a clear understanding of which markets we play in, how we are driving growth above market, and finally, inorganic growth, which will not be the focus of my discussion today, but is a topic Rob will spend a little time on later in the presentations.
On the right, we outline the four pillars of our growth strategy. First, we are making growth investments in high-growth markets, which we think of as markets with secular tailwinds and benefits from large-scale trends or mega trends. Second, solution selling. Our current portfolio and our new product investment is disproportionately focused on solutions. The industrial powertrain is a great example, but we are also working on many others. Solutions exemplify more purposeful innovation in the eyes of our customer and differentiate us from our competitors, which in turn makes our customer relationship stickier. Next is raising the business durability. Improving the durability of our business is as much about raising growth as it is about increasing the consistency of the growth that we achieve.
Our portfolio already has many characteristics that bolster durability, but we are pursuing a number of initiatives aimed at raising durability further, driven by new solutions, services, and channel initiatives. Finally, leveraging the unrivaled scale and scope of our transformed portfolio and go-to-market to create unique value propositions for our customers. On the next few slides, I'm going to elaborate on elements of our growth algorithm. And then, as we move through the segment sections, our EVPs will go deeper into how each of these drivers is applicable to their growth strategies for their businesses. While each segment will discuss its specific drivers, this slide summarizes the mid-cycle growth rates that we believe each segment can deliver.
For perspective, the second column shows the organic growth achieved in 2019 to 2023 on a pro forma basis. That is, assuming we owned Rexnord, PMC, and Altra, and giving effect to the divestiture of Industrial Systems. As you can see, our business has been growing, but we believe that with all that we are doing to drive growth, combined with the scale and scope of our new portfolio and go-to-market capability, we can grow faster than these historic levels. Our future expected mid-cycle growth rates by segment are outlined in the next column, and we list some of the key drivers of the anticipated growth acceleration in the last column on the right.
Our point here is to quantify the growth we believe each segment can achieve, likely over the next few years, but without making a call on where in the cycle our end markets are. Later, in each of the segment sections, and then Rob in his section, we will cover our guidance for growth and margins specifically for the 2024-2027 timeframe.
But starting with AMC, from 2019 to 2023, AMC grew organically 4.4%. We believe we can accelerate that to 6%, driven primarily by innovation investments and rising product vitality, with a focus on overserving AMC's predominantly secular markets. IPS historically grew 2.5% during the same period, and we believe we can raise that to 4%, in large part by leveraging the distinctive scale and scope of IPS to create unique value propositions for our customers. We are also making significant digital investments to make it easier for customers to interact with us. Many of the customers procuring our products want a robust online self-service model, and they increasingly move a long way through the buying process before ever speaking to a live sales professional. Lastly, PES was roughly flat from 2019 to 2023.
Keep in mind, during this time, we made the conscious strategic decision to prune approximately two-to-three points of less differentiated, lower-margin business, which impacted this segment's performance. Going forward, we are planning for PES to grow about 3%, aided by a pivot to more air-moving solutions driven by significant new product investments and leveraging our global manufacturing footprint to provide customers greater supply resiliency. Now let's discuss some of the factors impacting our growth outlook from an end market perspective. Our portfolio today has about 50% of its sales from secular markets, which are summarized on this slide.
We plan to continue to raise our secular exposures by directly focusing an outsized percentage of our growth investments to serving these markets. Our inorganic growth will also continue to drive these exposures higher because one of our key M&A criteria is investing in businesses with secular market tailwinds.
Large-scale trends or mega trends and our ability to help our customers address them are an important growth driver for Regal. Five of the most relevant trends are presented on this slide. The first is regulation, which also includes government stimulus measures. A lot of our customers are responding to evolving regulations related to decarbonization. Because many of our products and solutions are needle-moving when it comes to realizing energy efficiency gains, Regal Rexnord has a meaningful role to play in helping our customers address rising demand for energy-efficient solutions.
Other regulations, such as the CHIPS Act, are providing stimulus related to critical infrastructure, such as U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, where our PES and AMC segments have strong exposure. For example, PES sells air filtration equipment used in semi-fab cleanrooms, while AMC provides conveying systems used in semi-fab assembly operations. Shifting to digital.
We live in a digital world where B2B and B2C transactions are mostly digital, and rapid developments in AI are driving demand for data centers and the electricity to power them. Here, we are seeing benefits to our business from data center expansion and data center cooling. Less obvious, our IPS segment is benefiting from its power generation customers investing to meet rising electricity demand, directly tied to data center expansion. In the realm of automation, manufacturers are automating to address rising labor costs and labor scarcity. We participate through our AMC segment with servo motors, drives, controls, and actuators, and our IPS segment with engineered components and powertrains. Electrification, a meaningful trend as the world looks to decarbonize.
We have a large role to play, for example, with our expanding air-moving solutions portfolio in PES and with industrial powertrains in IPS. And lastly, an aging population. Longer life expectancy is driving medical innovations in robotic surgery, robot-assisted rehab, and faster diagnostic testing. We have a meaningful role to play in our AMC segment, helping our customers support these advances with our high-precision servo motors and small-scale powertrains that are used in a variety of medical tools. On this slide, we add some transparency to our secular sales exposures by segment, and you can see that all three segments have meaningful exposures to these growth tailwinds. Moving from left to right, in the second column are our target mid-cycle growth rate by segment, which I outlined on an earlier slide.
Next, we indicate each segment's exposure to our principal secular markets. The total of each segment's exposure is in the highlighted column on the far right-hand side of this slide. So by segment, approximately 86% of AMC sales are into secular markets, followed by approximately 22% of sales for IPS and approximately 48% for PES. At the bottom of the chart, we outline our estimates for each end market's three-year volume CAGR, which for the enterprise equates to approximately 4% end market volume growth from these secular markets. Below that, we also map the most relevant mega trends impacting each of our secular markets, as we discussed on the prior slide. An important strategic initiative is shifting the mix of our sales from selling components to providing engineered solutions.
To be clear, our portfolio today is characterized by highly engineered components with attributes our customers value. But the scope of our product portfolio, coupled with our technology leadership and domain expertise in our focus markets, means we have the opportunity to move up the value chain and deliver more value-added solutions to our customers optimized for performance and energy efficiency. As part of this strategy, our new product development is disproportionately focused on solutions. This shift is also raising our customer intimacy by offering customers a convenient and accountable partner, which in turn is creating stickier customer relationships and driving wallet share gain.
Some examples of our new solution products are pictured on the right-hand side of this slide. Improving the durability of our business is not only about improving growth, but also about increasing the consistency of the growth that we achieve. Our portfolio has a number of characteristics that bolster durability, as indicated on the left-hand side of this slide.
Today, approximately 40% of our sales are from the aftermarket and from services, many with like-for-like replacement characteristics tied to our strong, long-trusted brands. The fact that 50% of our sales are into secular markets means factors other than the macro cycle are driving demand. Lastly, our exposure to stages of the macro cycle is balanced, split evenly between early, mid, and later cycle markets. We are also pursuing a number of initiatives aimed at raising durability, examples of which are listed on the right-hand side of this slide. In AMC, over-investing in secular markets. In IPS, targeting first-fit sales that have higher aftermarket potential. And in PES, launching new products specifically for the aftermarket, to name a few. One of the most powerful attributes of our enhanced enterprise is a tremendous go-to-market capability.
Comprised of over 2,000 sales professionals, we are able to provide global customers with local support around the world. This sales organization also provides Regal Rexnord with a robust global conduit through which to monetize our new product investments. Unlike most of our competitors, we go to market by end market versus by product. This allows us to capitalize on the intersection of our product breadth, technology leadership, and deep domain expertise. It also enables cross-sell activity between our divisions and our segments, with each segment taking a lead role based on the depth of its capabilities and customer relationships: PES and HVAC and pump, IPS and metals and mining, marine and ag and off-highway, and AMC in aerospace, food and beverage, medical, and data center.
Finally, I would like to highlight a few key metrics that summarize where we are headed as we execute the next stage of our transformation journey. We will delve deeply into how we plan to deliver this performance throughout today, and hopefully over time, exceed this performance as we go through the segments and finance sections of the presentation. Starting with growth. Over the last five years, the portfolio we have now grew just over 2%. Today, we are introducing a three-year target of 2%-5%, which balances our many growth initiatives with an acknowledgment that a number of our end markets are experiencing sluggish demand. Next, margin. We remain on track to achieve our prior targets of 40% gross margins and 25% EBITDA margins exiting 2025. We should have nearly 38% gross margins this year.
The combination of stronger growth and margins, progress lowering our debt and financing costs, and declining M&A-related cash restructuring costs should all translate to over $1 billion of free cash flow annually starting in 2026. I think you will see that over this forecast period, we have a clear path to top quartile performance on all these metrics. Rob will connect the dots in much more detail, but I think the target metrics speak for themselves about the highly attractive value creation opportunity that we believe Regal Rexnord presents. With that, I would like to introduce Jerry Morton, who runs our Industrial Powertrain Solutions business. Thank you.
Thank you, Louis. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jerry Morton, and I run the Industrial Powertrain Solutions segment, or IPS. I've been in the power transmission business for 37 years. I began my career at Emerson and joined Regal Rexnord as part of the acquisition of Emerson's power transmission solutions business in 2015. I led the combined PTS business from 2017 until we closed the Rexnord-PMC merger in October of 2021, when I shifted to leading the integration of PMC. When we closed on the acquisition of Altra in March of 2023, I became the leader of the newly formed IPS segment.
Our IPS business is the leading global player in industrial power transmission. It is a combination of three complementary and highly synergistic businesses: the legacy Regal Beloit PTS business and the power transmission businesses of Rexnord and Altra. Creating this portfolio was intentional and, as you will see, highly strategic. In 2023, the IPS business generated $2.6 billion in sales at a very attractive 37% gross margin and EBITDA margins of 24%. Performance that speaks to the differentiated value we provide to our customers with respect to quality, reliability, and service. Our key products are shown across the top of this page. These are highly engineered components that transmit power. In other words, they connect a power source, such as a motor, to the application using the power.
Customers consider them critical components in the applications where they're used, and in many cases, they are manufactured to demanding specifications. Increasingly, we are seeing our components integrated into powertrains, an example of which is pictured in the upper right. A powertrain integrates a power source with all of the critical power transmission components that connect that power source to the work being performed. I'll spend more time discussing our powertrain business and strategy during my presentation because it's critical to our growth strategy.
As seen in the pie charts, this is a global business, though weighted to North America, which notably makes it well-positioned to support our customers' reshoring efforts. The business is split about 50/50 between OEM and aftermarket sales. IPS serves a diverse set of end markets, but weighted to more demanding, often heavy-duty applications within the general industrial, metals and mining, energy, and food and beverage markets where quality and reliability is essential. As I believe you will come to appreciate over the next 30 minutes, we are the industry leader in industrial power transmission, and we are extremely well-positioned for growth and further margin expansion. As you would expect, given this business's strong margin profile, IPS has a powerful competitive advantage. It starts with our unparalleled scale and scope, the result of bringing three great power transmission businesses together.
In short, we have the broadest offering, which, in combination with our high-efficiency electric motors business and PES, puts us in the unique position of being able to provide complete powertrains, as we can do this around the world, allowing us to serve our global customers locally. We have long-standing trusted brands, which signify quality and reliability. We have a large installed base of our products established over many decades, which, when replaced, generates six times the first-fit component revenue over the useful life of the original equipment on average. The strength of our brands drives strong like-for-like replacement business, creating an annuity-like revenue stream at very attractive margins and contributes meaningfully to making this business highly durable. Complementing this dynamic, our expertise-driven first-fit wins help ensure this aftermarket annuity continues far into the future.
These attributes are at the foundation of what makes IPS such a highly cash-generative business through the cycle, and lastly, we are distinguished in the markets we serve by our deep application expertise. This expertise, based on decades of experience, supports strong customer relationships, makes us a trusted advisor to our customers, and drives highly collaborative channel partnerships. On the right of this slide, we summarize our forecast for the segment's three-year financial performance. We expect 2%-5% organic sales growth. We believe the combination of top-line growth and M&A synergies, along with ongoing 80/20, lean, and productivity initiatives, support an EBITDA margin in the 27%-29% range. As a reminder, roughly 80% of PMC and Altra cost synergies accrue in this segment.
Our top quartile levels of cost synergies from the PMC and Altra transactions are going a long way towards allowing us to achieve truly differentiated margin performance across industrial companies. And we believe over the next three years, our sales synergies will do the same for our top-line performance. In fact, we are already starting to see evidence of this in our differentiated performance this year. Over the last five years, this business has undergone a profound transformation. Through the execution of two transformational M&A transactions, Rexnord PMC and Altra, which brought significant cost synergies and sales synergies, plus a host of operational improvements, we have created a global leader in industrial power transmission. Back in 2018, Regal's legacy power transmission business, PTS, had roughly $800 million in sales, 33% gross margins, and 19% EBITDA.
This year, we are on track to beat $2.6 billion in sales with a 41% gross margin and 26% EBITDA margin. The primary drivers of this margin expansion are over $200 million of cost synergies, 80/20, and the Regal Rexnord Business System. Operational execution by this team has been nothing short of exceptional, and I think the metrics on this slide bear that out. That execution also gives me great confidence that we can execute our remaining costs and sales synergies, accelerate top-line growth, and achieve our future margin goals. The transformation of IPS has also increased our go-to-market and product development strength. Our commercial organization has increased threefold, and our engineering and technical professionals up nearly fivefold since 2018.
