Okay, it's 8:30 A.M. exactly, so we are going to get started. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for SPX Technologies Investor Day. I'm Paul Clegg, the head of investor relations at SPX. Before we begin, I'd like to thank the New York Stock Exchange for hosting us here at this beautiful facility. We really appreciate the opportunity to present in this historic building. I'd like to remind everyone that this presentation is being webcast. Our presentation slides and a link to the live webcast are available on our website at spx.com in the investor relations section. There will also be a replay available for some time. Portions of our presentation and comments are forward-looking and subject to safe harbor provisions. Please also note the risk factors in our most recent SEC filings. Our comments today will largely focus on adjusted financial results and continuing operations only.
You can find reconciliations of historical adjusted figures from their respective GAAP measures in the appendix to today's presentation. Just a couple housekeeping issues. We will have six different presenters today, and we'll follow that by Q and A. We'll take a brief break in the middle. Please hold your questions until the Q and A session. And I'd also like to remind everyone, if you haven't already done so, to silence your cell phone. I'm going to now introduce our speakers for this morning. Gene Lowe is our President and Chief Executive Officer. Gene's going to discuss our history from the time we became a standalone company in 2015 to where we are today, as well as our vision for the future. Randy Data is our President of Global Operations.
Randy will discuss our business system, how we operate the company, and the tools we use to drive value throughout the organization. Sean McClenaghan is the President of our HVAC segment, and John Swann, just next to him, is the President of our detection and measurement segment. John and Sean are going to discuss our vision and strategy for these attractive segments and driving growth there. Michael Daley is our Head of Strategy and Business Development. Michael will discuss our acquisitions to date, our approach to M&A, and our vision for growing the company through further inorganic investments. Mark Carano, many of you already know, our Chief Financial Officer. Mark will discuss the way we manage our balance sheet, our cash generation, and our capital deployment model. We'll finish up with the Q and A session, as I mentioned.
With that, I will turn the podium over to Gene.
Thanks, Paul. Good to see everyone, and thank you guys for being here today. So why don't we dive right in? Let's start with a brief overview of my background. I joined SPX about 15 years ago and have spent the last 8 years as the CEO from the time of our spin in 2015. Prior to that, I led this pre-spin company's thermal segment, which included our HVAC cooling business. My background is very strategy focused. I was a head of strategy and M&A at Milliken and have had consulting roles at Bain & Company, as well as software venture capital experience with Lazard Technology Partners. So let's start by giving an overview of SPX. We're headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we have two focused market-leading segments in HVAC and detection and measurement.
We're largely North American-based but also have key markets and operations in Europe and the Asia-Pac region. While Paul already did introductions of our speakers today, I'd be remiss if I did not mention the rest of our really great team who are back in Charlotte and our businesses around the country and around the world who work very hard to make SPX successful every day. Until now, let's move on to our board. We really have an impressive board. I like to say that we punch well above our weight on this side. Our board members bring a tremendous amount of experience in growth and value creation, with several having long track records of leadership and success at companies like Carlisle Companies, Duke Power, Polypore, Sealed Air, Snyder's-Lance, Caterpillar, and Littelfuse.
So let's take a brief look back and look over the past eight years when we did become a separate standalone company. At that time, some of the businesses that we inherited at the spin did not really fit with our growth focus. We engaged in a detailed strategic planning process of evaluating our end-market growth opportunities, profit pools, on and return on invested capital, and ultimately decided that we did not consider our power assets to have a sufficiently attractive return profile. In contrast, we really liked the competitive positions, growth, and margin profiles, as well as opportunities for return in our HVAC and detection and measurement businesses. In 2015, these segments had revenue of about $760 million.
This year, we expect them to generate about $2 billion in revenue, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of more than 10%, and this does include both organic and inorganic growth. To date, we've completed 14 acquisitions for a total value of about $1.6 billion in capital deployed. We're also engaged in a process of reducing our exposure to legacy liabilities, which Mark will talk about more in his section. Let's start with our products. One of the things you'll find about our products is that they are everywhere. Very often right in front of you, although you might not notice them. They're often in the background, keeping us comfortable, temperature, maintaining our critical infrastructure, and keeping us safe from potential dangers. On the right-hand side of this illustration, you can see an example of a hospital where a number of our HVAC products are used.
This is just one example. We have a diverse set of end markets, and our HVAC products are used in important applications in manufacturing facilities, data centers, semiconductor, hotels, educational buildings, government buildings, and, of course, commercial properties, just to name a few. Sean will dive into these in more detail, but essentially, we are increasing the breadth of our products that are specced into applications or provide critical functionality across numerous different applications and end markets. These range from air handling units that provide high tolerances of airflow, temperature, humidity, back pressure, and quality to overhead radiant heating in indoor/outdoor spaces. They also include our cooling towers, which are the most efficient form of heat rejection for many applications and are seeing very strong levels of demand.
On the detection and measurement side, we cover a large range of products and technologies that maintain and enable critical infrastructure, ensure public safety, and make our customers more efficient. This includes the precision locators that you see, where electrical cables and pipes are buried before you start digging, robots that inspect and remediate issues in water and wastewater lines, as well as gas distribution lines, and communications technologies equipment. It also includes obstruction lighting for radio towers, wind turbines, and obstacles in marine environments, as well as municipal fare bus equipment and software. Let's go into a little bit more detail about our company. Across our HVAC segment, we report our results in two growth platforms: cooling, which includes cooling towers and engineered air movement equipment, and heating, which includes both electric heating and hydraulics equipment.
Across our detection and measurement segment, we have four platforms: location and inspection, aids to navigation, communications technologies, or Comtech, and fare collection technologies. Our markets have strong drivers and heavy levels of replacement sales. We are typically the number one or number two player in our end markets. As you can see, last year, HVAC made up approximately 64% of our sales, and detection and measurement made up about 36% of our sales. So what defines us as a company? If you look across our businesses, we focus very heavily on products that are on the high end of the value chain. These are typically engineered solutions that often serve niche applications, have leading market positions or brands, and are enabled by technology that gives our customers great insights and value add.
The things we do are difficult and don't lend themselves to commoditization or an easy time for new entrants to compete on price, giving us very effective moats. We also tend to have a heavy focus on sustainable solutions to meet our customers' needs. So let's talk about our business system. What is the basis of the business system at SPX Technologies? This is really important. And Randy's going to dive in more detail on this topic next. At its simplest level, we focus on the factors that we see as most meaningful in driving our performance. Our business segment leaders are also going to talk about these in more detail today, but at a high level, we talk about them in two groups, including excellence and growth. All right. Under excellence, our digital initiative is becoming very important to our customers across our end markets.
Digital solutions drive greater insights and productivity, operational performance, and help improve overall efficiency. Increasingly, this means providing software in combination with hardware, which has multiple benefits to our customers, including data capture, analytics, and solutions that enable performance enhancements for this hardware. It also makes the hardware solutions that we sell stickier and provides a long-term and growing source of recurring revenue in software. Continuous improvement is also critical to our strategy. A CI mentality is embedded in our culture throughout the organization, and we expect all of our businesses to have a strategy to operate more efficiently each year. This includes driving greater throughput, improving cost efficiencies, and reducing overall labor content. Talent refers to our most important asset, our people. Attracting, retaining, and developing strong team members is one of the most important factors that help ensure our long-term success.
Randy will talk about this more in his section, but I want to say that I'm proud that we've built a very strong culture here at SPX Technologies. Today, we have the strongest team we've ever had, and I think you'll see the high caliber of talent of the leaders speaking here today reflect that. Let's move over to growth. So new product development is another critical area of our growth strategy. And this is where we're really focused on voice of the customer. This includes not only what customers need today but what they will need tomorrow to achieve their goals and to make them successful. Another way we drive growth at SPX is through commercial excellence.
Commercial excellence is really about how we manage our channels, how we engage in direct sales, how we manage our key account relationships, as well as how we do value pricing, very important. We have very effective tools as a part of our business system that we apply across our enterprise to optimize sales. I believe this is a core expertise at SPX that is important to both our organic and our inorganic strategies. We'll have several examples today of how we've been able to create value through this process when John and Sean speak a little bit later. Finally, we've been very successful with our strategic M&A focus, having acquired 14 companies over the last 5 years, adding significantly to our total addressable market with accretion to both our growth rate and our margins.
We have the resources and talent to continue this process successfully well into the future, and we continue to expand the frontiers of our total addressable market within our existing platforms. Our strategy has been very effective and has led to significant growth in our financial metrics. Using our 2024 midpoint guidance, we anticipate a three-year compound annual growth rate of more than 34% for adjusted EBITDA and 29% for adjusted EPS. The market has rewarded this performance. From the time of spin, our market cap has increased by $4.8 billion, or about 10x. The story we're here to tell today is about our confidence in the ability to continue this growth trajectory. Over the medium term, we believe that we can double our EBITDA from our 2023 base through a combination of organic and inorganic growth and margin enhancements.
We believe that we have the right business model and strategy, as well as the financial resources and a very talented team that make these objectives very achievable. The roadmap that we will use to continue this journey is laid out here. I'm very pleased with our current businesses, which offer a strong foundation to continue building our platforms going forward. As I just described, our focus is on engineered niches, strong market positions, tech-enabled products, moats, and sustainable solutions that offer excellent potential for above-market growth and above-market returns. We'll leverage our business system to enhance the value of our existing businesses through investments and our key initiatives to drive this growth. We'll supplement this with strategic M&A to further accelerate our growth. Back in 2021, when we sold our transformers business, we provided financial targets for 2025, including $5 per share of adjusted EPS.
