Good morning, welcome to the 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders for Sotera Health Company. Before we begin, please note that some of the statements made today may be considered forward-looking statements. The matters addressed in these statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied. Please refer to our 2025 Annual Report on Form 10-K and our most recently filed quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, for a description of these risks and uncertainties. I will now turn the meeting over to Mr. Michael Petras, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of the company.
Good morning. I'm Michael Petras, Chairman and CEO of Sotera Health Company. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Sotera Health's 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'd like to take a moment to welcome and introduce our board of directors. Our board is comprised of individuals with deep experience in management, finance, strategy, corporate responsibility, healthcare, and professional service industry expertise. Our directors bring a wide range of perspectives and judgment necessary to guide our strategy and oversee its execution. Joining us virtually today are Ruoxi Chen, Sean Cunningham, Karen Flynn, Ann K lee, Richard Kyle, Kenneth Krause, James Neary, Vincent Petrella, Chris Simon, and David Wheadon. I would also like to recognize and thank Dean Mihas, who recently completed his service on the board, and Robert Knauss, who is not standing for re-election at this meeting.
On behalf of the board and the company, we thank them for their contributions and dedicated service to Sotera Health. We're also joined by Joe Matuszewski, representing Ernst & Young LLP, the company's independent registered public accounting firm. Copies of today's agenda, the rules of conduct and procedures, the proxy statement, and our annual report are available in the Meeting Materials section of the virtual meeting website. For those who are not familiar with the virtual annual meeting format, I would like to first ask our Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, Erika Ostrowski, to explain the mechanics of today's meeting. We'll move to the formal items of business for today's meeting. There are three proposals. First is the election of our four director nominees to serve for a new three-year term.
Second is the approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of our named executive officers, commonly known as a say on pay vote. Third is the ratification and the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2026. After the voting has ended, we will receive a preliminary report of the voting results, and the meeting's formal proceedings will adjourn. I will give a brief, short presentation on the company, and we'll have time for questions. Erika, will you take us through the procedures for today's meetings, please?
Thank you, Michael. Good morning, everyone. First, I want to highlight the rules of conduct and procedures of the meeting. The only business to be conducted at the meeting are the matters set forth in our 2026 proxy statement and notice of annual meeting of stockholders. Only stockholders of record as of March 27, 2026, certified beneficial owners on that date, or their proxy holders are permitted to submit questions and vote at today's meeting. If you have not already voted your shares, or if you previously voted your shares and would like to change your vote, you may vote your shares during this meeting by clicking the Vote Here button at the bottom of your webcast screen. Please remember that if you have already voted by proxy, it is not necessary to vote again.
Voting will remain open until after the presentation of the three matters to be voted on at this meeting when we conclude today's formal proceedings. Second, at the conclusion of today's formal proceedings, we will host a question and answer session during which we intend to answer questions submitted during the meeting. You may submit questions at any time during this meeting by typing your question in the question box on your webcast screen. If we receive multiple questions on the same or a similar topic, we may consolidate those questions and answer them together or choose one question representative of multiple questions. We do not intend to address questions that are irrelevant to the meeting, the business of the company, or otherwise not suitable for the meeting. Any recording of the meeting, including audio, video, or screen capture, is strictly prohibited.
Thank you, Erika. With that, let's move on to the formal proceedings. The company's mailing agent has provided us with an affidavit indicating that the stockholders of record have received appropriate notice for the meeting, which our mailing agent commenced distributing to stockholders on April 8th, 2026. Accordingly, this meeting has been duly called. Stockholder voting has been open since 9:00 AM and will close after I announce the third proposal of this meeting. Sarah Kim was appointed by the Board of Directors as the Inspector of Elections for this meeting. Ms. Kim has delegated that responsibility to Joelle Livorse, who will serve as the Inspector of Elections today. On March 27th, 2026, the record date of this meeting, there were 285,156,440 shares outstanding and entitled to vote.