The scale of our go-to-market and the depth and breadth of our in-house engineering capabilities positions us extremely well to accelerate growth by developing highly engineered new products and being able to commercialize our offering globally, and when I say commercialize our offering, I'm not just referring to IPS. We see many opportunities to leverage our go-to-market resources to drive growth at AMC and PES as well. We have also become a more global business with our sales outside North America rising from 20% five years ago to about 35% today. Lastly, the asset productivity achieved through synergies, 80/20, and RBS is reflected in our much higher sales per sq ft of manufacturing space, which is up 16% over this period.
Acquisition integration has become a core competency for Regal Rexnord. Earlier, Louis introduced our enterprise growth strategy, the four pillars which are outlined on this slide. I will discuss how each of them applies to IPS. First, our growth initiatives are focused on end markets that benefit from secular tailwinds and megatrends, such as reshoring, addressing rising labor costs, decarbonization, and electrification. Consistent with our 80/20 mindset, we are also executing outgrowth initiatives in markets where we have the most differentiated value propositions, the deepest domain expertise, and the strongest customer relationships.
Second, moving up the value chain from being a provider of components to designing complete solutions is fundamental to our industrial powertrain strategy. Our broad offering puts us in the unique position of being able to provide complete powertrains, and we can do this across the world to serve our global customers locally. As a reminder, being able to sell complete powertrain solutions was central to our strategic rationale for doing the Rexnord PMC merger, and it is starting to pay off.
Next, durability is a key characteristic in our business, owing to its large installed base, our broad portfolio of trusted brands, and the associated high-margin like-for-like replacement business. But raising durability is also a strategic focus for how we plan to grow. A healthy first-fit business will always be critical because it protects our valuable aftermarket annuity. But I will discuss how we are targeting specific kinds of first-fit business based on its aftermarket potential so we can grow our aftermarket business faster in the future. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, IPS has unrivaled scale and scope. We believe that the broad scope of our product portfolio, plus the scale of our global manufacturing operations and our go-to-market capabilities, positions IPS to offer customers a unique and compelling value proposition that will help us outgrow our markets.
I'd like to provide a little more detail about what we mean when we say our portfolio has a scale and scope advantage. Down the middle of this slide, we see all the key product categories in our power transmission portfolio. Across the top, we designate top global power transmission competitors and their capabilities in each principal product category. A few things become clear. One, Regal Rexnord is a leader in all categories with top three positions across the board. Two, we have the broadest portfolio in terms of products and capability depth. And three, Regal Rexnord is the only player able to offer complete industrial powertrains across a wide range of applications. A highly strategic complement to our distinct scale and scope across the industrial powertrain is a differentiated ability to monetize our portfolio.
As you can see on the slide, when it comes to our go-to-market capabilities, we have unique scale and reach with over 550 sales professionals, a 450-person commercial support team, and 200+ application engineers. These roughly 1,200 associates provide us with extensive global product management, marketing, and application support. What is also differentiated is that we go to market based on end market verticals while most competitors align by product. Our structure allows us to leverage our deep application expertise, plus our broad portfolio, to sell across categories, even across the broader Regal Rexnord, which is critical to moving up the value chain from a component supplier to a trusted advisor, capturing cross-category wallet share and selling integrated powertrain solutions.
Notably, we can do this on a global basis. We ensure consistency of service levels by using disciplined commercial processes and highly integrated CRM data and tools. Lastly, but also critical, our sales incentives are aligned to our enterprise Regal Rexnord growth algorithm, so everyone is rowing in the same direction. One of the ways that we believe we are in a unique position to create value for our customers is by leveraging the scope of our product offering and the scale of our go-to-market to become a natural destination for customers looking to consolidate their spending on power transmission products. As you can see from the chart on the left, the vast majority of our customers currently only buy one product category from us.
This is often a reflection of long-standing brand loyalties, which we like, but also periods in history when many of these brands were sold by independent businesses. With the portfolio we have now, we are starting to move the needle around customers consolidating their spend with us, which is sometimes driven by the customer, but is increasingly about us selling the value of our offering's broad scope. As you can see in the bar chart, the value from even a small incremental percent of customers adding a category can be very meaningful.
In the example in the chart, we assume 5% of customers shift to buying more than one category, which equates to approximately $160 million of additional sales, or roughly two points of annual growth for the IPS segment if the wallet share gain occurs gradually over the next three years. Because the math represents first-fit sales only, the associated potential future lifetime benefit of the aftermarket is roughly six times larger than the value stated on this page.
From the customer's perspective, the value proposition is compelling. A single point of contact, a single purchase order, reduced administrative complexity. In short, it is much more convenient than procuring individual components from an array of providers. Enablers of this consolidation start with the broad scope of our offering. We have a critical mass of components across a range of applications and are positioned to be a single-source supplier. As important is our deep domain expertise.
Customers rely on us to help them address their challenges, solve their problems, in short, be more of an advisor than simply a component provider, which makes them comfortable giving us more share of wallet. Lastly, we are investing to make it easier for spend consolidation to occur, making digital investments along the entire quote-to-cash value chain, from online search, configuration, and ordering, through to payables and eventually aftermarket service.
In other words, we are lowering switching costs. Remember, our components go inside products built by or used by our customers. And while our customer components are critical to the operation of whatever they are part of, end users are mainly focused on the larger application. And so being able to simplify their procurement of components from a single source with our reputation for quality, reliability, and high service levels can be highly value-added. And as you can see, the math makes it a win-win for Regal Rexnord as well. Here we present a case study of a customer in the heat exchanger business that has grown its relationship with Regal Rexnord over time. A relationship that began with couplings many years ago, expanded to gearing, then to motors, and more recently to include bearings.
Notably, our share of wallet with this customer expanded significantly after each of our strategic M&A transactions consistent with our broadened offering. We also earned these wallet share gains by consistently providing high-quality products over a period of years. Along the bottom of the bar chart, we outline the value of the content this customer procured as a % of the complete powertrain solution. And that is really the natural evolution of these wallet share gains that have been discussing, eventually trusting Regal Rexnord to supply the complete powertrain solution. So let's discuss that evolution to giving Regal Rexnord all the relevant components. We believe that is a large part of our future. But it goes beyond customers procuring all these power transmission components from us.
It is also about receiving them as one integrated solution that we design and engineer in which customers can drop into their product or application. As referenced earlier, most customers buy only one category of component from Regal Rexnord, even though they use multiple categories, which are then integrated by the customer into a powertrain. The capabilities we have built over the last five years position us to provide the integrated solution. We have the portfolio breadth to develop powertrains to serve a wide range of applications. We can provide full engineering support to accelerate customer program timelines. If we engineer our components into the integrated solution, we can optimize it for performance, efficiency, and reliability, and in doing so, we are offering customers an accountable partner while streamlining their buying process.
We've also been making significant digital investments to make it easier for customers to design and procure components under a robust self-service model and receive one quote and one single purchase order. On this slide, I'd like to highlight a case study on a recent powertrain win, which helps show why we are continuing to gain momentum here. The application is a marine winch and cable system that's used on ships to guide and control robotic rovers, which get lowered into the water and then move back and forth across a ship's hull to conduct inspections and clean the hull surface.
Our customer, the maker of the rover, needed help reducing product complexity and maintenance costs while meeting all its performance requirements, which included operating in a corrosive saltwater environment, generating enough torque to move the rover in and out of the water quickly, being able to maintain precision speed control, and having the winch system fit into a smaller enclosure.
As you can see, when comparing the original customer-assembled solution on the left with the Regal Rexnord optimized solution on the right, we reduced complexity by roughly 60%, eliminating seven components from the customer's original concept, which also lowered its weight by 60%, lowered a customer's cost by 30%, and raised energy efficiency by 10%. Critical to reducing weight, size, and complexity was substituting the prior winch system's standard induction gear motor with one of our Kollmorgen branded servo motors.
That allowed us to remove the mechanical brake, belt drive, and pulleys, among other content, because this functionality is embedded in the more intelligent servo motor. The servo also provides a high level of precision control and braking required for this application. This case study is also a great example of how the powertrain team is cross-selling power transmission components from IPS with automation content from AMC to create an integrated solution. We see so many opportunities for IPS to leverage its global reach and unrivaled product breadth, not only to add more IPS value, but also to sell content from AMC and PES to its power transmission customers. Our Regal Rexnord solution was also a huge financial win-win. We reduced the total content cost to the customer by over 30%.
But by selling a complete solution, we picked up more content than we would traditionally have had in such an application. Finally, it's noteworthy how we got the opportunity to work with this marine winch customer in the first place. The customer approached us through our online Ask the Expert channel. Increasingly, we are seeing even more sophisticated OEM customers who typically have sales coverage, preferring an online self-service model to conduct early-stage product research and design activities, to the point that in some cases, over 50% of the buying journey is complete by the time they reach out to us in person. This is why we have been making significant investments in digital. For example, design software, configurators, enhancing our online product spec libraries, and our online Ask the Expert functionality.
Our strong, well-recognized brands are also an asset here because users are more comfortable moving more of their buying journey online when they trust the provider. In short, we continue to gain momentum in powertrain with our unmatched product breadth, digital investments, and cross-selling opportunities, all key enablers. When we think about pursuing wallet share gains through our cross-selling efforts, selling the value proposition of procuring complete powertrains, or executing any other of our growth initiatives, we leverage an 80/20 mindset and focus on products, customers, and markets where we see the best opportunities. For IPS, the markets listed on this slide are where we see our highest growth opportunities and where we are directing the majority of our growth investments.
I know these days, markets such as aerospace and data center are getting a disproportionate share of the high-growth market attention. As you will hear from Kevin in AMC and Brooke in PES, we have attractive exposures in many of these marquee secular markets and clear plans to grow there. But for IPS, the markets presented here offer us distinct and robust growth opportunities. We have deep domain expertise and long-standing relationships in these markets. Our products have attributes customers in these markets value: reliability in harsh or hazardous environments, an ability to deliver high performance in application-specific operating conditions, compliance with relevant regulations, and an ability to help customers reduce their environmental impacts.
These markets are also leveraged to megatrends such as electrification, urbanization, carbonization, and sustainable manufacturing. I will share some more specific examples of how this offering is helping customers respond to one of these trends: electrification. Electrification is a significant megatrend as end users look to create more environmentally friendly, quieter, and safer applications with more capabilities. While the auto and truck sectors get most of the attention and are admittedly large electrification opportunities, we are participating in applications that present needle-moving growth opportunities for Regal Rexnord. Forklifts, turf and garden equipment, utility vehicles, and marine are in markets which are transitioning more to electrification and where we have domain knowledge and a customer value proposition that is resonating.
Our value prop is centered on optimized electrified powertrains that are customized to meet the specific performance requirements of these applications. Our extensive installed base of electromechanical clutches and brakes gives us the opportunity to work closely with key OEMs in these markets as their products are developed. Today, we have a funnel of over $70 million of opportunity, and that is quickly expanding.
Let's pivot to how we are strategically improving the durability of our portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, the aftermarket is a critical part of our business, and our reliable streams of high-margin aftermarket sales driven by a large installed base of products and strong brand loyalty is a cornerstone to what makes this such a cash-generative business. In order to preserve and grow the future aftermarket opportunity, it's important to win in the first-fit market, what some refer to as OEM sales. But all the first-fit sales are not created equal. In particular, some have higher associated aftermarket streams than others. We have an opportunity to capture more of these higher potential first-fit sales and maximize our future aftermarket opportunity.
Our strategy is to do this as centered on the factors listed in the middle column: focus on strategic verticals, leverage our deep application expertise, increasingly go to market as a solutions provider, leverage our global reach, leverage digital investments to reduce customer switching costs, and aggressively sell our full lifecycle support services. The potential financial upside is significant. Our aftermarket sales, generally speaking, are margin accretive and more durable. However, the aftermarket on this higher potential first-fit business tends to be six times the value of the first-fit sale. In many cases, that is because the applications are targeted, have characteristics that accelerate wear, such as corrosive operating environments. I would now like to share a few thoughts on our sales strategy. It is aligned with our enterprise growth algorithm and the growth initiatives I shared during my presentation.
First, a focus on cross-selling or gaining wallet share, especially with our 80/20 customers, which you may remember from Louis' presentation, are the highly valued customers that align best with our overall customer value proposition. Next is pursuing new business, and here again, we are leveraging 80/20 by focusing on prospective customers that resemble our current 80/20, our current highly valued customers. And as Louis mentioned, we call these our perfect prospects. Next is capturing MRO sales by growing our installed base, then servicing customers exceptionally to capture the highly attractive aftermarket annuity sales stream, and lastly, providing global support. Many of the customers that value us most have global operations, and they value a trusted partner who can serve them anywhere in the world.
Here we are investing in support resources in markets such as China and the Asia and EMEA regions while utilizing manufacturing localization capabilities to drive in-region, for-region OEM growth, so a few takeaways as I wrap up my presentation. Consistent with our objectives today, these are focused on how we are planning to accelerate profitable growth. First, leveraging the unrivaled scale and scope of our product portfolio and of our go-to-market capabilities to offer customers and channel partners a unique and compelling value proposition.
This will drive our cross-selling success. Second, moving up the value chain from being a provider of components to designing and engineering complete solutions, and particularly for our IPS, that is about the industrial powertrain, where the customer value proposition is clear and compelling and our capabilities are robust and differentiated. Third, focus on end markets that benefit from secular tailwinds and megatrends.
And consistent with our 80/20 mindset, markets where we have the most differentiated value propositions, the deepest domain expertise, and our strongest customer relationships. And lastly, increasing durability in an already durable business by growing our already large installed base with a focus on first-fit business with the most valuable aftermarket streams. In combination with our broad portfolio of trusted brands, we believe we can generate additional high-margin annuity-like replacement business. Thank you for your time this morning. And with that, we'll take a few questions.