In February, when we announced our full-year 2023 results in our current year guidance, we indicated that we expect to achieve that $5 metric a year early in 2024. Today, we're providing a framework for future growth, including a long-term average EBITDA growth target of 15%+ annually at more than 20% adjusted EBITDA margins. This does include both organic and inorganic growth. Looking at our end markets, we are starting from a very attractive position. We are leveraged to strong demand related to attractive long-term trends, while we also have a high level of sales associated with stable long-term markets, which we believe makes our sales less variable than the average industrial company. These include significant amounts of replacement revenue, where products in the field come to the end of their useful life or wear out and need to be replaced.
It also includes significant sales in markets that historically have either been less cyclical or follow an investment cycle that does not sync closely with the general macroeconomy. These include government sales, utility sales, and sales into end markets where our solutions are mandated or required by regulations. We also see a number of strong drivers that we believe will create tailwinds in several of our key markets in the coming years. These include important secular drivers such as investments in artificial intelligence, as well as government stimulus, which we believe will drive further demand for our products. One component of our strategy that is important to our entire enterprise is sustainability. If you think about the things that SPX Technologies makes, they tend to address many of the key issues faced by society today.
Many of our products help our customers to lower emission levels and enable the development of new, cleaner forms of energy. They also improve safety outcomes, help maintain clean, reliable water supplies, improve connectivity for broadband, and allow equitable access for public transportation. It's really not just about what we make. It's about how we make it. At SPX, our core values drive everything we do, and we strive to ensure a diverse and inclusive environment. We also promote constant awareness of opportunities for continuous improvement and waste reduction. To demonstrate our commitment to sustainability, we have a goal of reducing our greenhouse gas intensity by 30% by 2030. While we have more work to do, we feel very good about achieving that goal. Before I turn it over to Randy, I want to give you a sense of what you should expect to hear today.
We're very pleased with our performance over the last several years, which we believe demonstrates our adherence to our value creation roadmap and disciplined and effective capital allocation strategy. We intend to continue this growth journey using the same playbook as a successful compounder on our way to becoming the next great industrial technology company in America. Today, we're laying out a new metric to illustrate our commitment to growth. We would expect that the combination of organic and inorganic growth plus continuous improvement will allow us to achieve a CAGR for Adjusted EBITDA of 15%+ over time. While the timing of acquisitions and the economic cycle could cause the level of growth to vary year to year, we are confident that we can double the size of our Adjusted EBITDA over the medium term.
We expect to accomplish this with internally generated cash flow while maintaining a balanced leverage profile. I'm very excited about the opportunities ahead of us and the momentum we've built in executing on our growth strategy. With that, I'll turn the podium to Randy Data to talk about our business system. Thank you, Gene, and good morning to all of you. It's my pleasure to be here in New York City to talk about something I'm very proud to be a part of. That's SPX Technologies. Today, I'll be discussing with you some of the key elements of the way we operate inside the company, our business system. Before I jump into that, a little background on who I am.
I came to SPX in 2015 at the spin to focus on eliminating risks to our legacy liability projects in South Africa, which many of you know is now over, and to work with the leadership team in developing our SPX business system. With that said, I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to do much more than that at SPX, from leading several acquisitions and divestitures to managing several of our businesses across our segments. My career has been focused on engineering, operations, and growth while leading and turning around businesses and companies globally in various energy and industrial end markets. All right, let's get some of the good stuff here. The SPX business system. When we speak about the business system, it's not about some book that we throw up on the shelf and pull out every once in a while. It's how we think.
It's how we act. It's how we drive results. While programmatic in nature, it's designed to bring structure and standard processes and tools to how we operate. It is the common thread that brings our organization together. The key themes that you will hear about today are growth and excellence and how that has been the driving force to our success to date and the method we will use to achieve our forward-looking objectives. These key pillars to our business system are underpinned by our strategy and our commitment we have to attract, retain, and develop the best people in our respective industries. Now, let's discuss the role of culture at SPX and how that accelerates our mission of creating an infrastructure solution for a smarter, more productive future. We often get asked what differentiates SPX.
It would be easy to say the strengths of our products or our ability to develop unique, innovative solutions across our businesses, both of which are true. But in the end, the real answer is our culture and our people. While we do have market-leading technologies, without the right people and culture in place, we simply would not have been able to achieve the results to date or be positioned to continue our value creation journey as the next great industrial technology company. The logical question becomes, what is our culture, and how do we bring it to life? In simplest terms, culture to us is the way that we do things at SPX. The foundation of our culture is our core values: integrity, excellence, accountability, teamwork, and results.
While to many companies, these may just be words on the wall, at SPX, it's truly how we go about work every single day. As part of those values, we emphasize that the how matters. The SPX business system helps us define and manage the how. It brings structure, standard processes, and tools to how do we do things in a way that emphasizes the behaviors that are core to our culture. Behaviors needed to be a successful leader at SPX. Here are some of the examples of that leadership model. Focus on the things that matter and will have an impact. Keep your commitments and take ownership. Have a relentless focus on driving improvement. Be collaborative, inclusive, and help others succeed. In the end, have fun at what we do.
By making our strategy, mission, and vision clear and painting a picture for all employees on what good looks like in terms of behaviors and actions, we create a strong foundation from which to execute from. Before I get into further details of the business system, let me explain our operating model in simplicity. As you can see on the slide, we organize ourselves into two different segments: HVAC and detection and measurement. We manage internally just like we report externally. We believe this operating model allows our management team to optimize their growth strategy and leverage margin improvement across their businesses. The segments are fully responsible for their business results from front to back, customer-facing, and on-through product delivery.
As you can see on the right side of the slide, we then break our segments into six different growth platforms that Sean and John will provide further detail later in the presentation. To drive scale, we leverage certain functional expertise and shared services from the corporate center to support the entire enterprise, including tech experts in areas such as digital, CI, and EH&S, as well as shared services and information technology in certain legal and HR functions. Now, let's dig a little bit further into the business system. As I noted earlier, you see the core of our program: excellence and growth. In its simplest form, we are focused on improving margins, growing revenue, and developing people. How do we do that?
A relentless focus on our value drivers, on excellence, a digital focus on creating customer value, a culture of daily improvement in all aspects of our company's operations, and a structured approach to talent development. I'll provide more details in each of these areas on subsequent slides. Our value drivers for growth are both organic and inorganic. We are highly disciplined and strategic in our approach to M&A, as you will see in more detail in Michael's presentation. On the organic growth side, Sean and John will speak to some examples on how we apply voice of the customer feedback and innovation to our NPD Stagegate process, as well as our efforts to optimize our go-to-market strategies across the segments.
As you can see on the graphic at the bottom of the slide, the business system is driven by our annual strategic planning process, which starts the process of our goal deployment approach. Let's talk a little bit more about that, as it really is the framework that we use to connect all our employees to each of our strategies. The foundational element of SPX Technologies is the disciplined manner in which we manage the business. This takes the form of our goal deployment model. As we look across our platforms, everything begins with strategy. As a team, we must clearly understand and buy into the direction we're driving and the goals that we're setting to achieve. We have a framework that we follow throughout the organization to ensure that we are all rowing in the same direction and that our efforts are synchronized.
These include our annual operating plans and the establishment of specific key performance indicators for each business. Structured reviews serve as a tool to assess our progress toward these goals throughout the year, enabling us to adjust our approach and tactics as needed to achieve our goals and maintain alignment with our strategic direction. And finally, we align those KPIs to our individual performance objectives that we're held accountable for and are evaluated on through our performance management system. We believe this well-established process is key to organizational alignment, to our strategy, and allows each employee to feel like they are an important, empowered part of our journey. SPX knows that employee development and employee engagement are essential to sustainable success. We are highly focused on ensuring that we have the right skills and talent in place to execute our growth and strategic initiatives.
Our approach aligns company and individual employee goals to achieve shared objectives. We find motivated and committed employees thrive in a culture where they are appreciated, recognized, rewarded, and see a path of development and advancement of the future. SPX Talent Management Framework, called RISE, guides our team through how we will deliver on our commitment to reach, identify, strengthen, and engage our current and future workforce. These programs help us clarify needs and attract and retain the right talent to achieve our goals today and as we move into the future. We believe continuous investment in employee opportunities through education, skill development, new experience, and leadership support will result in successful outcomes for both our employees and our business.
As SPX has grown, our program offerings have expanded to include more opportunities for technical skills training, leadership development, mentoring programs, and various online educational resources that are available to all our employees. Our ongoing success is dependent upon the level of engagement of our teams and how we build the capabilities of the organization to deliver on day-to-day requirements driving those strategic initiatives. The development of our employees and the SPX culture are at the heart of both. The RISE Framework represents our commitment to ensuring that we stay focused on continuously improving both. Digital at SPX is comprised of business unit innovation and enterprise services, all designed to make it easy to select, order, install, and service SPX products and services. The corporate center provides technical and functional experts to support digital governance.