The Inspector of Elections has tabulated the proxies and has informed me that there are at least 267 million shares of stock represented by proxy, or approximately 94% of all the shares entitled to vote at this meeting. The shares represented exceed a majority of the shares entitled to vote at this meeting, which means a quorum is present. Accordingly, this meeting is duly convened and will proceed to the transaction of business. I'll move now to a review of the proposals and the Board of Director recommendations to the stockholders. The first item of business is to nominate and elect four director nominees to serve on the Board of Directors, each of whom will serve a new three-year term expiring at the annual meeting of stockholders in 2029. Information about each of these nominations is contained in the company's proxy statement.
Since no other nominations were received prior to the deadline established in the company's amended and restated bylaws, no additional nominations may be made at this meeting, and the nominations are now closed. Under our amended and restated bylaws, directors are elected by a plurality of votes cast at uncontested elections. This means the nominees receiving the highest number of votes will be elected even if they do not receive a majority of the votes cast. The board of directors recommends a for vote for each of the four director nominees. The second item of business is to vote on the approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of our named executive officers. The required vote is the majority of the shares present or represented by proxies and entitled to vote on this subject matter.
If you look to abstain from this proposal, the abstention will have the effect of a vote against on the advisory vote. The board of directors recommends a vote for the named executive officer compensation. The third item of business is the ratification and appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company and for the current fiscal year 2026, as described in the company's proxy statement. A majority of the shares present or represented by proxy and entitled to vote on this subject matter is required to ratify this proposal. If you look to abstain from this proposal, the abstention will have the effect of a vote against on the proposal. The board of directors recommends a vote for the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm.
I'll now ask Joelle, as Inspector of Elections, to give us the preliminary voting results.
Thank you, Michael. The polls are now closed, and I will report on the preliminary voting results for the 3 proposals that were presented. Each of the 4 director nominees has received at least 85% of the votes cast, which means the 4 director nominees have been elected to serve on the Board of Directors. The compensation of our named executive officers has been approved with approval of at least 97% of the shares present or represented by proxy and entitled to vote on the Say on Pay proposal. The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2026, has been approved with approval of at least 99% of the shares present or represented by proxy and entitled to vote on the proposal.
We will report the final voting results in a current report on Form 8-K to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within four business days of this meeting. Mr. Chairman, back to you.
Thank you, Joelle. This concludes the formal portion of this meeting, and our 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders is adjourned. We will now proceed to the business presentation. I'd like to walk you through a little bit of an overview of the company. Just for some of you folks who may not be as familiar, we have 3 business units, Nelson Labs, Sterigenics, and Nordion. We have over 5,000 customers in 50 countries, and we have over 3,000 employees across this company living our mission of safeguarding global health. We provide end-to-end solutions for our customers, and we do this through 62 facilities in 13 countries. Foundational to the company is our deep relationships with our blue-chip customers. 70% of our revenue is tied to multi-year contracts, and we service and play in an $18 billion service addressable market.
Fundamental to all this is our commitment to our values and our culture across the company. I'll take a moment to take you into some depth about our 3 businesses that are integrated and work across the continuum in helping our customers. The first business will be Sterigenics. In Sterigenics, we're a global leader in comprehensive sterilization services. We have over 2,000 customers with 48 facilities in 13 countries in 4 continents. In this business, we service the medical device and pharma industry. We service many of the top medical device companies you know of and pharma companies around the world. What happens in this business is the customers drop off their product, and we sterilize the product, and then they pick the product up. Visualize this. It comes in boxes on a pallet. The pallets get dropped off at our facility.
We work it through one of our key modalities, either gamma, ethylene oxide, or E-beam, and that ultimately is determined by the customer in close coordination with the FDA on what modality is ultimately used. We sterilize the product, they pick it up, and then they take it to point of care at ultimate use. We make sure that the product is safe and doesn't have any microorganism that could cause any damage to the patients. That's a critical role we play in safeguarding global health. Our second business is Nordion. Nordion is a world leader of Cobalt-60 sealed sources. In this business here, one of the key ways you sterilize, I mentioned, was gamma radiation. The key to gamma radiation is Cobalt-60. We are the world leader. What we do in this business is we harvest cobalt from nuclear reactors around the world.