Great. Thanks, Jerry. That was great. So we have time for a few questions on IPS. We have a couple of mic runners. Once I call on you, if you could just wait for the mic and then announce who you are and your affiliation and then your question. We could start in the back with Mike.
Hi, Mike Halloran, B aird. So two questions. First, just to frame it up here, when you talk about the 2%-5% growth that you laid out, both for you, both for the overall company, is that using 2023 revenue as the base or is using that 2024 revenue as the base?
Yeah, I will kick that off, and then Louis and Rob can jump in. We are showing a 2024 to 2027 plan.
Yeah.
Right? So yes, that would be a 2%-5% within that planning period.
Right. No, no. I'm just saying is the revenue building off of a 2023 base, so including the 2024 guided, or is it starting exiting 2024?
It's built off the 2024 exit.
Okay. Great. Perfect. So somewhat similar question. Could you build up then how you get to that 2%-5% rate? So how are you assuming for market? And if I hear a lot of the growth drivers here, the solutions, cross-selling, aftermarket penetration, I'm assuming there's an element of price in there. How are we getting there? I mean, it could be as simple as two, two and a half, and then the 50% market outgrowth. But I would love just some composition and some understanding of that. Thank you.
Yep. Thanks for your question, Mike. Outgrowth is absolutely part of that equation. We're looking at about 200 basis points in our plan for outgrowth. We won't get into price. We're going to have a price-cost-neutral plan as we have before, and we've proven our ability to do that. And then the rest is market.
Yeah, Mike. Sorry about that. Maybe I'll add on. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. We're going to be measured in how we think about what markets will do. And Jerry's talking about outgrowth of 200 basis points. We've been price-cost-neutral, price-cost-positive for 20 quarters now. So we know how to manage that piece. But that's why we're giving a range like we are. And you'll hear that in each of the segments and overall for Regal because we're not going to opine exactly on what we expect markets to do over that period, but outgrowth is our driver.
Maybe it's Julian down here?
Thanks. Julian Mitchell at Barclays. Maybe, Jerry, a couple of questions for you. One is just on the margin outlook. So I think you've got the highest margin expansion of the three segments as your goal. I think it's about 200 points or so over three years. So maybe flesh out how does that margin expansion split out between footprint versus volume leverage mix or anything else? And then just the second question would be around the customer mix and products you showed on slide 30. You've got the half a dozen types of product. I suppose, do you have a sense of how many of your customers are buying, say, three of the six today directly or indirectly and where that could go?
Great. First, on margin expansion, you're right. It's about 200 basis points of growth. As I mentioned earlier, about 80% of the synergies from the two transformational acquisitions we made come through this segment. That contributes about 100 basis points of that 200. We get some leverage on the growth that we mentioned. And then the balance is productivity, net of inflation, and growth investments. So we've had a nice track record recently there, and we expect that to continue.
Your question on wallet share in those key areas, as we mapped out the businesses, it was amazing how little overlap we had. And I showed you that. 10% of our customers buy more than one category, and few buy more than two. So there's tremendous potential, we believe, in those categories I showed you, in those industries I showed you, to leverage our domain expertise to just get one, two, and ultimately that entire powertrain.
But Julian, to, I think, answer the question, the majority of the customers would actually buy three or more of those product categories. And so that's why we think this is quite compelling. And the differentiator for us is how we go to market. And so we're able to pull forward, and we are also incentivizing our sales force by doing that as well.
Thank you, Louis.
Down in the front here, Nigel.
Thanks. I want to come back to the 2%-5%. So it does feel, especially at the low end, quite kind of conservative, especially given the 200 basis points of per annum. Just want to confirm that per annum outgrowth. So just maybe talk about 80/20 initiatives. I mean, I know that's been very significant in PES. Talk about what you're seeing, especially in your segment, Jerry, in terms of 80/20 initiatives, maybe offsetting that. And then perhaps touch on the aftermarket. You talked about converting or capturing competitor products in the aftermarket. How significant is that today, and how significant can that be going forward?
Yeah. If you want to talk about 80/20 in our portfolio, we've been doing this for many years now. Obviously, the acquisitions created another bubble to go through that. But we're in a position now where we see that as an enabler for growth, not for reduced sales. We're now able to focus on the 80 of our products and the 80 of our customers to grow. So we're at a point of enablement there in that portion. Second, you mentioned aftermarket and what that can mean to us.
Certainly, it is a big part of our initiative, as I showed today. We have the brand strength, the reliability, the reputation to get that aftermarket. Our scope and scale now with our channel partners as well as our business enable that as well. So we're seeing the ability through one quote, one purchase order, a stronger portfolio with our channel partners to drive more of that aftermarket growth.
We have time for one more, Chris, there. Kind of midway back.
Hey, thanks, Chris Glynn, Oppenheimer. Jerry, question on the migrating from 15% of customers to 20% buying multiple categories. Given the unrivaled sales and scope and some compelling case studies, curious, why might that not be more aggressive and somewhat related? How mature is the vertical market sales model?
Great. We do believe it's a measured approach for that as we learn more and build that strength out. Our vertical market maturity is now about three years old as we've built that team. We're continuing to strengthen that team globally. But it is paying dividends as we've seen this year, and we expect that to accelerate.
Great. I think we'll leave it there. We will now be taking a 10-minute break, after which we'll pick up with Brooke in PES. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
We're running a few minutes ahead of schedule, and I think we'll try and stick with that, so we've had 10 minutes, and I think we're going to now proceed with Brooke in PES.
Fantastic.
Yep.
Thank you, Rob. Good morning. I am Brooke Lang, leader of our Power Efficiency Systems business, or PES. I joined Regal Rexnord in July of 2022 to lead our conveying and power management division, which is currently part of the AMC segment. I assume leadership of PES a year later in the summer of 2023 with the retirement of Scott Brown. Prior to joining the company, I spent 14 years at Eaton Corporation in a variety of marketing and general management roles around the world. When I left, I was running the power components division. I began my career as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. Let's start by providing you a snapshot of the PES segment. Starting on the left, in 2023, the business generated $1.8 billion in sales at 30% gross margins and an 18% Adjusted EBITDA margin.
Our key products are shown across the top of the page and include high-efficiency motors, premium-efficiency air-moving solutions, and air-moving products such as blowers and axial fans. These products are engineered to deliver industry-leading energy efficiency, performance, and reliability. They have a long-standing reputation for consistently delivering on these attributes. As seen in the pie charts, this is a global business. They're weighted to North America and have roughly two-thirds to one-third split between OEM and aftermarket sales. PES serves a variety of end markets, but the typical applications we support require the movement of air, water, or objects, as indicated in the pie chart on the lower right-hand side. While PES is most commonly associated with residential HVAC business, you can see that residential HVAC represents only about one-third of the segment sales.
We also serve a wide variety of commercial HVAC, leisure water, pumping, industrial, and general commercial applications with our premium-efficiency fractional to approximately five-horsepower motors. Note that the 25% of our business serving general commercial applications is largely an ISM-driven business. The 25% that is commercial HVAC is about 50% North America and 50% outside North America and Europe and Asia. So what is the key to our success? It starts with technology leadership and continuous innovation.
We have a long legacy of innovation, particularly in the areas of energy-efficient motors and blowers, and we have continued to lead the industry across key performance attributes that include noise and vibration levels, power density, and form factor. Our legacy business invented the variable-speed electric motor, which has been responsible for dramatic increases in efficiency over the years for HVAC systems.
A key to this innovation is our strong partnership with leading OEMs across the industries we serve, giving us insight on the emerging needs of the end customer. Our flexible global manufacturing footprint, which is strategically positioned to produce in region for region, allows us to flex production and provide a more resilient source of supply for our customers. Increasingly, we are also designing our products, leveraging a small set of core platforms and components, which allow us to shorten innovation cycles, improve our cost position, and provide manufacturing flexibility across our global infrastructure.
Finally, we have a long legacy of trusted brands that signify quality, durability, and energy efficiency. We have been in the premium electric motors business for decades and, over time, have been designed into a large number of OEM platforms and have a large installed base of our products across the industries we serve.
This large installed base, combined with a preference to replace or upgrade with like-for-like replacement, drives a reliable stream of new OEM platforms and aftermarket sales. These advantages provide us the right to grow in our target markets. We are working under a three-year planning assumption for 2%-3% sales growth. As Louis shared, our PES segment has not grown in over the last five years, but we have grown share in higher margin applications and have leveraged 80/20 to focus on the products and solutions that are differentiated by technology, where we've had to prune a large amount of our lower margin business. At this point, our transformational pruning efforts are done, but because of the lack of historical growth, we are setting a modest 2%-3% basically GDP growth rate for the business.
We acknowledge that some of our analysts have a much more aggressive view of our end markets, but given the recent volatility and market uncertainty, we are purposely taking a more measured approach to our sales forecast. Of course, that does not mean we don't see opportunities to substantially exceed these levels. As you will see in the remainder of my presentation, we are working many, many initiatives that should accelerate growth above market as we expand further into high-growth segments and deliver differentiated air-moving solutions. From a margin perspective, we expect to achieve 17%-18% EBITDA margin. We believe we can consistently run this business at high teens or even low 20s adjusted EBITDA margin, but we are leaving room for growth investments that are core to our strategy of prioritizing outgrowth and customer diversification for further margin expansion.
Over the last five years, we have been streamlining the business, leveraging our 80/20 approach to become a more efficient, higher-margin business that is better positioned to drive growth. As you can see from the charts on the left-hand side of this page, starting in the upper left, we have simplified our product portfolio through SKU reduction, driving up our sales per SKU to over 50%. As seen on the lower left, the percentage of our sales from more value-added solutions has nearly doubled to what is now roughly 13% of our business. This is a strategic focus for PES, and we expect this to continue to grow as we pursue new opportunities with a broader solutions portfolio that meets the needs of our expanded target segments and applications.
In the last chart, you will see the PES gross margins are up about 230 basis points in recent years because of our portfolio upgrading towards more differentiated products and, in particular, towards more air-moving solutions. On the right side, we highlight the key drivers of this organic transformation. At the top of the list is 80/20, followed by a strategic shift to focusing more on air-moving solutions while continuing to remain the leader in energy efficiency. We are making e-commerce and broader channel investments to better serve our small and medium-sized OEMs, where we can earn attractive margins.
Our NPD pipeline continues to expand, and we are making nice progress. Finally, we are diversifying into new markets, in particular those with secular tailwinds such as data center and industrial clean rooms. I'll discuss many of these themes in more detail later in the presentation. With our organic transformation now well-advanced, we are shifting our strategic focus to growth. As we outline on the slide, our strategic priorities are leveraging global platforms to accelerate our innovation cycles and improve our already leading cost position. We will continue to lead with energy efficiency in all our new products and leverage our scale and, in particular, our flexible global manufacturing footprint to bolster our supply chain resiliency.
Our market focus is diversifying our customer base towards higher growth markets with secular tailwinds, in particular in data centers and clean rooms. And we are investing to drive growth in our aftermarket business, which is margin accretive and helps to improve the durability of our business. From a product perspective, we are investing to raise our new product vitality.
And as you can see in the bar chart on the upper right corner, we have been making good progress and have significant upside as we execute a robust NPD pipeline. As I mentioned earlier, we are increasingly focused on high-efficiency air-moving solutions. Lastly, as seen in the chart on the lower right, our intentional product pruning away from low-margin, less differentiated products has been a couple-of-point headwind to growth over the last several years. But we now have the product portfolio we want, which is focused on more differentiated products and systems. We will continue to strategically deploy 80/20 and focus on our best customers.
But for all intents and purposes, we are done with our transformational pruning, which should benefit our growth going forward. Pictured here is the Regal Rexnord growth algorithm that Louis introduced. I will bridge to what we are doing to accelerate growth in PES. Starting with high-growth markets, we see a number of attractive opportunities to leverage our technology in secular markets such as data center and industrial clean rooms, where we have products for cooling and air filtration. We also see opportunities to accelerate the shift to more energy-efficient variable-speed motors in our core HVAC and pool markets.
Solution selling is a core to our product strategy, where we are marrying our capabilities in high-efficiency motors and air-moving to create more value-added solutions. Our motors are also the heart of our industrial powertrain. They are the power in the industrial powertrain and strategically important for Regal Rexnord when selling a highly differentiated engineered solution. We are also improving the durability of our business with new products that are specifically designed for aftermarket. In particular, we see significant opportunity to capture a large share of off-warranty replacement and upgrade demand at accretive margins.
Finally, scale and scope. We have long been the leader in variable-speed motors, helping us deliver exceptional value to our customers. But we are increasingly seeing opportunities to leverage our global manufacturing footprint across APAC, Europe, and North America to deliver a strong balance of cost optimization, local content, and global scale. This also helps us to deliver a highly resilient supply chain and navigate the evolving geopolitical risk and desire for copy-exact global OEM platforms. There are four high-growth opportunities that we are focused on today.
For each of these growth opportunities, we see exceptional market tailwinds and strong fit with our product innovations, thereby giving us the opportunity to accelerate growth. Let me summarize these opportunities before I go into greater detail on subsequent slides. First, starting from the left, we continue to lead the market shift to higher-efficiency motors.
We are also launching a new product that we believe can meaningfully accelerate that shift. This product delivers the efficiency of a variable-speed motor but at a similar price of a legacy induction motor. We call this a set-speed ECM, which we will be launching in 2025. Second, we have a strong portfolio to address rising demand for clean rooms as investments resulting from the CHIPS Act continue to progress. Third, we continue to see robust demand in the data center market with our high-speed hermetic motors and air-moving subsystems. And finally, we continue to pursue growth in the heat pump market, especially outside the U.S., where we currently have limited share, but our technology and our strong global HVAC-OEM relationships put us in a great position to grow.