We have established a learning environment where we take best practices, proven solutions, third-party agreements that are designed to help accelerate a more standardized approach to delivery. Whether we lead from the center, advise, or support, SPX Digital is there to enable successful outcomes. The industries that we serve are specialized and can be complex. By making the complex simple and being easy to engage with throughout the product lifecycle, we enhance customer value and, in turn, grow SPX. Here's a little on how we do that. We are leveraging our full business portfolio and channels to create shared opportunities across our platforms via customer relationship management tools. Once engaged, we must also help the customer find and configure the best-fit solution for their need. Our specialized product configurators provide self-service recommendations that have resulted in the basis of design decisions and allow us to reshape the competitive landscape.
In the third leg of our digital strategy, we focus on connected solutions. Connected products benefit SPX in multiple ways. First, it provides a moat that, once established, can keep other competitors from penetrating into our customer relationships and markets. Next, it introduces a high-margin, recurring revenue stream and opens the door to a pipeline of data-centric solutions and services. Lastly, it allows us to provide real-time operational insights that can directly improve customer performance and value creation in their business. Finally, we believe in the power of our business to innovate together, to create new solutions within or across our respective markets. We are leveraging cloud computing, AI, and automation to enhance our existing product engineering capabilities.
Whether it's autonomous robots providing site mark-out services or sewer and wastewater pipe crawlers using AI to identify and document obstructions, we have opportunities to disrupt the industries that we serve via a digital approach to problem-solving. SPX investments in digital are paying dividends today and laying the groundwork for future growth. At the end of the day, it all comes down to making it easy to select SPX for our customers. At the core of our business system is the continuous improvement program. At SPX, we have an expansive view of continuous improvement. We're not shy about using any tool or program that we think can help make us better. That said, we've made considerable progress in our efforts to deploy a core set of lean fundamentals across the enterprise. Let me provide some key stats that will illustrate this.
327 employees have been trained on something greater than just introductory concepts. 78 personnel have been trained in our flagship Lean Leader program, which is our most rigorous training, or our experts. We have 15 full-time CI leaders across our sites with another 40 practitioners in place. Most of the lean focus to date has been on the four walls of the factory and the adjacent parts of that value stream. That said, there is still significant opportunity as it really is a never-ending journey. Another important element of our CI efforts is how we approach strategic sourcing across the enterprise.
We centralize and source indirect spend from the center and then utilize the SPX Sourcing Council to drive consistent processes and to leverage our total spend on key categories to drive cost efficiencies, better deliveries, and improve quality, an overall approach that continues to deliver results to the bottom line, especially as the supply chain has been readjusting since the pandemic. While we have been on our CI journey for several years, the opportunity set is still strong. This year, we are focused on advancing CI further in our back office operations and realizing benefits from some of our recent capital and automation investments in HVAC. Sean will speak a little bit more to that shortly. Gene summarized in his section how we think about sustainability and what targets we are driving within the company.
Just a little more color on how we operationalize it and bring it to the forefront of already established processes. As I discussed in the previous slide, we have a maturing CI program. We now tie our CI projects to how we think about sustainability. After all, lean principles are really about eliminating waste and doing things more efficiently. Additionally, as an engineered equipment company, most of our products are centered around being more efficient, safe, and cleaner for the environment. So we are embedding that mentality in our new product development process. I like to call this smart sustainability. It creates value for our customers while at the same time providing value to our shareholders. We believe that this sort of sustainability is core to what we do, both in terms of what we make and how we make it.
You'll see some great examples of this in the upcoming sections. We started developing our M&A playbook almost seven years ago, a concentrated effort by all our functional disciplines with third-party support to establish best practices as we prepared to unlock our journey of strategic M&A growth. 14 acquisitions and 4 divestitures later, we are still improving our playbook, all the while staying disciplined in our mindset and processes. We truly see this as a cohesive process from identification to diligence and finally to creating value through the integration period. Michael will provide more detail on the front end of the process, strategy and diligence, a little later as I talk a little bit about our approach to integrations. I like to compare integrations to the execution of any large project.
It starts with a plan and objectives, a schedule, and an understanding that you must, and I say must, resource it appropriately. Critically important in the process is to unlock value, our synergies, identified in diligence. The realization of this comes from a full ownership inside the business, making tough decisions that are often not popular, and finding an empathetic path to merging difficult cultures or different cultures. Quite honestly, it can be a difficult process, but with that said, I'm pleased with the value that we've unlocked so far in our journey. All right. Let me wrap this section up. Our business system has been really an integral part and an important part of our success in driving margin. That's the excellent side, and increasing our value revenue, which is the growth side.
With that said, it doesn't happen without talented people in a culture that has a growth and continuous improvement mentality. I'll let Mark do the talking on our financial performance, but I think the chart on the right speaks for itself. Thanks for your attention. Now I'll pass it off to my friend and coworker, Sean McClenaghan, President of the HVAC segment.
Thank you, Randy, and good morning, everybody. As indicated earlier, again, my name is Sean McClenaghan. I joined SPX in 2022, and I have responsibility for our HVAC segment. I'm pleased to be working with such a great team and group of colleagues here at SPX. My background is across several industrial and technology-based sectors, including building products, specialty materials, and industrial electronics in both public and privately held companies. If I was to summarize my career with a singular theme or common thread, that would be pretty straightforward, is that theme would be creating value through growth. Growth through the strategic use of M&A has been a particular focus and developed both in operating roles and through more than a decade of experience in private equity. Building on the growth theme, the key takeaways for today regarding SPX's HVAC segment are as follows.
Externally, we do operate in a large and attractive market, with our products being all around you. Within this market, we are very selective regarding where we choose to operate, focusing on higher growth areas and on solutions that are both defensible and critical to operations. This focus enables us to operate in high-margin and high-growth areas of the market. Internally, we also have a clear focus. We use the SPX business system tools to improve performance and drive efficiency across the entire value chain. These clear external and internal focus areas in what is an attractive sector provide a defined path for the continued double-digit growth of sector income over the medium term. I'll start with a quick overview of the HVAC segment. At $1.1 billion in 2023 revenues, we are principally a North American-oriented operation with a large installed base that generates significant replacement and repair revenue.
Importantly, as the chart on the right illustrates, we are growing and doing so disproportionately at the segment income level. As I'll discuss today, this profitable growth is driven through organic and inorganic initiatives that focus on building a premium brand portfolio and through a culture of continuous improvement. These efforts have impacted and improved the growth and the sustainability of the segment margins profile. It is important to start with an understanding of where we here at SPX play in such a large and broad market as HVAC. Although often unseen and often unobserved, our products are all around you within any building environment. This is for good reason. Our product categories are the technologies that play a significant role in critical heating, in critical cooling, and in critical air movement applications.
Each product is selected within a system design because they do make a difference in performance and efficiency and are often made basis of design for many of the applications. It is also worth noting, as in the case in this healthcare example or facility that we have on the slide today, that the critical decision-makers and engineers making specification decisions often influence many of the product categories that we offer, providing SPX a point of leverage to drive sales and channel synergies. Looking at HVAC through a more macro lens, the industry has attractive and strengthening investment attributes. Starting with the market itself, it is large and fragmented, providing room to operate and to be selective. The demanding needs of critical applications is another consideration, as that drives specialized niche and product offerings, which again is where we focus.
A large install base is also important, as that drives repeatable replacement, retrofit, and aftermarket business, often at higher margins. Finally, the HVAC sector has inherent and market diversification. As we define HVAC, it touches virtually every use case. It is found in almost every building type and is part of nearly every manufacturing process. This diversification provides stability, and it provides predictability. It also allows SPX to focus and select on attractive subverticals within the overall HVAC industry. Collectively, these factors result in a sector with favorable growth trends and one we expect to grow faster than GDP over the medium to long term. These attractive attributes are supported by several megatrends that provide solid sector tailwinds. These megatrends include the growing focus on sustainability and energy-efficient HVAC solutions, the global investment in technology and technology infrastructure, and the reshoring manufacturing back to North America.
While not called out on this slide specifically, the impact of aging infrastructure and how that will drive replacement revenue opportunities is another important factor. Combined, the attributes I mentioned on the prior slide and these megatrends altogether highlight the long-term attractiveness of the HVAC sector and underwrites why SPX continues to be proactive in our investments here. Within this large and attractive sector, it's important to understand that SPX is particular and focused on where we play. In alignment with SPX's overall strategy, we focus on high-value-add areas. These areas are niche applications that address critical comfort or critical manufacturing process HVAC needs.
As the examples on this page highlight, these applications are broad and range from the cooling of data centers, semiconductor fabs, and battery plants, providing critical exhaust for pharmaceutical manufacturing, to the heating of specialized manufacturing equipment, and to the air movement and control in hospitals and laboratories. It is important to note that these niche applications are also demanding, resulting in solutions that consist of value-added engineered products. These products are engineered systems and engineered key components that are often specified as design, certifications, performance, functionality, reliability, and total cost of ownership are all key purchase decisions for these products.
To summarize how and where we compete, our focus on portfolio design, meaning the businesses that we choose to operate and the products we choose to offer within HVAC, is on highly defensible market positions with brands that are in demand by engineers, by contractors, by operators, and owners. These brands, such as Marley, Patterson-Kelley, TAMCO, Indeeco, and Ingenia, to name a few, are leaders in their niche areas and in certain instances can be synonymous with their product category. This focus, combined with the SPX business system execution, is why our HVAC segment portfolio grows profitably. I'll now shift from where we play our focus externally to where we focus internally, provide examples of leveraging the SPX business system and leadership approach to drive HVAC value improvement.