Our biggest suppliers happen to be in Canada. We get the Cobalt-60 from these nuclear reactors. We take it to our facility in Ottawa, Canada, we process this product into a usable form for sterilization. We ultimately ship this product to ourselves at Sterigenics as well as other customers around the world that compete with Sterigenics. We're the only fully integrated gamma sterilization company in the world. We have very unique capability in how we handle this material, how we ship it around the world to get to customers that are ultimately used in the sterilization product to make sure that you have safe and sterile products. Again, we have three businesses. This is the only business that happens to be a product business. The other two businesses are services businesses, I'll now walk you through our third business, which is Nelson Labs.
Again, this is a service business. We're a global leader in microbiological and analytical testing. We have over 3,000 customers around the globe. We perform over 900 tests in this business. What we do in this business is we're an independent test lab, so a lot of the customers that I talked to earlier have significant overlap with the Sterigenics business. These are the same med device and pharma companies. What we do in this business is we test to make sure the products are safe and meet the regulatory requirements. We do this as an independent testing lab business. We have facilities throughout the world. Our biggest facilities are located in Salt Lake City, Utah, as well as Leuven, Belgium. Talking a little bit about the role that we play in Sotera Health across the entire healthcare supply chain.
If you look at this chart here, you could see the different facets of a healthcare supply chain, and you see where each of the businesses play across this continuum. In most places throughout the continuum, you'll see a significant presence of Sterigenics and Nelson Labs. Starting early on in the R&D, material selection, or packaging optimization, when customers are looking at bringing products to market, they work with both Sterigenics and Nelson Labs to help them pick materials and help them put sterility plans together. We work with them throughout the cycle, ultimately to the end game where you get through sterilization or our Nordion business plays a critical role, as I just described earlier, in gamma radiation or Cobalt-60 is one of the key modalities for sterilization.
We do testing to make sure that from a sterility assurance perspective at Nelson Labs, to make sure the product is safe and meets the regulatory requirements, and then ultimately do quality control tests across the businesses within Sterigenics and Nelson Labs. Hopefully you get a good understanding and appreciation for the role we play across healthcare. The next page will just give you an example of how we bring our mission of safeguarding global health to life across. As you can see here, this company has brought healthcare to life every day, living our mission of safeguarding global health. We've delivered growth over 20 consecutive years. We've had a 9% compound annual growth rate and just consistent growth every single year since 2005. If you go to the next page, you could see that we've grown revenue.
Since we've gone public in 2020, we've grown revenue 7%, we've grown adjusted EBITDA another 7%. Over that time period, we've gone from $420 million to $594 million, and our free cash flow growth has been 17%. From in 2020, we were at $95 million. At the end of last year, 2025, we were $210 million. We've had over $170 million of adjusted EBITDA growth since we went public. As an investor and shareholder of the company, I want you to know this company is a global leader that's well-positioned for sustainable growth. We're a leader in large and growing addressable market. We have an industry-leading expertise in highly regulated markets. We have a comprehensive global facility network.
We have an end-to-end platform, as I just described earlier, in how we go from 1 end of the healthcare supply chain to the other end in helping our customers with their needs. We're positioned for above-market growth. We have a strong and consistent financial profile. As I stated, we've grown every single year since 2005. We have accelerating free cash flow, we have a disciplined capital allocation process that's embedded into our processes within the company. Now, I'll hand things over to Erika, who will host the Q&A portion of the meeting.
Thank you, Michael. We will now begin the question and answer portion of our meeting. As a reminder, if multiple questions are asked about the same topic, we may consolidate those questions and answer them together or choose one question representative of multiple questions. As noted earlier and in the rules of conduct and procedures, only appropriate questions will be addressed, and we ask that you please limit yourself to two questions each. I don't see any questions. I'll turn it back to the chairman for concluding remarks.
Thank you, Erika. That concludes today's meeting. Thank you to our board of directors who joined us virtually today. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our employees who have continued to demonstrate tremendous commitment this past year. Thank you to our customers and partners for your ongoing support. Finally, of course, thank you to our stockholders. On behalf of the Sotera Health Board of Directors, we appreciate your continued trust and support as we execute on our strategy and mission of safeguarding global health. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you for attending today's meeting. This conference has now ended. You may now disconnect.