Over the next five years, there are a number of regulations that create significant opportunities for PES and will accelerate the adoption of more efficient motors and solutions, a key differentiator for us. We are currently supporting residential HVAC-OEMs through the new refrigerant change that has legacy production stopping at the end of this year and will sell through the channel in 2025. You will also see new DOE efficiency regulations that will drive a shift to more efficient variable-speed pool pump motors starting in 2025 and provide PES an approximately $50 million opportunity. In 2026, we see an enhanced EU eco-design standard driving increased efficiency in motor-driven fans. This provides a significant opportunity to continue to drive growth with our high-efficient Kopra fans.
As we look further out, new efficiency standards for medium electric motors, commercial refrigeration equipment, commercial unitary equipment, and circulatory pumps will significantly increase the efficiency requirements and align well with our next generation of pump motors and commercial HVAC motors. And finally, the pending DOE efficiency regulations for expanded-scope electric motors and fans and blowers will drive significant efficiency improvements and increased testing requirements across our sub-3 horsepower motors and fans. All these regulations will accelerate the shift to premium speed motors that fit nicely with our strengths.
For some time now, there has been a slow but steady shift to higher efficiency systems across the market and, in particular, the residential HVAC and pool markets. We now see two additional catalysts that we expect will accelerate the market shift to higher efficiency variable-speed motors. One is the regulatory drivers I just discussed on the prior slide related to higher efficiency standards for pool pumps in 2025, medium electric motors in 2027, and expanded-scope electric motors and blowers in 2029. The other driver we feel will accelerate this shift is the introduction of a new electric motor that delivers significant energy efficiency benefits versus legacy induction motors, more than 10%, but with a much lower price premium compared to today's variable-speed motors.
We believe this lower premium will drive a much faster adoption as the efficiency gains quickly deliver a compelling ROI for the end user and deliver greater flexibility for OEMs. We see this new product line delivering roughly $20 million in sales over the next few years. Another market we are excited about is the industrial clean room market, which we expect to grow at high single-digit CAGR over the next few years.
We are well-positioned to capitalize on this growth with our fan filter units that circulate and filter the air. Our initial focus has been on the expansion and new construction of semiconductor fabrication plants, but we see opportunities in other verticals as well. In two years, we went from zero to approximately $35 million in sales, and we see this doubling over the next three years. Along with these system sales, we see a great opportunity to sell replacement filters through the life of the facility.
As outlined in the middle column, we are leveraging our expertise in air-moving and premium efficiency motors to compete in this space. We also see local production with capabilities across all three regions provides us a nice competitive advantage. Finally, our systems also deliver some of the most advanced controls and condition monitoring capabilities, which support our customers' most critical applications.
I'm sure this audience appreciates the tremendous growth we are seeing in data centers. Spurred in part by the adoption of AI, we see attractive opportunities in selling products to keep data centers cool. We have already been benefiting from this high growth with our legacy portfolio of motors and air-moving solutions. But we are also innovating here to address customers' rising demand in this vertical.
We see a $30 million growth opportunity over the next three years from augmenting our presence, which translates to us quadrupling our sales over this period. The driver of this growth is tied to new products we are launching for the market, which are pictured in the middle of the slide. At the top is our Kopra motorized fan, which we recently launched and have been expanding our lineup to support the various needs of the data center market.
Our market-leading efficiency and its compact size give an attractive power density, which can be critical when accommodating space constraints and most footprint-constrained data center designs. Next, our SyMAX Pro premium efficiency motors. With our market-leading reliability and lifespan, our product delivers greater than 90% efficiency and comes with embedded IoT capabilities to enable performance monitoring. These motors are used to run data center cooling systems. Finally, our medium and low-voltage hermetic motors are used to power large chillers typically found in hyperscale and AI data centers.
We expect our market-leading position in this product category will benefit from the significant growth projected in this space. Energy-efficient regulations and government incentives are driving demand for heat pumps, a market we expect to experience high single-digit growth for the next several years, even after this year's significant decline, especially in Europe.
We see a $70 million incremental sales opportunity for PES over the next three years, driven by our expansion in Europe and new platforms in North America. We also see large opportunity with the expected transition to heat pump water heaters in North America. Our strategy for growing our heat pump business is summarized in the center column. First, leverage our experience in North America HVAC and water heating, where we have great technology, market-leading positions, and strong relationships with our global OEMs.
Second, we have developed new products for the heat pump market, including our silent axial fan solutions, which lead on energy efficiency, noise levels, and durability. Finally, our innovative design enables quick and easy drop-in replacement, so we can serve the aftermarket and new build demand. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, our solutions support residential, commercial, and water heating applications.
The final large growth opportunity I want to highlight today is with our aftermarket business. We see significant opportunity to grow our share among HVAC contractors serving the aftermarket with our Evergreen Universal Replacement Motor, an opportunity we think can be worth $25 million of incremental sales to PES over the next three years. As shown in the middle column on this slide, our Universal Replacement Motor has an auto-configured design that allows it to be quickly and easily configured on-site to work in a wide variety of HVAC systems.
In other words, contractors coming to your home to replace a motor do not need to carry dozens of SKUs on their truck, hoping that they have the right one to replace the motor in question. With our product, they can carry a handful of Universal Replacement Motors and auto-configure them to work with a customer's system.
This makes a contractor's life much easier and significantly raises productivity. As we note here, our Universal Replacement is achieving 90% first-visit success rates, well above the industry standard levels, while allowing contractors to hold 50% fewer SKUs on their trucks. Because our Universal Replacement Motor is an electronic ECM motor, contractors who are incentivized to sell it due to the ease of use can simultaneously sell the value proposition of energy savings. This upgrade can result in over $300 of annual savings for the end consumer.
Overall, we see the aftermarket continuing to grow as customers look to repair versus replace. We are even starting to see the potential for proactive upgrades by customers looking to reduce their carbon footprint and realize impressive annual savings. To support this expected growth is the scale and scope of our global manufacturing footprint and supply chain.
We have a manufacturing strategy that delivers global resiliency, cost optimization, and flexible sourcing to navigate the constantly changing geopolitical landscape. This allows us to support our customers regionally while offering standard global platforms that meet the needs of our customers. On the right side, we list a few enablers that are improving our resiliency value proposition beyond the simple breadth of our footprint. One is migrating to global platforms, which over the next five years can support about 50% of our SKUs. This not only furthers regional manufacturing flexibility, but it accelerates our innovation process. Second, the use of global platforms is coupled with late-stage customization capabilities, which means we can support more fine-tuned, customer-specific configurations closer to our customers.
Finally, the use of global platforms means we are using more standard electronics and other components, simplifying our own supply chains and increasing our flexibility when it comes to where we manufacture a given product. This strategy has been directed by our 80/20 approach. We believe this value proposition around flexible global manufacturing is becoming increasingly relevant to our customers as they look to manage geopolitical risks and add resiliency to their supply chains. I would like to leave you with four key themes as you think about the PES strategy and growth opportunity going forward. One, Regal Rexnord has been undergoing significant transformation over the last five years.
And while a lot of that has been related to significant inorganic investments, in PES, we've been executing a profound organic transformation driven by 80/20 and a host of other measures to create a more focused, wider moat, higher margin portfolio that is well-positioned for growth. Two, we are investing heavily in new products to strengthen our core offering and enter new high-growth secular markets with strong regulatory tailwinds such as data center and industrial clean rooms.
Three, we are strategically focused on offering more systems and solutions to enhance our value proposition in new and existing markets. And four, we see opportunities to leverage our flexible global manufacturing footprint to migrate from a global platforming strategy, which will benefit our customers and heighten supply resiliency and more rapid innovation. Thank you for listening, and I'll be happy to answer any questions.
Great. Thank you, Brooke. We're happy to take some questions from the room on PES down here. Julian?
Thanks a lot, Julian Mitchell at Barclays. Maybe just a first question around the sort of nearer term, if that's okay, just any perspectives around sort of the extent of pre-buy in that U.S. residential HVAC market around the refrigerant change? And I suppose, zooming out a little bit, how much of the sales pressure in recent years has been sort of deliberate pruning? I understand there's been a bunch of that versus, let's say, non-deliberate market share pressure from OEMs for different reasons.
Let me start with your last question, and I'll move backwards through that. Clearly, and as Louis highlighted, we've seen about a 2%-3% headwind based on our overall pruning and as we transformed our portfolio of products to what we believe are wider moat, more differentiated products and solutions that we want to go out and service our customers with. That continues to be the focus of us and our business around a differentiated solution. So overall, we continue to expand our customer relationships, and we can continue to look at opportunities to drive market share growth.
I think kind of your first question related to the transition, the A2L transition, the refrigerant transition that will take place, and as everyone knows, hey, by the end of this year, they need to stop producing the legacy, and we'll need to transition all manufacturing to A2L gas and the new refrigerant that will go into the market.
We've heard a lot of mixed input from our customers, and we're constantly pulsing them just so that we are putting ourselves in position to best support whatever strategy they implement. I think what we've seen is they're pretty close to the vest around what their strategy is going to be, as it has pretty competitive implications and is creating a little less visibility than we would like from a forecasting perspective. So we're continuing to play it by ear. I think it's one that our OEMs will start to convey kind of which direction they're going to go as we work through Q3 and Q4.
Any other questions? Chris, back there.
Yeah, Brooke, just a question on the combination of the growth targets and the margin targets. You had the certain numbers on the slide, 2%-3%, 17%-18%. Curious about some of the color around there, whether we should consider that more telling. You talked about room to operate in the high 20s-low 20s, but for growth investment. But then we're pointed back to 2%-3%, which suggests, hey, the focus and the emphasis should be running on the high teens-low 20s. So having tough connecting sort of the narrative with how that growth target and margin target kind of pair together.
Yeah, so let me start with overall, we see just exceptional opportunities in the market. A lot of tailwinds, a lot of opportunities, whether it's through regulations, through our new innovations that we've launched, and new products and categories that we're entering into. So we are really excited about that growth opportunity. But in our growth plans, we have not incorporated that deeply into our growth numbers.
And so our modest 2%-3% growth rate is really us reflecting on our inability to grow over the last five years. And so we hadn't seen growth, putting together what we think is a very measured approach in terms of our growth strategy. And then as we continue to see how those play out and how our customers and the markets play out over the next several years, we'll continue to update our guidance and forecast. But we wanted to be really prudent in our approach as we set guidance there.
Right in the back there, Mike.
So just following up on that then, so from a competitive perspective, it doesn't sound like there's any change in your thought process that you can hold share in your core categories where you have that differentiation. Is the expectation that's embedded into the 2-3 then that the share gains remain consistent? And then all of the other initiatives are what maybe drive some share gain or expand the addressable market. And any thoughts on what that competitive landscape looks like in general? Thank you.
Yeah, I think you categorized it extremely well. We think we can continue to leverage our technology innovation, our technology leadership to continue to take market share at a pace. I think these opportunities that we highlighted give us those extensive opportunities to continue to grow, expand our addressable market, expand our breadth in which we serve our customers, and continue to take an accelerated path to gaining market share.
Down on the front here, Nigel.
Thanks. Can you just be a little bit more specific on how Regal's content on A2L systems compares to 410A's? Is there any significant change in content? And then just maybe taking Julian's question a little bit, I understand that the A2L strategy at this point is a little bit murky by OEM, but how are production rates on current systems comparing to your plan in the second half of this year?
I may ask you to repeat that second piece, but let me start off with the A2L transition. And generally, the content for the motors has stayed the same. There are a few edge cases where you needed more power in order to push that refrigerant through the system. And in those cases, we've been working closely with our OEM customers to provide kind of that next-generation solution. Typically, it was just scaling up in one of the product categories that they were already buying and going up to a higher horsepower motor.
And so, not a huge change. There was just a few edge cases where we saw that transition really be required. Yeah, just clarifying, you mentioned kind of murky visibility from the OEMs. I'm just curious about the second half production rates compared to your plan. Yeah, we're continuing to ramp up production. And so, we saw a 15% production increase sequentially as we've moved through the quarter. And we'll continue to see production ramp up in Q4. As we highlighted, it's murky. I think everyone has seen a lot of the industry reports, and those kind of give conflicting views.
Whether you're looking at the HARDI report, which is generally flat, you look at AHRI, which took a sudden jump up in kind of that June-July timeframe, is creating a little bit of ambiguity as to will this be a sustained process? Will we start to see that flow through the distribution channel? And so we're working closely with our OEM customers to ensure that we can align with them and provide them what they need.
Thanks.
Great. And I think we'll leave it there and move on to Kevin Zaba and Automation and Motion Control. Thank you, Brooke.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Kevin Zaba, and I lead our Automation and Motion Control segment, or what we call AMC. I have been with Regal Rexnord for 10 years, starting as president of the former Rexnord PMC segment, joining Regal Rexnord as the president of our MCS segment after the Rexnord PMC merger, and then becoming leader of our AMC segment when we formed it from complementary businesses across Regal Rexnord at the completion of our acquisition of Altra in March of 2023.
Before Regal Rexnord, I spent almost 25 years with various product systems and solution businesses at Rockwell Automation, and after a career started as an engineer at Boeing Aerospace. Now, let me transition to our AMC discussion by starting with the business fundamentals for this segment. On the left, you can see the segment's 2023 financial profile, $1.7 billion in sales at very attractive margins, margins that we believe reflect the significant technology and differentiated performance attributes of our products. Along the top are our principal product categories, the majority of which help solve critical motion applications in a diverse set of industrial end markets. We also have an adjacent power management business with highly engineered products that manage standby and backup power, predominantly in data center or critical infrastructure applications.