These examples are case studies that will cover organic and inorganic growth levers as well as efficiency improvements across the segment. They will also provide direction as to where we are investing. As I review these initiatives, note our focus on leveraging the growing scale and similarities across the HVAC business portfolio to drive segment synergies. Starting with top-line growth, we leverage our channel scale to drive revenue synergies. As noted on the earlier graphic highlighting a healthcare facility, large projects often use many of our product categories to provide an adequate applied HVAC solution. This is where we utilize our sales pipeline and market understanding to position many of our products and influence the basis of design.
This slide highlights a few examples where we enjoy cross-business revenue synergies, but I will use the recent acquisition of Ingenia as an example, highlighting the dual growth synergies we can see from strategic acquisitions. Ingenia currently focuses geographically on Eastern Canada, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. In these particular areas where Ingenia has historically focused, they are involved with new projects early and are often basis of design for their targeted applications. Because of Ingenia's relationships, they can influence the specification of products included within or attached close to an air handler, such as for dampers, duct heaters, and critical air ventilation systems. This is where we look to leverage the Tamco, Indeeco, and Strobic brand offering with Ingenia's relationships. We have already seen instances of these synergies developing early in the Ingenia integration.
Likewise, as we increase manufacturing capacity at Ingenia, we will use the strength of our third-party manufacturing rep relationships from national organizations such as Marley and Strobic Air to expand the geographic reach and footprint of Ingenia more quickly. For reasons such as this, as the segment scales and grows, we expect our opportunity pipeline growth will increase disproportionately. Further supporting organic growth is our effort in product development. Recognizing that our product categories are well-established, we focused on improving the product portfolio by emphasizing more sustainable solutions as we help our customers improve the efficiency of their HVAC systems. This page highlights a few of these NPD or new product development efforts. Olympus V adiabatic coolers offer significant advantages over traditional air-cooled systems, including reduced energy consumption with nominal water usage. WaterGard preconditions cooling tower makeup water, reducing wastewater and overall water consumption.
Weil-McLain's stainless vertical firetube boilers improve both efficiency and reliability. While not highlighted on this page, in part because of this custom nature of their solutions, our electric heat product portfolio continues to evolve and broaden as it offers solutions responding to building and manufacturing process electrification or the process of moving away from gas systems to those powered by electricity. This electrification process helps buildings and manufacturing facilities become more energy efficient and carbon-friendly as the electric grid itself becomes cleaner. In many of these NPD instances, such as with the newly launched Olympus V and WaterGard systems, we are actually expanding our serviceable market via extremely tight adjacencies. In the case of Weil-McLain's SVF boilers, we are increasing revenue per unit while delivering a more energy-efficient solution.
An important takeaway regarding SPX is that, as the sustainability megatrend mentioned earlier evolves, we will continue to focus our new product development on improving energy and water efficiency, which is good for the environment and additive to SPX's top-line growth. Moving from product efficiency to operational efficiency, as Randy mentioned earlier, CI or continuous improvement is foundational to our culture and how we operate, including improving safety, quality, delivery, throughput, and cost-effectiveness. These efforts, combined with our strategic pricing initiatives and portfolio mix additions through M&A, have driven meaningful improvements in our margin profile in HVAC. As these examples illustrate, we have leveraged and continue to leverage the SPX business system across heating, cooling, and air movement to drive value, utilizing Kaizen events and lean manufacturing techniques to improve efficiencies on the factory floor and in the back office.
Similarly, we've been investing in automation to drive throughput and labor efficiencies, which is particularly important in a tight labor market. Focusing a moment on the long-term trend of retiring skilled labor both in our manufacturing facilities and externally in the building product trades, we address this across SPX in numerous ways designed to provide us an advantage. These approaches include areas such as simplifying product design and configuration with digital tools, offering digital product interfaces, adopting AI tools for documentation and contract reviews, or, as in the case with these two examples, using automation on the factory floor. The left-hand example on this page highlights what's been a 30-month effort at our largest cooling products plant, which began in the summer of 2022.
This effort will result in an 80% increase in metal fabrication capacity at that particular facility that, when complete in the middle of this year and combined with an assembly area expansion, will unlock an incremental $100 million in packaged cooling tower revenue opportunity at an improved margin. While one of our larger automation efforts, it is representative of what we are doing across our network of factories. Likewise, Ingenia embarked on a four-year automation program that they started in 2020 to drive capacity and deliver what we believe is one of the most efficient custom air handling unit factories in the industry. This program at Ingenia has been and will continue to provide the capacity expansion needed to support Ingenia's growth. From a 2020 baseline, this program, heavily anchored in automation, will unlock $125 million in additional revenue opportunity for Ingenia, also at improved margins.
We also invest in digital technology to improve the customer and channel experience and drive efficiencies across the entire value chain. From control systems at Patterson-Kelley and product selection tools at Marley to contractor tools at Weil-McLain and product design software at Ingenia, we continue to invest in and improve the experience that our channel partners have with our products. These investment areas are also linked to the reduction of skilled trade labor that I mentioned earlier. Our tools designed for use by the contractor, such as Weil-McLain's ProTools, are made to simplify, streamline, enhance productivity, and flatten the required experience needed to be effective. With ProTools, you don't need 20 years of experience to work on complex boiler installations.
Across our businesses, we understand that this investment is an essential part of deepening our moats and our differentiated positions as we continue to make doing business with SPX more seamless and efficient. Lastly, let's discuss inorganic growth. The ongoing transformation in SPX's HVAC segment has been driven by the type of organic initiatives that I've touched on this morning, but also and importantly through M&A. In what is a sizable, addressable market, SPX has increased our serviceable market with several strategic acquisitions of leader in their niches designed to drive revenue and operating synergies. Establishing SPX's air movement platform through the acquisition of Cincinnati Fan, Strobic, TAMCO, and Ingenia is part of this effort, as was the expansion of our electric heat platform through the acquisition of ASPEQ and its powerful brand portfolio.
These acquisitions have materially impacted our top line, and due to their market position and value add, they have been materially beneficial and accretive to the margin profile of the HVAC segment. As the prior M&A case studies just emphasized, inorganic growth has been impactful to the segment, both to grow a core business like electric heat, but also to expand into adjacent areas such as engineered air. As such, we remain focused on growing our core businesses via strategic M&A, and we continue to identify targets for these. We also understand that we can enter adjacencies and new markets most effectively through acquisition, like we did with the engineered air portfolio. While I'm not planning to get specific, we also continue to evaluate other adjacent areas as well and to look at additional climate-conscious offerings.
In summary, we see an environment that remains supportive, well into the future, for additional HVAC segment growth via strategic acquisitions, and we plan to leverage our successful track record of identifying and integrating these brands and assets to fuel our growth. To conclude our discussion on the HVAC segment, there is a clear path to maintaining momentum in segment income growth over the planning period that we've discussed today. The path starts with our well-defined focus and our well-defined strategy. It is supported by an attractive HVAC sector, and it is enhanced by a proven and reliable SPX business system. And it is accentuated by our track record and capacity and the opportunity for additional growth through focused M&A. Thank you for your time today. With that, I'm going to turn over to John Swann, my counterpart in the detection and measurement side.
But before John begins, we are going to take a 10-minute break. We're reconvening at 9:40 A.M. So again, thank you, and we'll start promptly at 9:40 A.M. Thank you.
[Music Playing]
[Music Playing] I winked my eyes, got into the ride, went to a club, was jumping. Introduced myself as Lowe. She said, "You're a liar." I said, "I got it going on, baby doll, and I'm on fire." Took her to the hotel. She said, "You're the king, so be my queen if you know what I mean." Let's do the wild thing. Wild thing. You shine like a star. You know who you are. You're everything beautiful. Just act hot like the sun. The loneliest one. Still everything beautiful. I'll be goddamn standing at my door. We stayed up in the city till the stars lost the war. Friday night, Holy Ghost, take me to your level. Show me the one I need the most. I need the most. I wish I knew you when I was young. I could have got so high.
[Music Playing] Now we're here, it's been so long. Two strangers in the bright light. Oh, and I hope you don't mind. We can share my mood, yeah. Two strangers in the bright light. I wish I knew you. I wish I knew you. Oh, I wish I knew you when I was young. Truth is all that you need. You bury that seed. It's everything beautiful. And that sound comes from the underground. It's all inside you now. It's everything beautiful. But what you, what you, what you, what you running from? And they got, they got, they got, they got you on the run. So Friday night, Holy Ghost, take me to your level. Show me the one I need the most. I need the most. I wish I knew you when I was young. I could have got so high. Now we're here, it's been so long.
[Music Playing] Two strangers in the bright light. Oh, and I hope you don't mind. We can share my mood, yeah. Two strangers in the bright light. I wish I knew you. I wish I knew you. Oh, I wish I knew you when I was young. Maybe we can share my mood. Maybe we can share my mood. I wish I knew you when I was young. I could have got so high. Now we're here, it's been so long. Two strangers in the bright light. Oh, and I hope you don't mind. We can share my mood, yeah. Two strangers in the bright light. I wish I knew you. I wish I knew you. Oh, I wish I knew you when I was young. Something told me it was over. Yeah, yeah. When I saw you and her talking.
[Music Playing] Something deep down in my soul said, "Cry, girl." When I saw you and that girl walking down. Ooh, I would rather, I would rather go blind, boy, than to see you walk away from me, child. Ooh, so you see, I love you so much that I don't want to watch you leave me, babe. Most of all, I just don't, I just don't want to be free, no. Ooh, ooh, I was just, I was just, I was just sitting there thinking of your kiss and your warm embrace, yeah.
[Music Playing] When the reflection in the glass that I held to my lips now, babe, yeah, yeah, yeah, revealed the tears that were on my face, yeah. Ooh, and baby, baby, I'd rather, I'd rather be blind, boy, than to see you walk away, see you walk away from me, yeah. Ooh, baby, baby, baby, I'd rather be blind.
[Music Playing] Bless my heart, bless my soul. Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old. There must be someone up above. Say you come on, Britney. You got to come on up. You got to hold on. Yeah, you got to hold on. So bless my heart and bless yours too. I don't know where I'm going to go, don't know what I'm going to do, but must be somebody up above. Say you come on, Britney. You got to come on up. You got to hold on. Yeah, you got to hold on. Yeah, you got to wait. Yeah, you got to wait. But I don't want to wait. I don't want to wait. So bless my heart, bless my mind. I got so much to do. I ain't got much time. So must be someone up above. Say you come on, girl.
[Music Playing] Yeah, you got to give it up. You got to hold on. Yeah, you got to hold on. Yeah, you got to wait.
If I could ask everybody to take their seats, we're going to get started here again. I'll turn us back over to John Swann, our President of Detection and Measurement.
Thanks, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Welcome back. I'm John Swann, President of our Detection and Measurement segment. I'm happy to be with you today. For background, I joined SPX in 2004 after previous advisory roles focused in the areas of strategy and M&A. I began my nearly 20 years at SPX in our business development group focused on executing M&A transactions. I spent the last 14 years in various general management roles, including leading our leading and growing our HVAC heating business and our location and inspection platform through both organic investments and M&A.
Most recently, I became President of the Detection and Measurement segment in late 2022. I'm exceptionally proud to be part of the SPX organization, our outstanding team of people, and our ongoing transformation over the last several years. Looking forward, I'm very excited and energized about the future potential of our business and the possibilities we have in front of us today. Here are a few key themes and takeaways for today's D&M presentation. First, our businesses are well-positioned strategic platforms. We serve specialized critical infrastructure applications in attractive end markets with strong growth dynamics. We deliver competitive differentiation and profitable growth through organic investments and strategic M&A. Let's start with a high-level snapshot of our D&M segment. Here's a breakdown of our revenue mix, recent operating performance, and growth and margin expectations.
We generated nearly $620 million in revenue last year, nearly triple the volume of the segment at spin. Comprised of four strategic platforms, our geographic mix is roughly 60% Americas and 40% rest of the world. L&I, AtoN, and Comtech each have higher proportions of international sales, while transportation is focused solely on the North American market. We're forecasting medium-term revenue growth of 4%-6% per year and expect our segment margins to rebound this year as we return to a more typical revenue mix in 2024 and continue trending towards our medium-term targets of 22%-24% over the next few years. Next, I'll talk about what we do and how we go to market. Each of our D&M platforms provides specialized field-deployed tools and technologies that enhance the safety, quality, productivity, and performance of critical infrastructure systems and subsystems.
This is a strategic thread that defines our common purpose across the segment. As we will cover in more detail on the next page, we play in specialized market segments where deep domain expertise and highly engineered solutions deliver superior customer value and create differentiation in the market. As you've seen in Gene and Sean's presentations, this is a simple, but I think effective graphic slide, please. There you go. Thank you. Depicting where our solutions are deployed in the field and how they impact our everyday lives. Starting in the lower left, you'll see examples of our location and inspection solutions. The two at the bottom are remotely controlled robotic systems that are used to inspect and remediate underground utility assets.
Moving up to the center left of the image, you can see a worker using our Radiodetection precision locator to identify and mark buried infrastructure prior to any excavation taking place in the area. This is essential to preventing damage and accidents at construction sites and is mandated by legislation in most developed countries. We're a global market leader in utility locators and the U.S. leader in robotic camera systems for wastewater applications. Across the top of the image, we show several representations of our AtoN solutions, including monitored lighting systems on a mobile communication tower and wind turbine to warn air traffic of potential obstructions, and another mounted on a buoy in a waterway for marine vessels. We're market leaders in serving these highly regulated, harsh environment applications and have strong global reach in both commercial and government channels.
One of our spectrum monitoring systems is shown here, capturing the signal coming from a communications tower. Our communication technologies, or Comtech platform, makes a variety of specialized equipment used by telecom and government agencies to monitor their RF spectrum and ensure quality of service. Lastly, we show a bus using our transit fare collection system, which includes integrated hardware and cloud-based software solutions to process payments and allow municipalities to analyze data about ridership that can be used to more effectively improve efficiency of their fleets. Next, I'd like to cover the end markets we serve and the key demand drivers for our solutions. On the demand side, construction activity to support a growing population, urbanization, and aging infrastructure assets drive the overall need for what we do.
Demographic trends, including an aging workforce and growing skills gap in the technical trades, call for automation and digital capabilities that improve productivity and de-skill asset repairs and maintenance. Safety considerations and environmental sustainability drive the need for precision, high-quality solutions that help customers avoid accidents and comply with emerging regulatory requirements. Turning to our end markets, we serve strategically important segments of critical infrastructure verticals such as energy, water, telecom, government, and transportation. There are also many attractive adjacencies within these verticals that would allow us for the natural expansion of our current offerings as we pursue future growth. To provide additional context around our demand environment, I'd like to share a few data points relating to some of our specific end market segments.
For our L&I business, it's estimated that the cost of damage to buried infrastructure in the U.S. alone exceeds $30 billion annually, with an estimated 10% increase in reported damage each year and with 37% of all damage incidents being directly attributable to poor location practices. The U.S. also has over 1.8 million miles of municipal wastewater and lateral pipe, with an average age of 45 years, requiring significant ongoing investment to maintain and repair these systems. For our AtoN business, approximately 50% of obstruction lighting systems in the U.S. have yet to be converted to LED. This represents a steady and ongoing upgrade cycle that will continue over the next decade. Finally, there are over 40,000 specific infrastructure projects and awards totaling $400 billion of investment through the 2021 infrastructure bill.
That funding is making its way into our markets, as we've seen most directly with our transportation business. How do we compete and win? Our D&M strategy starts with a laser focus on attractive end markets we know well and natural adjacencies within high-value customer segments. We typically have differentiated offerings with strong competitive moats. Leveraging our demand expertise, we work closely with our customers and end users to address critical technical challenges. We actively seek out new customer problems to solve using our needs-driven R&D and product development processes. As we continue to scale our D&M platforms, we use strategic M&A to accelerate growth and improve our market positions. We target companies with highly complementary solutions that can both benefit from and enhance our current offerings. The majority of our eight acquisitions within the segment since spin have resulted from proprietary, bilateral processes.
As Michael will share later, we currently have a very active M&A pipeline. Next, by incorporating our advanced digital technologies into our offerings, we not only unlock potential new profit pools, we also increase the level of customer intimacy, mind share, and stickiness over time. We're specifically focused on developing solutions to enhance our customers' field labor productivity and quality control through automation and digital workflow tools. Finally, we execute our continuous improvement strategy by using the SPX business system to leverage key internal resources, talent, and supplier relationships to improve organizational capacity, accelerate our growth, and expand margins. In the next section, I'll share a few specific examples of these strategies in action. I'll start with a few brief case studies highlighting how we leverage the power of our platforms to increase customer mind share and expand our market reach.
In our first one, a large contractor was struggling to coordinate and manage activities across various subcontractors during the installation of new gas distribution service. With multiple active job sites, they had difficulty monitoring the status of individual install operations and managing overall quality control across 12 different subcontracting crews. Using our cloud-based software along with several of our location and inspection tools, the contractor and subs were able to capture location and status of individual workflows in real time. Our solution quickly got the project back on track and resulted in significant improvements in productivity and quality and ultimately cash flow and collections for the contractor. Next, I'd like to talk about our Aton Portable Solar Airfield, or AGL, solution. Originally designed for rapid deployment of military airfields using mobile trailer systems, we've been able to expand its application into the commercial market.
O'Hare International Airport in Chicago was faced with the challenge of managing over a dozen airfield construction projects and changing taxiway configurations. Our AGL solution allowed O'Hare to deploy taxiways quickly and easily without the additional power and communication cabling required in traditional airfield lighting systems. Additionally, we've been able to effectively insource key production activities using D&M locations from other sister business units in the U.S., which has resulted in higher margin capture. And it allows U.S. airports to access federal funding grants through the Federal Airfield Improvement Program. Next, I'll cover a few examples that highlight our ability to work alongside customers to identify and address some of their most important challenges and ultimately develop creative new solutions that deliver real value. First, I'll talk about our robotic CISBOT technology.
Gas utilities operating large-diameter cast iron networks face significant challenges and very high costs to properly maintain their assets. Often located in high-density urban areas such as New York and London, these systems can be over 100 years old and prone to failure. With thousands of miles of cast iron pipe in place in the U.S. and the U.K. alone, leaks can have enormous human safety and environmental consequences. Historically, the default solution for preventative maintenance or leak repairs has been to shut down gas service, excavate around the pipelines, and either patch or replace the impacted section. This is very costly, time-consuming, and highly disruptive both to utility customers with service interruptions as well as delays from rerouted traffic above the repair zone. Avoiding these costs and disruptions altogether, our robots enter a live gas main through a small hole created inside of a launch tube.