As you can see in the pie charts, this is a global business that weighted to North America, which notably makes us well-positioned to support our customers' reshoring efforts, but also represents an opportunity for us to continue to grow selectively in geographies outside of North America, as our available market opportunity is approximately balanced across North America, EMEA, and APAC regions. The AMC business is split about 70-30 between direct sales to OEMs and systems integrators and indirect sales to end users and more localized OEMs through distributors.
Now, with this OEM and project-biased channel mix, our business truly benefits the most when capital purchases are flowing well into our served markets. Regarding the served markets, AMC serves and takes the lead segment role in cross-selling the Regal Rexnord portfolio into five secular end markets that comprise the majority of our sales.
These include factory automation, aerospace, food and beverage, medical, and critical power. We expect each of these will grow at higher rates due to the macro trend demand drivers in these end markets. As I believe you will come to see and appreciate over the next 30 minutes, we are strengthening our position in Automation and Motion Control, a strategy that should allow us to outgrow our market over the next few years. Now, consistent with AMC's healthy historic and anticipated growth and margin performance, this business has a number of powerful competitive advantages. How we win in the markets we serve starts with technology leadership, which is a fundamental attribute of our customer value proposition. All of our divisions have a reputation for developing solutions known for the highest performance, reliability, and productivity improvements.
Our customers also value our deep domain expertise, which allows us to collaborate with them to solve their toughest application challenges. In many respects, we know our customers' applications as well or better than they do, which has allowed us to build strong relationships rooted in trust and a spirit of collaboration. A critical third advantage are our digital capabilities, where we are investing in developing proprietary approaches to digital marketing and lead development and creating a robust online experience along the entire quote-to-cash value stream. Our approach aligns with the strategy of both IPS and PES, creating an opportunity for a seamless customer experience, regardless of the mix of offerings our customers choose to research, design, purchase, or receive support for.
We know that our customers are looking for self-serve options, even amongst the most technically sophisticated buyers procuring our most highly engineered products. So our investments here are truly a differentiator, as we believe we are distancing ourselves from our competitors in this area. The fact that we have resources to do this and can leverage relevant developments across the entire organization are benefits of Regal Rexnord's scale and scope. On the right-hand side of this slide are our three-year financial targets for AMC.
Our sales growth outlook is 4%-7%. We expect our EBITDA margin to be in the 24%-26% range over this timeline, aided by mix positive new products, volume growth, synergies, and ongoing lean and productivity actions. We believe our financial profile places us firmly in the top quartile among industrial companies. So you're now familiar with the four pillars of our enterprise growth strategy.
Let me summarize how they apply to AMC and then elaborate on the most critical drivers by sharing pertinent examples for each pillar in the remainder of my presentation. First is a focus on high-growth markets. As noted, our end market exposures in AMC are highly attractive, with strong secular and megatrend exposures. We are prioritizing investments to capitalize on these typically positive tailwinds across the markets that we serve. More practically, this is about developing products and solutions that address customer demand trends, many of which are disconnected from the broader macro cycle, enabling our opportunity for outgrowth. Second is solution selling.
Our technology leadership, domain expertise, and opportunities to collaborate across AMC and with the other Regal Rexnord businesses allows us to move up the value chain and sell more industry-aligned subsystems and solutions, bringing more value add to our customers and creating even stickier relationships with them. The third is raising durability. With the majority of our sales landing in markets with secular trends, our demand is less tied to the typical industrial macro cycle swings, which makes AMC inherently more durable over time. Our plan to over-invest in product subsystems and solutions to broaden our position in these markets will further improve our durability moving forward. And finally is leveraging the enterprise's scope and scale. Our AMC business is by definition a smaller, more focused player relative to a number of our automation peers.
But the advantage of being part of Regal Rexnord is leveraging the organization's 2,000+ associate global sales organization, in particular at IPS, to help us monetize our differentiated technologies and our healthy innovation pipeline. Our products often sit adjacent to IPS and PES products at end users and OEMs in our key end markets. So our industry-based commercial collaboration with other segments not only helps us penetrate new accounts, but enables the entire organization to move up the value chain with our existing customers, positioning Regal Rexnord as a trusted strategic partner. Now, this slide summarizes our end market exposures, and as you can see, they are very attractive. We consider approximately 86% of our markets as benefiting from secular tailwinds or associated megatrends, so the most relevant are listed on the right.
At the top of the list is labor availability and an aging workforce, both of which are spurring more automation investment in the industries that we serve. Next, electrification is about the shift from fossil fuel, hydraulic, and pneumatic-driven power to more efficient and cleaner electric power. We are leading the way here, in particular with some of our actuation products that are pushing the load boundaries into the higher power ranges needed for electric actuation. Regulatory changes in the U.S. and abroad are driving investments in defense, electrification, clean energy, and critical infrastructure that we believe we are well-positioned to take advantage of with our current and planned offerings.
We're also helping our customers make their manufacturing operations more sustainable, whether that is with the recycled materials our conveying team is using to produce advanced plastic belts, or our market-leading 95% efficient permanent magnet motors, just to name a couple of examples. In fact, sustainability impacts are a key consideration in all new product development decisions that we make across Regal Rexnord. Medical technology advancements are driving rapid growth in automated surgical tools and robotic surgeries, which are enabled by core offerings in our automation businesses. These tremendous benefits that are tied to increasing access, improving patient outcomes, and reducing the duration of hospital stays and the cost of care make investment in these more advanced tools increasingly more attractive for our end users.
And lastly is data proliferation, in particular related to AI, and driving a tremendous demand in data center infrastructure buildouts and, in turn, our associated data center solution set, a macro driver which I suspect needs no further elaboration with this audience. This slide outlines our expected growth rates for each of our secular markets, our key applications in each market, and our value proposition, or how we win with customers in each of the markets. We're going to go into more detail on each market in subsequent slides, but there are three common themes that I'd like to highlight. One, we focus on critical applications that require high precision, highly repetitive motion control, and critical power management. Our customers expect this highly reliable, consistent performance all day, every day, for years at a time.
Two, our value proposition is tied to having deep knowledge of our customers' applications, selling products with extremely high quality and reliability, and being able to design engineered subsystems and solutions built with our components. And third, frequently leveraging the scale and scope of Regal Rexnord to provide differentiated value to our customers through ease of doing business, consistent service levels on a global basis, and a seamless and trouble-free omnichannel experience through our digital investments. Now, I'd like to go deeper into how we play in each of our principal end markets and share a few examples of the innovations and growth initiatives relevant to that market. So let me start with factory automation. Our business serving discrete factory automation designs and manufactures high-performance motion control components and systems for industrial applications.
Some application examples are listed on the left side of the slide, and our products are used to automate factory robots, improve industrial safety, operate conveying systems, and drive high-precision machine tools. On the right, we list the main products we sell into this market: motion control hardware and software, highly engineered servo and stepper drives and motors, and precision mechanical components such as gearboxes, bearings, brakes, and seals. At the bottom are examples of automation solutions, which are complete subsystems that our customers, which are often an integrator or an end user customer, will use to build or upgrade a portion of a manufacturing line or multiple lines within their factory. The business competes on its differentiated technology and precision engineering and focuses on customers that have very demanding performance standards.
The fact that customers can count on these products to reliably perform to exacting specifications and to do so consistently over time has created extremely sticky customer relationships and annuity revenue streams with attractive margins for us. Now, this is an example of a recent AMC innovation in the factory automation market, in this case, a solution to amplify collaborative robot or cobot productivity. Our team created a seventh axis for the cobot via a precision linear motion track solution that allows the cobot to slide laterally, greatly extending the cobot's reach versus the typical fixed mount installation. Secular trends such as onshoring and labor availability, as well as investments to improve workplace safety, are increasing automation spending. But not all applications require soup-to-nuts automation. And this is where cobots play a role by enabling an automation light solution.
We expect cobot demand to grow at a 20% CAGR in the near to medium term, and AMC's innovative seventh axis offering is directly relevant to this market growth. The solution is also a great example of a highly engineered subsystem. As you can see in the upper right, the product is comprised of a number of our components, including servo motors and drives and precision mechanical components that enable the robot to quickly, precisely, and safely move materials between cells. Our proprietary design has a number of features customers value, including approximately 20% lower installation and startup costs, higher load capacities, and a much longer travel length than available from our closest competitors.
The seventh axis also has a proprietary collision detection system used when more than one cobot is mounted on the same rail, designed by our teams leveraging their years of application experience in this area. It's a clear technology differentiated product, which is consistent with other offerings that we have at AMC. Next, let me turn to food and beverage, where our offering centers around automation and conveying components and subsystems. Pictured on the left-hand side of the slide is a bottling line, which is a great representative application for our products pictured on the right. Our products include modular plastic and metal conveying chains, servo drives and motors, linear actuators and ball screws that work in complement with components from the IPS and PES segments, such as motors, gearboxes, brakes, clutches, and couplings.
In AMC, we also provide value-added automation solutions, which incorporate our products into conveying modules and subsystems that are installed in food and beverage production facilities and enable our customers to transform raw ingredients into packaged consumer goods. This includes, as shown on the bottom right, our Busse branded palletizer and depalletizer equipment, ModSort material handling sorters, and even Kollmorgen technology kits embedded in leading AGVs and AMRs. Now, all of these solutions are typically found at the start or finish of the production process and are used to move received goods to the production line or the finished goods to pallets or trucks for shipping. The critical product attributes here include quality and reliability, as well as differentiated competencies in line speed and sustainability.
The latter is largely focused on reducing water consumption and improving energy efficiency at our customers. Increasingly, our growth in food, beverage, and other consumer packaged goods and markets will be driven by application solutions like the subsystems just mentioned and new industry-specific powertrains designed through the cross-functional collaboration between our conveying business and the applicable teams at IPS and at PES.
What's important to note is that consumer packaged goods applications represent the broadest number of cross-segment product opportunities at Regal Rexnord. And therefore, leveraging our existing scope and scale to win additional components and create new subsystems and solutions represents a very significant growth opportunity for us. Now, on this slide, we discuss two of the ways we are driving growth in the food and beverage market. One is meeting rising demand for more sustainable solutions, and the second is pursuing significant cross-sell opportunities. As you can see in the middle column, we have been intervening to make our products more sustainable in the areas of reduced water usage, lubrication requirements, energy consumption, and downtime, as much as 20% in this example. The first element on the right-hand side of the slide is our flush-top surface conveying chain.
This chain can run without lubrication, reducing the water used for production by approximately 30% versus traditional solutions, and the unique surface design reduces material scrap from container toppling and breakage as they run at high speeds. Regarding cross-sell, the majority of our customers typically procure only one or two product categories directly from us in their food and beverage applications, but they use products from many of our categories to create their full automation solution. As an example, they may procure a conveyor belt from us, but they also use gearboxes, couplings, guides, motors, and actuators to create a subsystem that is part of a food or a beverage line.
Our current beverage portfolio breadth means we have the components as well as the application expertise to design and engineer a complete subsystem for them, such as the number two example pictured on the right. I will note a factor underpinning our value proposition in both of these examples is our service capabilities, as pictured third on the right. This is not just about aftermarket service for us, but about collaborating with our customers to improve their operations, such as through line audits and line optimization assessments. Let's turn to the aerospace market. In this market, we sell highly engineered components used in commercial aerospace, air and land-based defense, helicopter, and space exploration applications, as pictured on the left-hand side of the slide.
Our offering is pictured on the right-hand side of the slide, and at the top are our current and emerging actuator subsystem offerings, which are highly strategic for us. Through the combination of our legacy Regal aerospace business with the Rexnord PMC and Altra aerospace businesses, we have built a more comprehensive product portfolio that enables us to expand from selling components to also providing these vertically integrated electromechanical actuation solutions. And I'm going to discuss these in more detail in just a few minutes. Other products include components such as bearings, seals, and servo motors, all built to the highly demanding specifications required by our aerospace customers, where quality tolerances are measured in microns. The collective aerospace markets where we play are expected to benefit from strong secular tailwinds as well.
These are tied to making air travel more sustainable, addressing rising geopolitical risks, and our OEM customers prioritizing suppliers with lower-risk supply chains. Now, in the realm of aircraft sustainability, we see greater electrification of commercial and military aircraft, the introduction of alternative fuels, and increased use of hybrid propulsion systems as well. Now, as geopolitical tensions arise, countries are enhancing their domestic defense capabilities, which is driving demand for our defense products as well. And in the wake of recent periods of global supply chain disruption, customers are shifting their business to supply our partners with better-managed, lower-risk supply chains, and all of these trends I just discussed play to Regal Rexnord's strengths.
We have been making meaningful investments to significantly raise our new product vitality and production capacity in aerospace, ensuring that we are well-positioned to continue addressing our customer needs in regards to these secular trends. And I'm happy to say that we have solid momentum and expect significant growth for years to come in this end market. Now, let me leverage that similar aerospace application slide to discuss the significant cross-sell synergy opportunities we are now pursuing as a result of the Rexnord PMC and Altra transactions. We currently see the strongest cross-sell opportunities in the four applications listed on this slide: helicopter, commercial transport, commercial space, and defense, where we already are seeing a strong funnel emerge.
Our current funnel of opportunities exceeds $100 million in new opportunities, and we've captured some really nice wins already. In each of these cases, we have anchor brands with strong relationships at relevant players in each application that can pull through the rest of the Regal Rexnord aerospace portfolio. For example, in the case of commercial aircraft, the Rexnord aerospace franchise can pull through content from across the broader portfolio, inclusive of content from the IPS segment, like gears, brakes, clutches, and brakes.