You can see that with the red circle in the image on the lower left. Once inside the pipe, we can inspect and seal over 100 joints remotely over a quarter of a mile from the point of entry. To date, our robots have sealed over 50,000 joints in the U.S. and the U.K. with significant opportunities for future growth based on our strong value proposition and customer feedback. Next, we'll talk about a new offering from Radiodetection that improves the productivity and performance of our customers in utility locate applications where precision mapping is also needed. Utility location and the mapping of buried infrastructure have traditionally been separate field operations performed by different teams. Using our new tool, operators can now perform location and precision mapping activities with a single technician using a single device. We can also integrate mapping data into third-party asset management software.
This powerful new solution delivers real value to our customers and results in high-margin incremental sales for us. Turning to our digital strategy, there's enormous customer benefit from the ability to de-skill equipment operation, remotely monitor and troubleshoot issues, or reduce truck rolls using predictive analytics. We recognize that the impact of enhanced digital solutions can have in our markets and feel we're well positioned to deliver these benefits to our customers. Here, we have two examples where AI is being deployed in our businesses today. Contractors and municipalities tasked with maintaining wastewater systems need to monitor the condition of those systems on a regular basis. Typically, that process is performed by inserting a robotic camera system into a pipe and taking a video image inside the pipe as the robot moves along it. A trained technician then codes specific types of defects in real time as they're observed.
Historically, this has been a tedious and time-consuming process subject to high error rates and the need for reinspection. Using our AI-enabled algorithms, we have simplified and automated the condition assessment and defect coding process with cloud-based software. The customer benefits are substantial. Crews can now complete inspection work much faster with improved quality and cost savings through lower coding labor, which can often be reduced by 90% or more. In our communication technologies business, we have expanded our spectrum monitoring hardware offerings to include AI-enabled software applications that can proactively identify interference and alert regulators for action. As we discuss our inorganic growth strategy, there are a few common themes you'll see in the evolution of our D&M platforms. We start with a solid foundation of market leadership, strong technology, and broad distribution capabilities. We then acquire highly complementary, best-in-class businesses that expand our range in high-value applications.
Let's take our L&I platform as an example. Historically, SPX has been the global leader in electromagnetic location equipment with our Radiodetection business. However, there were still some attractive niches where we did not play. Our Schonstedt and Sensors & Software acquisitions were essentially product bolt-ons that fit nicely within our Radiodetection offering. We then targeted an attractive adjacency in the robotic inspection market, resulting in the acquisition of CUES, which is the North American leader in wastewater video inspection, and then expanded our capabilities into remediation with the acquisition of ULC, which developed the CISBOT technology we discussed earlier.
In just a few years, we took what was essentially a single category locator business with less than $100 million in annual sales and evolved it into a powerful platform for managing the full life cycle of buried infrastructure with $270 million in annual sales and significant additional growth potential ahead. Next, you can see a similar theme in the two examples on this page from our AtoN and Comtech platforms. SPX has long been the North American leader in land-based obstruction lighting systems. We saw strong similarities between the aviation and marine markets. So the next logical step was our acquisition of two best-in-class marine lighting companies with different geographic strengths: Sabik and Sealite. Next, we acquired ITL, which further enhanced our position in our core obstruction lighting market. Going forward, we see additional M&A growth opportunities for AtoN across a number of attractive adjacencies.
We're running a similar playbook at Comtech, where we've used M&A to capture significant technology synergies between ECS and TCI and open up new market opportunities for us in commercial and intelligence applications. In our final topic today, I'll cover how we use our business system for continuous improvement. I'm sometimes asked by those outside the company how our various platforms fit together, given the diversity of our businesses and the end markets we serve. While these are obviously unique platforms with a high degree of operational autonomy, there are some important commonalities in how our D&M markets behave and how each of our businesses go to market. We've identified four primary areas of focus: digital and engineering, commercial excellence, operations and supply chain, and facilities and shared services to further capture synergies within the segment.
On the digital front, we talked earlier about how we're embedding AI and SaaS software into our offerings. Another quick example would be the provisioning of IoT-enabled hardware, where we're currently building a common toolkit using cross-segment engineering teams. This approach speeds up delivery and reduces development costs for each business using the solution. We also have revenue enhancement opportunities that include channel management, strategic pricing, and cross-selling in key verticals. We have additional areas of opportunity for productivity improvements using our Lean toolkit, cost savings through strategic sourcing, footprint consolidation, and back-office scaling. While the focus of our continuous improvement efforts within D&M may be less operationally focused, given the asset-light nature of what we do, we feel very good about our ability to drive real improvements across the segment that both positively impact our customers and our bottom line.
To quickly recap our key takeaways before concluding, our businesses are well-positioned strategic platforms serving specialized critical infrastructure applications in attractive end markets with strong growth potential. We'll continue to deliver profitable growth through both organic investments and strategic M&A with a strong focus on execution as we continue to scale our platforms over time. I thank you for your time today, and we'll now turn it over to Michael Daley to cover our M&A playbook in more detail. Thank you. Good morning. Can everybody hear me okay? All right. It's great to be here and have a chance to speak with you. By way of introduction, I joined SPX in 2022 to lead strategy and business development following nearly two decades in similar roles. Is that accurate or not?
You got it.
Thank you. Okay. Two decades in similar roles at Honeywell, Caesars Entertainment, and GE Capital. Through these experiences, I've honed a skill set for designing and executing strategic growth and transformation programs for global companies. And I've been blessed with a wide range of experiences through business cycles and across a variety of industries. The slide here highlights why I'm excited about being at SPX and thrilled to have the opportunity to continue the great work of transforming and growing the company. Through a successful M&A program, we've been able to reposition the portfolio by exiting non-core assets and redeploying that capital into attractive new opportunities. We've recently demonstrated an ability to do larger deals and today have an active M&A program and a healthy pipeline. We're proud of what's been accomplished, but of course, we're just getting started.
What's not specifically identified on the slide is the exit from non-core businesses like Transformers, which freed up capital to deploy into these new growth platforms. Through this portfolio transformation, we were able to dramatically improve margins, reduce cyclicality, and build a strong portfolio of scaled platforms. An example Sean mentioned earlier is engineered air movement, which was just a strategic idea a few years ago, but in 2024 should generate about $250 million of revenue through the combination of Cincinnati Fan, TAMCO, and Ingenia. Similarly, AtoN today is a diversified platform serving obstruction, aviation, and marine applications around the world and will deliver approximately $170 million in revenue. While the last 12 months saw a considerable investment in HVAC, this followed periods of greater activity in D&M, and overall, our track record is very balanced.
We seek out inorganic opportunities across the board, review dozens each year, and complete only the best strategic deals indifferent to the segment alignment. On this page, the same information, but this time in numbers. As you can see, we've been both highly active but also very disciplined with an average deal size around $100 million, very reasonable and digestible for a company of our size, and highly reasonable purchase price multiples, especially when considering the typical synergies. Through our dealmaking, we've both strengthened our platforms but also added large addressable markets, which give us lots of room for further growth. Something I mentioned earlier is our recently demonstrated ability to find and complete larger deals. These bigger needle movers add diversification and open up large addressable markets, and this new tool will be part of the go-forward repertoire.
As such, we expect a healthy mix of deal sizes across our strike zone in the future. Transitioning to how we do the work and why we think we can continue delivering strong inorganic growth, I highlight that we approach everything in M&A from our strategic framework. Organically and inorganically, we seek to be a category-leading provider of niche, highly engineered, and tech-enabled solutions with resilient moats, operating in regulated or specified markets. We're focused around HVAC and detection and measurement and apply a consistent and rigorous approach to our financial analysis, ensuring the target business has significant room for growth, deals are priced appropriately, and the margins and returns meet or exceed metrics in an appropriate timeframe, considering the relevant opportunities, risks, and resource requirements. As I mentioned before, M&A starts and stops with strategy, and by its design, it exists to accelerate SPX's overall strategic goals.
This is why these functions are under one roof. Each year, we complete a thorough, bottoms-up, long-range planning process. This is then aggregated to form a top-of-the-house perspective, which guides the overall direction for the company. The several-months-long effort includes a portfolio review, considers key trends, risks, and opportunities, and addresses crucial business topics, which in turn inform our priorities and investment plans for the following years. We hold ourselves accountable for prior years' performance, and the strat plan, as it's referred to internally, includes our inorganic strategy as well. Targets are identified through the annual strat plan process and then racked and stacked based on attractiveness and actionability, which forms the basis for the game board, which consists of a few hundred companies across SPX.
Outreach is then distributed, with the business unit and segment general managers and presidents playing an active role in developing relationships with desirable target companies. This can form tight connections, which yield great results. Our acquisition of CUES is an excellent example of a strong relationship built over time, which ultimately positioned SPX extremely well when it came time for the owner to sell his company. And in fact, more than a third of our deals have been bilateral in nature, where we were able to avoid an auction process. In addition to our direct calling efforts, we maintain strong relationships with the investment banking community and private equity sponsors. We believe that the direct outreach, when combined with our consistent activity level of completing 2-3 deals a year and strong reputation, creates a positive flywheel effect.