We have visibility to the potential here because we've connected our opportunity funnels. And in many cases, our customers are proactively reaching out to us about ways to collaborate on other components and subsystems based on our broad portfolio, high quality, and solid track record of delivery performance against a very challenging supply chain environment. This was further reinforced during our executive top-to-top meetings at the recent Farnborough Air Show. Now, I mentioned that a recent expanded product for us, enabled by our expanded capabilities with Altra, are electromechanical actuators. These engineered subsystems are responsible for controlling critical movements on an aircraft, such as raising or lowering wing flaps.
Our legacy businesses have long sold the components used to build the actuator assembly, but we are now in the process of designing and engineering the entire subsystem to move us up the value chain and, in turn, develop stickier relationships with our customers. We also see a compelling growth opportunity selling actuators into the advanced air mobility market, which is outlined on this slide. Advanced Air Mobility, or AAM, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the aerospace market. It is also one of the few areas in commercial aerospace where new platforms are being developed. By some estimates, as many as 2,000 AAM aircraft per year could be in production by 2030. The tier-one players in this market have often assembled electric actuators using various third-party components but are increasingly open to procuring complete subsystems from us.
We are designing an electromechanical actuator, as represented on the right, leveraging the breadth of our component portfolio, and you can see all of our content that either already goes into or has the potential to go into one of these subsystems is called out around the actuator image itself. We find ourselves well-positioned at tier-one OEMs to engineer our components into the integrated subsystem and to optimize it for performance and efficiency because we know the components and the end-use applications so well, have strong roots in the aerospace market, are able to manufacture to the highly demanding shock, vibration, and temperature specification levels required, and can manufacture at scale in a typical lower-volume production industry.
Now, there are still many regulatory hurdles to clear to broadly commercialize these AAM solutions for electric aircraft, but we are progressing our solutions very quickly and look forward to communication from us regarding our commercialization efforts over the coming weeks. Let me switch now to medical automation, where we serve the market with a full range of ultra-high-performance, highly engineered motors, controllers, and encoders, and high-precision linear motion mechanical components, as shown on the right. Some great examples of applications with this precision content are pictured on the left side of the slide. The application in the upper left is a leading robotic surgery system. Our products control various parts of the system, including the robotic arms that are performing surgical procedures.
And as you can imagine, this requires an incredibly high degree of precision control, and anything less than this can be highly problematic for our end users, which in this case are surgeons and their patients. This is exactly the kind of application that plays to our strengths of high precision, high reliability, and high durability. Below the robot is a diagnostic testing application where our micro-motion products are moving various parts of a lab machine, including a micropipette that is dispensing small amounts of fluid into a tray of test vials. Again, we play where there is a need for highly calibrated, high-precision motion on a small or even micro scale and can be trusted to do so with accuracy hundreds or thousands of times each day.
Moving across to the lower right, our micro-motion family of products are also used in medical hand tools where precise motion control in a small format is critical, and finally, on the upper right, we have CT and MRI scanning machines, including open-frame motors and linear motion control with similar performance requirements to the other examples that I mentioned. In some of the applications I discussed, we have started providing customers with a complete high-precision powertrain solution as well, which usually includes a precision motor, encoder, gearing, and other components that are pictured. The medical injector pen is a great example of this. Now, by providing this component as an integrated solution, we improve productivity while also helping customers optimize their product performance. On this slide is an example of how we're driving innovation in the fast-growing robotic surgery market.
As you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, we expect demand for robotic surgery equipment to grow at a mid-teens CAGR over the next three years. Robotic surgery continues to rise in popularity as well, with the number of annual procedures doubling in the last three years. And that's not surprising because, as noted earlier, using robots tends to improve patient outcomes and lower the cost of care through shorter hospital stays as well as fewer patient complications. Our strategy here is to launch different new products into this market, including the medical-grade components and subsystems pictured on the right-hand side of the slide. Pictured here is a representative high-precision robotic surgery system.
Now, while this is just one type of surgical robot, this example is helpful to illustrate the types of new products we are launching as called out around the robot so you can see how they fit into a robotic surgery system. These include actuators called out in the upper left that raise and lower robotic arms, power-dense frameless and housed motors, and housed motors that power the larger actuators, and a micromotor on the lower right that moves the smaller parts of the robot, such as the fingers and the probes. What these products have in common is highly precise motion provided in more compact designs with a greater power density versus the relevant competitive offerings.
These attributes all support less invasive procedures that, in turn, benefit patients and lower costs for providers. We also differentiate here on operational excellence. We can manufacture and sell these products globally, and the quality and reliability of our operations means we can reduce supply chain risk for our customers, which is an increasingly high priority for many of our customers after experiencing the pain of the recent post-COVID-driven supply chain disruptions. Now, as a final end market example, let's discuss our capabilities in the data center market, where our Thomson Power Systems business manufactures and sells paralleling switchgear, automatic transfer switches, and power management devices, and leads the cross-selling of fan filter units from PES, all pictured on the right-hand side of the slide.
Our highly engineered products are used to provide standby and backup power in mission-critical applications where even the briefest interruption of power supply can be disruptive to our end users. In addition, our value-added services business helps our customers achieve important 24/7 uptime and creates a stickier customer relationship and a recurring revenue stream for Regal Rexnord. While our products and services are primarily sold into the data center market, they also serve applications in smart manufacturing, medical, and critical public infrastructure such as water and wastewater management. Our power systems team competes on its deep application expertise very competitively at times in a high-demand market cycle, exceptional quality and proprietary technologies, most notably in our switchgear controller, which enables critically important fast switchover times to emergency power.
We see significant growth opportunities in data center, not only because we expect the market for our products to grow at a high single-digit rate for the foreseeable future, but also because the demand here currently exceeds supply for the power management components where we play, and buying decisions are tied to attributes such as guaranteed uptime where we excel. We are investing for growth in data centers and see future share gains tied to new products, expanding our services footprint, augmenting our sales organization, and notably building on recent successes with our lean initiatives to scale up our manufacturing capacity in this space. With that, let me shift gears and discuss a growth initiative focused on broadening our addressable market in the discrete factory automation space.
Historically, our discrete automation business has been focused on the ultra-premium market, which demands the highest levels of precision performance on the highest-end equipment. Solving our customers' most challenging motion applications is really our core competency here. Now, while this will continue to be core to us, we also see opportunities to leverage our superior technological expertise that's been honed over years of solving ultra-premium applications to selectively expand into the high-end mid-premium slices of the factory automation market. This has a few benefits for us. One, it widens our addressable market, opening up new avenues for growth. Two, it allows us to leverage our RD&E investment over higher volume packaged offerings. And three, it can improve our business's durability by reducing the lumpiness that often comes with the longer-cycle project work in ultra-premium applications.
I do want to emphasize that our intention here is to selectively expand because we are conscious of being able to at least preserve margin, and we actually see opportunities to grow our margins here, in particular white spaces of this market where precision motion matters most, and we can provide a differentiated and compelling customer value proposition built from our historic strengths. As indicated on the right-hand side of the slide, we see a new sales opportunity growing to an estimated $50 million based on our initial plans, which would add approximately a point of growth to the AMC segment in each of the next three years.
Longer term, we think there's more room to grow here, and we will seek to expand our boundaries in high and mid-premium applications based on learnings from this initial foray into this slice of the market. Now, on this slide is an example of a new system we plan to launch next year to address this mid- and high-premium segment of the factory automation market. The growth opportunity we see is outlined on the left, is expanding our addressable market in a space growing at a mid-single-digit rate, and we are starting from a relatively low-installed base here, given our historic focus on ultra-premium, so we believe we're actually going to outpace this mid-single-digit growth rate over the coming years.
Our value proposition outlined in the next column centers on the level of precision control our offering supports, which is about 30% better versus other high- and mid-premium category competitive offerings. Our startup times are also lower than most competitors by up to 50%, meaning the time it takes to install, configure, and tune the system is cut in half via our innovative plug-and-perform capabilities that are native to this system. Now, lastly, our digital investments will make it easy for buyers to select, configure, and order this new system independently online, all steps that typically required expert technical assistance in the past.
As a result of these differentiators, we expect the margins on this product to be above our AMC fleet average as we achieve full run-rate production levels over the next few years. So with that overview, I want to leave you with four key takeaways for the AMC segment. One, 86% of our sales are in high-growth end markets that are benefiting from a variety of secular tailwinds and megatrends, with strong brands and products known for high reliability, precision, and performance. Two, we are moving up the customer value chain by cross-developing and cross-selling new solutions built from our strong portfolio of leading components. Three, we are making significant innovation investments to drive strategic new product development, double our new product vitality, and better serve these growth markets.
And finally, we are selectively expanding our discrete factory automation solutions, leveraging our technology leadership and deep domain expertise in ultra-premium to provide differentiated value propositions to users in the high and mid-premium slices of the motion control market. So collectively, healthy market tailwinds plus our initiatives to drive outgrowth should support durable 6% mid-cycle organic growth in this segment and attractive and increasing margins. Thank you for listening, and I'm happy to take any questions.
Great. Thank you, Kevin. So we do have a few minutes for questions for the AMC segment. Start back in the room there with Mike.
Hi everyone, Mike Halloran with Baird. So two questions here. One, maybe the first question's a little broader than just your segment, but if you look at some of the slides, there was certainly a lot of not just specific to your segment products that spanned across all three. So when you think about identifying, prioritizing, and focusing on some of these solution sales or the cross-sell opportunities, how does that process work? Is part of it that you go to market commercialized by end market? Does that help that process? But more broadly, I mean, how do you figure out where the size is meaningful enough for you to put the investment dollars forward?
Yeah, that's a great question. As we talked about, across the company, we're really looking at these vertical go-to-market models where each segment looks at who has the most strength there and then leads that effort moving forward, and that leads to a number of things that we would optimize on how we both approach those key customers in that area and how we're going to then drive the voice of customer to help us prioritize the subsystem or that collection of offerings that makes the most sense for us, so we leverage 80/20 to help do this as we size each different opportunity just to ensure that it meets the volume and the margin criteria that we're looking for collectively across the space.
The only thing I would add to that is we focus on those highly valued customers. It might be in one product category that we believe we can grow and expand with. So to Kevin's point, that's the pull-through that we get. But it starts with one position where we already have a position of strength.
And then, just a question on the margins, 24/26 guide. I think this year your guide's somewhere around 24%. Maybe just talk to the incremental margin assumptions if there's any drag on that progression. And this is typically an area that would increment pretty strongly. And I know the growth is strong, so maybe just kind of sync all that together.
Yeah, the real element to the margin is that we are reinvesting in innovation. Quite frankly, when we brought in the Altra's business in this space, and in particular for the automation markets that we need to serve, we knew we had to do incremental investments there to really drive the growth that we were looking for. So we are reinvesting in innovations heavily there to just position us well for this future growth.
Let me just chime in. The leverage in this business should be 40+ in this business. That is being tempered by what Kevin just described. But if you go and you run your own models based on what we plugged in throughout the day today, you'd find that the margins would certainly be above the levels that we're putting out in terms of the guidance. However, that does represent that investment, the difference, just to be clear.
Great. Other questions for Kevin there in the middle?
Yeah, maybe a peculiar question on the medical business, but at least in an adjacent area, not saying they're one and the same, but several companies that sell components into the med dev OEMs are seeing massive destocking this year. You've talked about continued strong growth into that market. Just curious if you see any signs of a backup there as the supply chain crisis is coming kind of full circle to normalization there, or if maybe your sell-in and sell-through was always aligned.
Yeah, we haven't seen anything considerable from our major OEMs on a destock at this point. Our backlog in these areas has been strong. Our customer results that they're seeing with the machines that they're selling has remained strong, at least the places that we play in. But it's certainly something that we constantly look for.
Maybe just one more question up front here in the first row.
Hi, thank you. Jennifer Eppel with Alpine Peaks Capital. I'm wondering who the customer actually do you serve the OEMs? For instance, in automation, would you be selling directly to them, or would you be selling to Intuitive Surgical with the robotics? Just trying to understand who's the one actually spec'ing you into their systems here.
Yeah, we're heavily focused on the OEM itself, which is typically a direct sale from us. Now, about 30% or so of our business goes through channels, but even those channels are going to serve a smaller OEM typically. So when we mention about benefits that we can see from any kind of additional capital flowing into these end markets, that's why we would typically get a nice benefit of that because of just the flow of that investment in those machines that we keep flowing.
Great, thank you. I think we will just continue along here next with Rob Rehard, our CFO.
Thank you, Kevin. There are at least tall people in the group.
Good morning. My name's Rob Rehard. I'm the CFO for Regal Rexnord, and I hope it's become clear through the course of this morning that we have, over the past five years, built a very powerful enterprise, one with high exposure to secular markets, a portfolio of technology differentiated products, strong brands and channel positions, high aftermarket revenues, an advantaged global manufacturing footprint and supply chain, unparalleled scale and scope of go-to-market with over 2,000 selling professionals around the world, and one that is highly cash generative. This morning, I'd also like to help quantify the various growth-related discussions we've been having and also broaden the discussion to include margin, cash flow, capital deployment, which can be summarized by these four key messages. First, strong controllable execution around our growth initiatives.
This occurs through the introduction of innovative new products and leveraging our scale and scope advantages, especially in IPS, combined with our healthy exposure to secular tailwinds, all of which should drive an inflection to positive organic growth starting in the second half of this year, with further acceleration expected as we look further out. Second, we continue to have a clear path to 40% adjusted gross margins and 25% adjusted EBITDA margins exiting 2025, which are largely volume independent, plus potential upside beyond these levels. Third, we expect to deliver an adjusted free cash flow margin in the low to mid-teens by 2027, which can support substantial value creation through capital deployment. In the near term, that's likely weighted to delivering.
In the mid to longer term, it's about bolt-on M&A, opportunistic share repurchases, dividend increases, or more likely some combination of all three. Fourth, we are targeting a low double-digit organic earnings per share CAGR over the 2024 to 2027 forecast period. Taken together, we believe Regal Rexnord presents investors a highly compelling value proposition, especially considering the multiple at which we are trading. I'll add some further perspective on valuation later in the presentation. As Louis mentioned earlier, the strong enterprise we have today is the result of highly intentional organic and inorganic transformation initiatives.
As you can see on this slide, in the last five years, we have created a dramatically more valuable Regal Rexnord as measured across all key metrics. Our sales have roughly doubled. Gross margin is up 900 basis points and up 1,100 basis points as compared to our 2024 run rate. EBITDA margin is up 700 basis points. Cash flow has more than doubled, and our free cash flow margin is up 300 basis points. Perhaps most profoundly and underpinning this improved financial profile, our portfolio was 77% motors and air moving products in 2018 versus 29% today, while power transmission has grown from 23% to 43%, and we expanded into the adjacent industrial automation space, which is now 28% of the new portfolio.
Notably, in 2018, our top 10 OEM customers accounted for 24% of our sales, where today that level is only 11%. Shifting to total shareholder return, TSR is one of the key quantifiable metrics on which we measure performance versus our mission to be among the most compelling choices for our investors. Since we began our transformation journey back in 2019, coinciding with when Louis joined as CEO, we have produced a total shareholder return of 145%.
I think this performance is best considered in the context of the significant in-market fluctuations we have been navigating over the past couple of years, plus our strategic decision to use our strong balance sheet to opportunistically acquire Altra. Overall, strong performance. Even so, our TSR in the last couple of years has fallen short of our goal for top quartile performance. But we see this as temporary, especially with the new portfolio we've discussed today, which provides tremendous growth opportunity along with the continued levers we have within our control. Rest assured, our team is working extremely hard to deliver the growth, margins, and free cash flow performance that we know we are capable of. And we expect to deliver a much stronger top line and TSR performance in the future.
Today, we are maintaining the guidance range we set when we reported second quarter results back on August 1st. However, based on how business is tracking, we now think the lower half of the range is more likely. Our principal guidance points are listed on the right side of this slide. For those who have not followed us closely, we list characteristics of our year-to-date performance on the left, and I will highlight two. One, strong margin and cash flow performance despite persistent in-market headwinds.
And two, our strong cash flows plus Industrial Systems sale proceeds should allow us to pay down approximately $900 million of our debt this year, lowering our net leverage to about 3.3 times as we exit the year and keep us on track to be below two and a half times in the back half of 2025. On this slide, we present our sales and margin outlook for the 2024 to 2027 forecast period. Starting on the left with sales, we are modeling a three-year in-market CAGR of 1.5%-3.5%, plus outgrowth to deliver total organic growth of 2%-5%. Embedded in our in-market growth assumption is that our secular markets will average mid-single-digit growth through the forecast period, and our other in-markets will be flat to up low single digits. As a reminder, our secular in-markets represent about 50% of our sales.
As Louis shared in his presentation, over the last four years, pro forma for the Rexnord merger, the acquisition of Altra, and given effect to the sale of Industrial Systems, our portfolio grew about 2%. Our 2%-5% planning assumption assumes various degrees of acceleration versus recent history, driven by our improved in-market exposures and all the outgrowth initiatives we have been discussing this morning. Next, gross margin. We remain on track to hit our target of 40% gross margins exiting 2025. Our planning assumption is that we remain at approximately 40% through 2027. While volume leverage, along with benefits from synergies, 80/20, and lean actions should support additional upside beyond 40%, we assume that growth investments will be an offset.
Other factors, such as product, in-market, or geographic mix, along with price-cost dynamics, could also impact gross margins. Our planning assumption for a gross margin that is flat at 40% leaves room for some variability on such measures. Finally, on EBITDA margin, as discussed on the right, a similar story to gross margin with a clear path to 25% as we exit 2025, and an assumption that the business continues to operate at that level through 2027, given growth investments we intend to make. From a strategic perspective, we believe that we can create more value for our stakeholders by prioritizing organic growth acceleration over further margin expansion once our gross and EBITDA margins are sustainably at 40% and 25%, respectively.
And we are planning to dial up our growth investments accordingly. To be clear, we recognize that with the growth and self-help opportunities we've discussed today, we could see performance above the levels we're guiding. However, in light of current market conditions and uncertainty around the timing of interest rate reductions, upcoming election, etc., we are taking a measured approach in setting our assumptions.
For the last three years, our team has done a tremendous job executing our synergy plans, which, along with our 80/20 and lean initiatives, have been a principal driver of our margin expansion. In the chart on the left, we outline our cost synergy targets, starting with total cost synergies announced to date, $150 million related to Rexnord PMC and $160 million from Altra. In the next column, we show how much synergy benefit we expect to recognize in the P&L by the end of this year, which is approximately $205 million, and in the third column is our current outlook through 2027, which adds $15 million of additional cost synergies to our prior estimate for a total of $325 million. We expect to achieve the incremental $15 million in 2026, with modest spillover impacts in 2027.
The bar chart on the right of this slide details our cross-sell synergies, starting with the previously announced value of $125 million, which is related to Rexnord PMC. In the middle column, we show our cross-sell synergy achievement we expect this year, which is about $120 million, comprised of roughly $100 million related to Rexnord PMC and $20 million from Altra. In the right column is our current cross-sell synergy outlook, which totals $250 million and adds $125 million of cross-sell synergies related to Altra that we are announcing for the first time today. Note, the $125 million is inclusive of the $20 million we have recognized since closing Altra.
Over time, we believe the value of our cross-sell synergies will far exceed these values. But with the businesses now fully integrated and operating as one team, go forward synergies are somewhat impractical to track. Accelerating our organic growth was at the foundation of our strategic rationale for doing the Rexnord and Altra transactions. And here, three opportunities really stand out. One, selling complete power trains comprised of content from all three of our segments. Two, having the portfolio breadth and IPS to offer customers a compelling one-stop shop for all their critical power transmission needs. And once again, as Jerry mentioned in his sections, just think if we were able to sell more than one of our product categories to 5% more of our IPS customers.
That alone represents $160 million of growth opportunity, which equates to roughly 1% contribution to our three-year enterprise CAGR, not to mention the tremendous aftermarket potential. And three, leveraging a scaled global go-to-market presence to monetize our current and new product offerings. On this slide, we present our three-year sales and margin expectations by segment.
Starting with Industrial Powertrain Solutions, our planning assumption is for a three-year sales growth CAGR of 2-5% and EBITDA margins expanding to between 27% and 29% in 2027. As a reminder, about 80% of the synergies we forecast, both sales and cost, are in this segment. Next, Power Efficiency Solutions, where our assumed three-year sales growth CAGR is 2-3%, and the 2027 EBITDA margin is planned in a range of 17-18%. Lastly, Automation and Motion Control, where we set a three-year sales CAGR of 4-7% and EBITDA margins expanding to 24-26%. While AMC benefits from some degree of M&A synergies, we also see the highest degree of incremental growth investment in this segment as we refresh the innovation pipeline in this technology-rich business.
Moving to earnings per share, we expect to deliver at least low double-digit earnings per share growth over the forecast period, driven by the top line growth and margin expectations I just discussed, along with lower interest expense. We believe this level of earnings per share growth would be top quartile performance in our sector, aided by M&A synergies and a debt reduction opportunity funded by our strong expected free cash flow generation. From a modeling perspective, we assume that all post-dividend free cash flow goes to debt reduction and that our net interest expense will decline from the $376 million guided for 2024 to somewhere in the $210 million-$230 million range for 2027.
Note that as of the second quarter, only about 13% of our total debt was variable, and we expect to pay off this variable rate debt during 2025. Our transformed portfolio has a tremendous ability to generate cash, building on a history of strong cash flow generation by Legacy Regal, Rexnord, and Altra. These cash flows are now being enhanced by our growth, margin, and working capital initiatives.
As you can see on this slide, by the end of the forecast period, we expect to have a free cash flow margin in the low to mid-teens, up from approximately 11% this year. We believe our target performance would put us in the top quartile among industrial companies on cash flow margin. Viewed another way, the targeted 2027 cash flow margin equates to over $1 billion in annual adjusted free cash flow, which we expect to deliver beginning in 2026.
When it comes to how we're thinking about capital deployment, our top near-term priority is paying down our debt, both to lower our interest costs and to improve our risk profile. This will remain our priority until we see our net debt to EBITDA ratio fall below two and a half times, which, as I stated earlier, is expected to occur in the second half of next year. In the meantime, we plan to continue funding organic growth investments and maintaining our dividend. We benefit from a CapEx-like business model with required capital spending tracking at just under 2% of sales.
Once we achieve our net leverage target, we plan to deploy cash to fund inorganic growth and return cash to shareholders, likely toggling between opportunistic share repurchases and bolt-on M&A based on what is actionable in our acquisition pipeline and the relative valuations and return profiles of acquisitions versus repurchases. We will also aim to maintain a competitive dividend. While we are likely to allocate capital across all these categories going forward, our bias is towards growing the business. This chart shows the potential benefit to our equity holders from paying down our debt.
The bars represent our enterprise value and indicate the percentage mix of debt versus equity and how we expect the mix to evolve over the next three years based on our generation and use of cash flow under the assumptions outlined on the right side of this slide. Notably, we assume that our EV to EBITDA multiple remains constant over this period. Of course, if our multiple expands, that would suggest even more meaningful upside for our equity holders. The rising percentage of equity in our capital structures we pay down debt implies significant upside potential to our share price by the end of year 2027 versus recent levels.
In our modeling assumptions, we've assumed that all available free cash flow after dividends goes to paying down debt, and at the same multiple, would equate to approximately 50% upside potential to our share price by the end of 2027. However, even if we assume that only half of that available cash goes to paying down our debt, we would still equate to roughly 35% upside potential over the same period. Clearly, debt paydown is expected to be a significant component of the Regal Rexnord investment case through 2027.
On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see our historic and forecast net debt to Adjusted EBITDA leverage. Historically, we ran the business with low leverage, and we plan to return to that approach. We made an intentional, highly strategic decision to add leverage to acquire Altra, which has been a true home run for us. Given our strong free cash flow, plus the industrial system sale, we have been paying down debt expeditiously and expect to be below two and a half times net debt to Adjusted EBITDA leverage by the second half of 2025, and then plan to run the business with roughly one and a half to two times net leverage going forward, funding any bolt-on M&A with cash flow. On the right, you can see our debt maturity schedule, which shows we have no debt coming due until 2026.
With maturity of the first of four tranches of notes we issued to fund the Altra transaction. After that, we have no maturities until after 2027. As we approach the 2026 maturity on our notes, we will regularly evaluate the highest return use of our cash flow, whether that is funding debt paydown, including potential early repayments versus funding other capital deployment opportunities, such as bolt-on M&A and/or stock repurchases.
On the next two slides, we provide some benchmarking data to put our transformation in context and do so in a quantitative manner. In each of these four bar charts, we present our performance on a particular metric in 2018 prior to beginning our transformation activities, followed by the metric based on our 2024 estimated performance, and then where we expect to perform on each metric in 2027 based on the financial planning assumptions we've shared today.
In the last column of each chart, we show the range of performance on each metric for relevant top quartile peers. I'll note that we define this peer universe in part based on feedback we receive from our investors through a perception study we conducted last year. The takeaway is that in some cases, such as gross margin and Adjusted EBITDA margin, we are already performing in line with these peers. And by the end of our current three-year forecast period, we expect to be firmly in range or even at the high end of the range versus these peers. On this slide, we present additional benchmarking data following a similar format, but these charts are focused on ROIC, net debt leverage, and valuation. Taken together, I think the message is clear.
When considered on operating metrics such as growth, margins, and cash flow, or on a return metric such as ROIC, or even on balance sheet leverage, Regal Rexnord either is currently or over the next few years expected to be firmly in range with top quartile peers on the most relevant valuation-related metrics. However, as the bar on the far right of this slide shows, our valuation is currently lagging versus this same peer group. We believe this disconnect presents a tremendous opportunity for our investors because we expect this valuation gap to close in the near future, and we see a few drivers that we think will help close it. First, continuing to pay down our debt and bring our leverage to below two and a half times.
Second, achieving the performance metrics we are outlining today, in particular related to accelerating our top line growth through the cycle and generating over $1 billion of annual free cash flow with cash flow margins at the low- to mid-teens level, and third, delivering consistent performance through the cycle. On the third point, we believe that our portfolio can deliver more durable growth in the future, and as you saw across our segment presentations, we are executing various initiatives to further enhance our revenue durability. While we are on a temporary pause from M&A, we continue to maintain an active funnel and over time expect M&A to be a meaningful component of our growth algorithm, so I want to spend a few minutes on our M&A criteria and process. It starts with funnel creation and deal screening.
Aligned with our long-term vision for the company is the first screen and primarily involves clearing hurdles for growth margins and highly probable cost synergies. After that pre-screen, we look at the target's markets, and here we are looking for GDP plus growth and secular tailwinds. We then look at the target's competitive differentiation. It must have differentiated products with long-term sustainable advantages, factors likely consistent with 40%+ gross margins or a clear path to get there. If the market and target are attractive, we then look at fit. There must be a strategic logic for the asset to be part of our portfolio. The last hurdle is deal economics.