As an example, completing the acquisitions of TAMCO and ASPEQ propelled our position as the best owner of Ingenia, having demonstrated an ability to do larger deals, work in an effective and expeditious manner, and reinforce our interest in pursuing growth in Canada. Deal execution is best in class. We heavily utilize digital workflow and collaboration tools, which drive process standardization, efficiency, and consistency, and when combined with our deep experience, allows us to focus on what matters the most and move quickly. We leverage a narrow set of strong partners, which again enables speed and efficiency. While I'll touch on diligence and integration later, both are incredibly important to our overall success and ensure that we never lose our hunting license. With the legacy challenges related to non-core assets, asbestos in South Africa now behind us, all focuses on growth.
We continue to expand our strategic framework and thinking to map multidimensional and multi-year growth plans. The $15 billion of addressable market reflected here aligns with our bottoms-up strategic planning work and could be easily doubled when expanding into adjacencies through modest step-outs in markets and products, let alone when we consider further adjacencies in whitespace. Key themes driving our M&A focus include secular trends such as electrification and decarbonization, the tech and data center buildout, as well as our ability to leverage extensive customer and channel relationships across D&M to offer expanded digital and monitoring solutions. In short, we see a lot of exciting runway and believe there's ample room to grow. Diligence and integration really are two sides of the same coin, and SPX's track record of successfully underwriting and integrating acquisitions is truly exceptional.
Adding to what Randy shared previously, our approach to each leverages the extensive experience of our corporate functional experts and thoughtfully designed processes and playbooks, which are then customized in close collaboration with the business unit teams, utilizing their knowledge of markets, products, and operations to ensure each plan is fit for purpose. Diligence is then performed through a two-in-the-box approach in which we pair the functional experts and business unit counterparts, who in turn are complemented by external vendors, many with whom we have had longstanding relationships, which leads to increased efficiency and effectiveness. Integration planning starts during diligence to ensure seamless approach and handoff. Our executive leadership team is closely involved throughout, and our board of directors provides oversight and guidance. We expect that M&A will remain a key enabler to value creation for SPX as we continue our journey to become the next great industrial compounder.
Our ability to programmatically redeploy free cash flow into new and attractive acquisition opportunities will be crucial, and you should expect us to pursue strategic acquisitions between $50 million and $500 million with room to go up and down based on strategic fit and opportunities, and a goal to deploy $1.5 billion-$2 billion of capital over the medium term. Paramount to success will be our relentless focus on strategy as our north star, remaining the buyer of choice through best-in-class origination and execution, and rigor and discipline in our approach to pricing, process, and integration. Thank you for your time, and I'll turn it over to Mark Carano, who will take you through the financial strategy.
Slide by there.
Hey, thanks, Michael. Hey, good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It's good to see so many familiar faces across our shareholder and stakeholder communities here this morning. I've got the pleasure of being the last presenter today with the enviable role of pulling all the narratives you've heard thus far into a financial picture, one that will give you the confidence that we have the right team and a proven strategy to double the EBITDA of the company. Before I walk through my slides, I'll start with some color on my background. I joined SPX in January 2023, bringing broad experience across a range of disciplines, including accounting, finance, strategy, and business development. I've held various senior financial roles in several industrial companies, serving as CFO of both publicly traded and private equity-owned organizations.
So as I like to say, I've worked on both sides of the aisle, public and private, and bring a unique financial perspective and mindset as a result. In addition to more than a decade in corporate America, I spent the first 14 years of my career as an investment banker here in New York. But don't hold that against me. As I look back on 2023, it was just a remarkable and record year for the company financially. We grew revenue by 19% and expanded adjusted EBITDA margins by 360 basis points to approximately 18%. We grew adjusted EPS by over 39% and delivered an adjusted free cash flow conversion at a level greater than 100%. Turning to 2024, the backdrop for our business is expected to remain strong.
Looking at the top of this page, I've outlined the 2024 guidance that we articulated last month in our Q4 earnings call. This year, we anticipate almost $2 billion in revenue at approximately 20% Adjusted EBITDA margins and Adjusted EPS of $5 per share at the midpoint. This implies approximately 13% in company-wide revenue growth year-on-year. Margins continue to reach higher levels as the benefits of our business system-driven initiatives, recent acquisitions, and the continued leveraging of our corporate cost base translate into EBITDA margins approximately 200 basis points above 2023 levels. As many of you recognize, this guidance implies we achieve most, if not all, of our 2025 targets a year early, including our threshold for revenue, margin, and our anchor target of $5 per share. We're proud of the momentum. It demonstrates our ability to do what we say and deliver on our commitments.
Today, almost 70% of our revenue comes from our HVAC segment, which has grown both organically and due to acquisitions, including 3 over the last 12 months. As you know, there's quite a bit of serendipity related to the timing of acquisitions. Of our 14 acquisitions, 6 have been in HVAC and 8 in D&M. Our growth plans envision M&A activity in both segments, so we would anticipate more balance in our revenue mix over time. Geographically, our large North American focus is a real positive and positions us to benefit from the strength that we are seeing in the U.S. economy, where GDP growth is expected to be among the highest of developed economies over the next several years. The substantial government investment in a broad range of infrastructure markets, megatrends such as AI and sustainability, and general reinvestment in the American manufacturing base are underpinning this view.
Reprising a bit of what Gene talked about, we've come a long way in a short period of time. Looking back at the time of the spin in 2015, we had almost $1.7 billion in revenue, but at substantially lower margin and profitability than we have today. We've been on a journey to intentionally reposition and de-risk the company on our way to becoming what we believe is one of the next premier industrial technology companies. We initially descaled the business by selling lower-margin power-related businesses before reinvesting the proceeds, as well as the cash we generate from operations in market-leading, higher-margin, higher-growth businesses. Most of these efforts were completed in 2021. You can clearly see the effect on our margins of having rescaled the business through growth and margin accretive acquisitions. In addition, our business system has provided us the tools to grow efficiently.
Over the last several years, we've improved the margins across the enterprise while also scaling our corporate cost base with higher revenues. All of these efforts are expected to result in over 1,000 basis points of margin expansion since 2016 and approximately 16% compound annual growth rate at the adjusted EPS line. So it's been a remarkable last 8+ years at SPX with several transformative achievements, and I believe that we are still in the early innings of growth and value creation. Our strategy has been effective at creating shareholder value, evidenced by the substantial increase in our share price. As you can see on the right side of the page, our stock has strongly outperformed the S&P 500, representing a further validation of our execution from one of our most important constituents, our shareholders.
In addition to the early exits of businesses that were not a good fit within our portfolio, our combined 14 acquisitions have been accretive to both margins and growth rates and have contributed significantly to our shareholder value story. As we move forward, we will continue to focus on acquisitions with accretive margins and growth profiles, either initially or with a clear path to get there in a reasonable time horizon through synergies and the deployment of our business system. Importantly, we've also removed two substantial pre-spin liabilities, including a legacy power project that was related to a business that we sold years ago and divesting our asbestos portfolio in 2022. The elimination of this overhang has allowed the SPX team to reprioritize its time and resources on future growth initiatives. You'll note we've returned capital only once through a small share repurchase in 2022.
This was a unique and opportunistic decision at a time when the stock price was substantially dislocated. In short, SPX has never been stronger and is well-positioned to continue delivering on its strategic initiatives. With our proven track record of delivering strong financial results, including outstanding top-line growth through both organic and M&A investments, a strong balance sheet supported by significant cash flow generation, and our disciplined capital allocation policy that has proven effective, we expect to be able to continue growing our company and compounding returns for our shareholders. We're breaking it down by segment. You can see significant above-market revenue growth, particularly in our HVAC segment, where we've invested more recently in M&A. Based on our 2024 midpoint guidance, this would represent a combined compound annual growth rate for the total company over a three-year period of 17%.
Organically, this comparable compound annual growth rate for the total company over the same period would be approximately 9%, which is markedly above long-term market growth trends for each of the segments. For our HVAC segment, we've also seen significant improvement in our margin profile. Based on our midpoint 2024 guidance, we would anticipate a nearly 40% compound annual growth rate in our segment income over the three-year period. We believe that we have structurally changed our HVAC margin profile, largely due to significant investments in automation, better alignment of production processes, tighter pricing discipline, and favorable continuous improvement initiatives. You heard many of these brought to life by Sean in his presentation. In addition, all our recent acquisitions have been accretive to our margin profile and have brought incremental cost synergies in addition to revenue synergies. These are powerful levers to magnify our growth.
Consequently, we now expect the margin profile of HVAC to be in the range of 21%-25%. This is, of course, greater than levels we've communicated in the last few quarters, but the combination of market trends and the benefit of acquisitions gives us the confidence that it's sustainable. Shifting to detection and measurement, we've also seen strong compound annual growth rates in segment income, benefiting from both acquisitions and organic growth. While our sales mix has caused our margins to be roughly flat despite growth over the last three years, we continue to target margins in a range of 22%-24% and are engaged in various initiatives to drive this process. Similarly, our growth in adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margins has been substantial, and we anticipate a three-year compound annual growth rate of more than 34% through the end of this year.