We want ROIC to exceed WACC by year three to year five, depending on the target's strategic relevance. We look for adjusted EPS accretion in year one, and as fit would imply, we want to see significant synergy potential. The key message is that we are data-driven, selective, and disciplined. With a disciplined process, most targets we review never clear the initial pre-screen, and fewer than 5% are ever reviewed at the final deal level. On this slide, we present how our portfolio segment mix evolves, assuming we deploy 50% of our post-dividend free cash flow to acquisitions after we reach two and a half times leverage ratio.
Based on our expected cadence of debt repayments, we believe we could start to execute smaller bolt-on M&A late in 2025 with likely transaction close dates in early 2026. Based on our current pipeline and strategic objectives, we expect most of our M&A to occur in AMC, which results in this high-growth, high-margin segment coming to represent approximately 37% of our portfolio by 2030, up from about 28% today.
As AMC becomes a larger share of the portfolio, it should have mixed positive benefits to our enterprise growth rate and also improve the durability of our sales performance. When you consider the cash flow our portfolio can generate, our robust pipeline of targets, and our strong track record on synergy realization, we believe it presents a compelling growth and value compounding opportunity, one our team is excited to execute in the coming years. As I wrap up, I will summarize how we envision the company in three years. Evidence of a powerful transformation story summarized in these metrics.
Organic sales growth of 2%-5%, 40% gross margins, 25% EBITDA margins, low double-digit earnings per share growth, a free cash flow margin comfortably in the low to mid-teens, which implies $1 billion+ in annual free cash flow, and net leverage in the one and a half to two times range. All metrics we believe would support a top quartile valuation multiple. And driving this performance is all that you heard today, which I will summarize in three broad buckets. The first is about being in attractive markets.
Roughly 50% of our portfolio is in markets that benefit from secular tailwinds and various mega trends such as decarbonization and electrification. And as you heard from IPS, we also have exposure to markets where we see high growth opportunities, even if these markets are not typically labeled secular. The second is about making strategic innovation investments.
All our segments have robust pipelines of new products with an emphasis on subsystems and solutions. These products have differentiated value propositions informed by voice of the customer, and they target our highly valued 80/20 customers and users in the high-growth markets. A number of these new products can also improve the durability of our revenue by targeting less cyclical aftermarket opportunities.
The third is about leveraging the scale and scope of our enterprise. In one regard, our scale and scope is itself a compelling value proposition for customers by creating an easy-to-use, highly knowledgeable one-stop shop for components along the industrial powertrain. In another regard, our scale and scope uniquely positions us to monetize our innovation by leveraging our global multi-thousand associate strong go-to-market team, and in yet another regard, our scale and scope ensures supply resiliency for our customers worldwide.
Executing this growth strategy is an exceptional team of disciplined people driving disciplined thought and disciplined actions. A team with a continuous improvement mindset, a team that acts with urgency to innovate with purpose. In short, a powerful enterprise positioned to fuel more durable growth and deliver top quartile results. And with that, Louis and I are happy to take your questions.
Great. Thanks, Rob. So we are now going to start our Q&A period. As a reminder, we are also taking questions from the virtual audience. So if you're online, you could either submit a question through the portal where you registered, or if you prefer, you could just email me directly, robert.barry@regalrexnord.com. And I think I forgot to mention earlier that we'll take about 15, 20 minutes for Q&A. We have some flexibility. We'll make sure all the questions get answered. And then after that, we do have lunch with presenters as well as our broader executive team in the room over to the left here. And with that, let's start down here in the front with Julian.
Thanks a lot. Maybe just the first question around the near term. You mentioned the sort of lower half of this year's guidance looks more likely. Maybe just any color around that.
Yeah, I think, Julian, at the end of the day, it's all about demand. I think if we exited, sorry, second quarter, and then we saw July order rates, they were up about 5%. And then August comes around, we get the results from ISM, and then we saw our orders in August were actually down about 3.5%. Certainly, ISM impacts much of our business. The general commercial side impacts from IPS to AMC and PES. The nice thing about IPS is that we do have some nice overdriving opportunities to help offset a lot of that.
But it certainly impacts roughly half of Brooke's business and PES, and then to another smaller extent, in some ways, Kevin's business. But factory automation certainly still lagging for us. And then there's the part of the PES segment that is commercial HVAC outside of North America, which has still been very pressured. So all of those things contributed to us seeing the lower half is more likely this time.
Thanks. And then maybe one more for Louis on the portfolio. Brooke gave a very strong presentation on the PES outlook. One question we often get from investors is around the sort of synergy of PES with the other two divisions. Maybe just kind of remind us of that and why it belongs with the other two, please.
Yeah, it's actually really simple from the standpoint of strategically, the industrial powertrain is a major part of our go-forward strategy. The motor is the heart of that powertrain. And how it all integrates and works together and having that knowledge of the product, but also the applications we serve, is very, very important. And so PES plays a huge role in our go-forward strategy from that perspective. Great. Let's go to the back with Mike. Hey, everybody. So if you think about all three of the presentations, and then certainly Rob's as well, heightened internal investments, strategic investments, partially a drag on the margin profile as you move forward, which makes sense.
I mean, it helps drive growth. But could you put that in context, what that means from a dollar basis or whatever way you can add some relevance there? And then secondarily, what you think that's going to add to growth or what the benefit can look like and just kind of frame the two sides of where those investment dollars are going? Yeah, maybe I'll take a crack and then Rob can add on because we didn't come prepared, Mike, with detail specifically on the dollar growth piece, right? But first of all, five years ago, our R&D investment was less than 2%. It will be 3% as of next year and we'll continue to invest in new product. That's a big driver of our 50% outgrowth. And so Jerry talked about 200 basis points. Kevin, if you looked at Kevin's market range, he's also looking at a 50% above market. And then Brooke has really pointed at market right now.
And because we want to be measured in how we think about PES with being relatively flat for the last five years. And so all of the investments, and we've been saying it for a while, right? 40% gross margins exiting 2025, 25% EBITDA margins. We have a clear path. We really don't need volume to get there. The investment then takes us to being able to achieve our goals. Now, we're driving to grow as a business. I would say this is the one muscle that we're still building and we're proving out. Historically, last five years, the business pro forma has grown 2.25%. We want to prove we can grow at 4%. And so that's where the investment. So sorry if it wasn't as quantified there for you, but hopefully that gives you a sense of how we're thinking about it.
But part of it is R&D goes from 2 to somewhere north of 3, right? For sure. That's just one thing to put in there. That's a big piece. The other big piece I'd say is we are investing in our go-to-market. You saw that sales force, I mean, 2,000 associates today helping to drive the entire portfolio. That has been incremental. That hasn't been just at a percentage of sales, if that makes sense.
The second one is just how do you define aftermarket? What does aftermarket mean for you? And then more importantly, when you think about the growth enabled there, how much of this is capturing your own replacement business or aftermarket business? How much of it is the cross-selling component and getting more aftermarket in? I mean, just maybe to frame up how that growth profile looks by component.
Yeah, the simplest way to think about aftermarket is break, replace, the simplest way. And so that's how we define it. I'm going to take it by business. So PES, we're investing in product that allows us to take share from other competitors in the aftermarket. In AMC, it's all around secular growth. And so the aftermarket play isn't as critical as growing in those secular markets. In IPS, it's a refocus on first fit in those markets that tend to have a faster rate of replace. But it's like for like mostly Regal product.
Maybe actually dovetailing on this theme of investment, we got a question from online. Does the AMC segment have a product or component need, in particular in software or electronics, that would be a strategic target for M&A?
You want to take that, Kevin? Let's just wait for the mic, please.
Yeah, so if you think about AMC's software focus now, it's really around software for programming, configuring, and optimizing our automation set. We don't have an independent software element, and some IoT elements in there as well. But we don't have a standalone software play at this point, or it's not an area of focus for us either at the current point in time.
Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is spot on, Kevin. Thank you. The AMC markets served are highly fragmented. There are opportunities in those markets that we could expand product as well as go-to-market, so regional expansion, that would strengthen our position. That's why as we talk about where we're going to invest in the future with bolt-ons, it's really mostly in AMC. And on top of that, we love the fact that AMC, 86% of the business is connected with secular markets. And so that will be a focus for us.
Great. Maybe up in the front here, Nigel.
Thanks. Just another crack at the second half outlook there. So Rob, in your slide, you say second half return to growth, organic growth. Is that still the case?
It is still the case. We do see organic growth in the second half.
Okay. Third quarter or just second half?
Second half.
Second half. Worth a try. And then on the medium term, so is it fair to say you're baking in about $1 billion of debt reduction over the next three years, give or take, but no M&A, no buybacks into your plan?
In the modeling that we've done, yes, we've paid down the level of debt, that level of debt, but we have not assumed anything in terms of buybacks or M&A.
Okay. Given those are quick answers. Define bolt-on. So you're committing to bolt-ons once you get past down below two and a half times leverage. What is a bolt-on right now for you guys?
Yeah, a bolt-on for us is a business that is going to strengthen our capabilities to service our customer. Now, a bolt-on is going to typically be a smaller business. We see no need. We were very intentional with what we did with Rexnord and Altra. But a bolt-on is typically, and as we look at our target list that we're cultivating right now, it can run on average about $100-$150 million of revenue. Now, are there a couple in the $300 million? Yes.
And are there some below 100? Absolutely. But that's what we think of as a bolt-on. But it has to have certain characteristics. It's got to be in secular markets. It has to have a clear path to 40% gross margins. It has to make us stronger. We have to see cost synergies justify the acquisition, but then sales synergies, which we don't bake into our modeling, but sales synergies for the future. There is no question in my mind that the Rexnord and Altra transactions for us will play out success around the sales synergies that we talked about. More so, although I love our cost synergies we got out of those two acquisitions, the sales synergy is what's going to differentiate us. And so that's how we approach bolt-ons as well.
Great. Actually, another question I'll intersperse here from online. How are you thinking about solution sales impacting the durability and reliability of the product portfolio?
Well, we think it strengthens the durability and reliability of the product portfolio. No question that as we move up that value chain, we become stickier with the customer. We're partnering them to solve a problem and provide a total solution. And so from that perspective, it strengthens our durability. Great. Chris here in the middle. I think Louis may have just clarified, but just for finality, I think a lot of emphasis on the bolt-on M&A. I think you kind of relegated PMC and Altra as singular, but beyond the next year or two, are you suggesting that particularly scaled M&A is just not part of your intent or expectation? Highly unlikely. I'm never going to say never, but we do not have any acquisition going on of any asset above $500 million of revenue.
Great. Oh, actually, okay. Let's go to Chris back there. Yeah.
Sorry, Chris Dankert at Loop Capital. Just to kind of level set us first off, you guys had previously talked about some footprint consolidation maybe before we got into Altra, I guess. But where do we stand in terms of footprint today? Some of those actions in the past versus supply chain rigidity and kind of what you need to have in the future.
Yeah, you know, over the last few years, we have reduced our square footage by about 18%. Going forward, we expect it will still be a driver of opportunity for us, and we're looking at about 15% reduction in square footage. Now, one of the core differentiators for Regal, though, is our global manufacturing footprint, and that will continue to be a strength, and we saw it certainly during COVID when we were able to take on some additional opportunities with customers. We see it as a resiliency play around the supply chain.
We have pivoted a bit here, though, in that we are focused on supplying in region for region. Doesn't mean we can't supply outside of region as well, but we have pivoted in region for region. A great example of that is five years ago, China was a bigger percentage of our sales, sorry, bigger percent of our production. Today, it's only about 6% of our production on 5.5% of our sales, and so that has been a conscious effort, but beyond that, we think it's a core differentiator for us is our global supply chain.
Great. Intersperse another couple of questions here from online. First of all, can you discuss the framework you use to evaluate whether the growth investments are actually working? And if, for example, you use, say, a return on invested capital kind of threshold or return metric, what would be the threshold for evaluating the effectiveness of the growth investments on that metric?
Most of the time, we use a payback period of about two years. And most of the investments that we make are in that category. That easily exceeds our cost of capital from an ROIC or a payback perspective. Okay. I'll put in another one. Can you comment on your AI and/or digital strategy? Does AI have a role to play for Regal Rexnord? Yeah, actually, digital absolutely has a role to play, and AI has a role to play. You all might recall that last year, we brought on a chief digital and information officer with an intent to help us in this realm. There are certain drivers and benefits for us. From a demand perspective, we're seeing the benefits of the data center market expansion in digital.
From a product perspective, no question, Perceptiv in our IoT offering is important to us to be able to provide the customer with the visibility to the functionality of our products, and we continue to invest there. From a service perspective, Jerry talked about this. When you think about the scale of our business, 60 brands, no one is going to be able to compare against us in the ability to take one PO for multiple products in our portfolio. We're trying to make it easier for the customer to do business with us.
In addition, we look at digital and digital marketing and providing information online as a way to facilitate our demand generation and demand growth. And then lastly, from an AI perspective, we're working on different programs internally, such as demand planning, scheduling our plants to be most efficient, providing effective information to our customers when they're asking questions. All of this is an important part of our go-forward strategy. We believe five years from now, we'll be doing more and more and more digitally.
And so Regal is focused on investing here. Just one more from online. Can you help us chart the path back to growth acceleration in AMC? Yeah, the biggest driver of that, we're seeing growth in pretty much every market in AMC, medical, aero, data center, food and beverage, except for factory automation, and that has weighed on us this year.
And I think it's pretty well telegraphed in some of our competitors as well that it's been a pressure. When that destock, that's hopefully our last destock discussion in our portfolio, because we've been through a few. When that turns, AMC will turn.
Great. Any other questions in the room? All right.
Great.
We're in good shape. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you all for being here. Thanks for your interest in Regal Rexnord. And we'd like to invite you to join us for lunch.
Thank you.