This reflects the overall improved margin profile of our businesses, in addition to the power of leveraging our fixed corporate cost structure. As you can see, the percentage has come down notably from 2021, when it was 4.3% of revenue, to approximately 2.4% in 2024, or just about 200 basis points. Going forward, we are appropriately resourced to continue scaling the platform. For our adjusted earnings per share, there's a bit of a delayed impact for the benefit of acquisitions, resulting from higher interest costs given the current rate environment. Nonetheless, based on our $5 of adjusted EPS, our midpoint target for 2024, we anticipate a three-year compound annual growth rate of nearly 30%. So as with all industrial companies, one of our most important metrics is free cash flow, which is the lifeblood of our growth strategy, allowing us to redeploy capital into growth investments and compound returns.
The short message is this: we believe our company should convert approximately 95%-100% of adjusted net income into free cash flow annually. In 2024, we expect this number to be slightly lower, approximately 90%, due to elevated CapEx for important growth investments in our HVAC segment. This translates into approximately 2% of revenue, but on a long-term basis, we'd anticipate a more normalized level of approximately 1.5%. These investments are critical to both maintaining and supporting the growth of the business. Every dollar is rigorously analyzed to verify it meets an appropriate return threshold, which is targeted at a 2-3-year payback period. Throughout our transformation, we've been very consistent in the management of our balance sheet, remaining steadily within our target net leverage range of 1.5-2.5 times, apart from 2021 and 2022 when we benefited from the sale of our transformers business.
As of the end of 2023, our pro forma net leverage, including the acquisition of Ingenia, was 2 times. We would expect to be at 1.5 times or lower by the end of 2024, providing additional capacity of more than $500 million for capital deployment by year-end. Our access to capital remains strong, thanks to our longstanding bank relationships, and has been sufficient to support our growth. While we are committed to this leverage range and have demonstrated an ability to manage our growth initiatives, including M&A within it, we could certainly exceed it for a significant value creation opportunity. As we've indicated in the past, we would consider it for a highly strategic acquisition, which has a clear pathway through growth and synergies to drive our leverage level back within the historical range in the near term. The priority for investments is clear.
Looking at our historical capital deployment from the beginning of 2021 through to the present, we've deployed 90% of our capital towards acquisitions, with 7% going to CapEx and only a small portion for share repurchases that, as I mentioned earlier, were opportunistic in nature. Growth will continue to be our key focus for capital deployment, whether that be through CapEx or acquisitions. In the next two slides, I'll outline the key elements that support our long-term growth model. As Gene indicated in his introductory slides, we are establishing a framework that combines both a margin profile and a growth target: 20%+ Adjusted EBITDA margins and consistently delivering on an average 15%+ Adjusted EBITDA growth annually. While it does not identify specific time-based targets, it does provide management and investors a clear algorithm to measure shareholder value creation over time.
A combination of above-market organic growth, margin expansion beyond 20% from business system-driven tools, strong free cash flow generation, and a strategic deployment of capital, all working in concert, are designed to deliver financial performance consistent with this framework. We've achieved it over the last few years and are confident in our ability to continue to do so. Starting with top-line organic growth, you heard Sean and John talk in detail about our leading positions in markets, many of which are supported by secular tailwinds. You also heard them discuss the multiple levers available to grow their business at above-market trends through initiatives like new product innovations, digital offerings, and commercial excellence. I believe the top-line growth message is clear: we are well-positioned to drive growth above-market organic growth going forward.
Over the planning horizon, HVAC anticipates revenue growth of 5%-6%, and D&M anticipates revenue growth of 4%-6%. In both cases, we expect it to outperform the broader market growth rates. Moving to EBITDA growth and margin leverage, clearly volume is a tailwind, which should deliver incremental EBITDA dollars from growth through operating leverage and corporate cost scaling. We would expect price realization to offset input cost headwinds, leaving us in a neutral price-cost environment. Other inflationary headwinds should be more than offset by our business system initiatives. You heard Randy outline our business system, and John and Sean provide real examples that have, on a net basis, been additive to our margins and ultimately EBITDA. We expect this focus on costs from all of our businesses and corporate functions, with measurable targets to deliver a net positive benefit to margins annually.
So what does this mean in terms of segment income margins? We believe HVAC should operate within a 21%-25% range over the planning horizon, with opportunities to approach the higher end if end-market momentum continues. We expect D&M to incrementally return to its legacy margin profile of 22%-24% over the planning horizon. So if you step back, the organic model's simple: grow the top line at middle single digits, leveraging through to the bottom line. We've been executing on it already and have the processes, strategies, and expertise in place to continue to do so in the future. It also assumes we continue to manage our balance sheet within a reasonable range of net leverage, while reinvesting in our existing businesses to facilitate growth and productivity.
Organic growth is almost always the best and highest return on capital employed, but our significant cash flow generation far exceeds our needs in our core businesses. Complementing this organic model is M&A, a strategic advantage allowing us to compound our earnings growth. When done right, it has been and will be a game changer to our growth profile. As Michael outlined, our focus on core, adjacent, and TAM expanding opportunities that will be accretive to our growth rate and to our margin once fully integrated is the accelerator to our earnings. We intend to continue to exercise the same level of discipline with respect to valuations, recognizing that certain acquisitions may fall outside of the average range on both the upper and lower end.
Taking these assumptions and overlaying them onto our growth framework, you'll see we have a clear path to more than double EBITDA over the planning horizon. In fact, almost two-thirds of the increase in Adjusted EBITDA over the planning horizon is expected to come from organic growth and the benefits of our business system. We have plenty of capacity and firepower to support this acquired EBITDA and, in fact, could support more if the right opportunities are available. In summary, over the last 8+ years, we've proven out our ability to deliver strong financial results and to deploy capital in a responsible and effective manner. We have strong cash flow generation and intend to use our balance sheet to support our inorganic growth objectives in a manner that drives significant long-term growth in shareholder value.
We feel good about our ability to continue compounding our compounding strategy for the foreseeable future. And now I'll turn the podium back over to Gene for his closing comments.
I want to thank you guys all for coming here today. I think that the key themes that we wanted to communicate is that, first and foremost, we really like our businesses. We really think we have a good portfolio of businesses with very strong competitive positions, with attractive growth opportunities in front of them, and we like our end markets. So I think that's really important. We like the portfolio we have. I do believe we have the right strategy. We're not changing our strategy. Our strategy is to continue the execution of this going forward. I believe we have the right business system. If you look over the past six years, the value creation from our business system has been very significant. We intend to continue applying this across our enterprise, both for our existing businesses and for new businesses going forward.
Probably most importantly, I believe we have the best team we've ever had here at SPX, and we have the capacity and the capability to execute on our strategy going forward. We're very excited about the future. I'm going to hand it off to Paul Clegg, who's going to quarterback or orchestrate Q&A, and would love to answer any questions you guys might have. I really appreciate you guys coming by today.
Okay. You guys know how this works. We got mics here, and we would ask that you please raise your hand and wait for the mic. We've got one right over here, Brian, to ask the questions so the folks on the webcast can hear you.
All right. Thanks for all the detail today, guys. Success to date. Post-spend, fantastic. Proven in the share price, 15%+. EBITDA growth going forward, good times still ahead. The medium-term "to doubling EBITDA" mark to follow through on my friendly warning from earlier, how should we think about that? Four to five years, four to six years, is that a reasonable time frame? And then if that is, in fact, the case, thinking of the way that you typically frame your annual guidance, what are the key upside/downside drivers? Obviously, macro conditions are going to be there, timing of M&A, anything else to keep in mind within that?
Yeah, Brian, I'll start. I think if you take 15% and you compound that, starting with 2023's numbers, in about five years, you get to a doubling of EBITDA, right? We've indicated that we can do greater than 15%, 15%+. So when I think about it, if I were sitting in your shoes, I think medium-term means four to five years. It's the right way to think about it.
The upside downside?
Yeah. And as we think about the upside/downside, listen, a lot of it's going to be a function of the economic environment that we're operating in. As we look out over the next, let's call it, 1-2 years, particularly in both businesses, given the infrastructure dollars that we see coming, the megatrends that are underpinning our cooling business, the reshoring that we're seeing across the U.S., I mean, all these items that we kind of talked through today, all of those should drive strength, I think, in performance in the near term and potentially over the planning horizon or that time period. But ultimately, it'll be a function of what does the economy look like. It's hard to forecast. Probably none of us know what it's going to look like 4-5 years from now.
As we sit today, we're in a good spot, and we feel good about it.
Appreciate that. You have already a good segue there with the megatrend reference. Within HVAC, data centers, fantastic growth driver for the cooling business in recent past. Remind us where data centers sit in terms of percentage exposure now, what growth rates have been, and tell us what you think about growth rates or growth runway going forward. And within that, any competitive risks or opportunities that have emerged in recent past that we should keep in mind in thinking about that path forward.
Sean, can we get you to take that one?
Yeah. No, I'll start with that. In terms of data center, and I'm going to kind of start maybe pointing you back to slide 20 in Gene's section, and we kind of carve out kind of the data center exposure at SPX as a whole, which is sitting about 7%. From an HVAC perspective, it starts to get kind of in that 9-ish range. I think the things I'd highlight with regards to data center and data center growth is that this has been a segment that we've been supporting for a long time, right? We've seen meaningful revenue in data centers for the past decade plus. So it's an important segment for us. But if we think about where it's going, clearly artificial intelligence has been getting a lot of press and a lot of headlines.
But you got to really, I think, step back about all the factors that are impacting data center growth, right? It's cloud computing, gaming, social media, the digital media delivery via streaming services, the proliferation of these things, mobile devices that are all around the world, the impact that all of that's going to be having on proliferation of IoT devices, right? And then on top of that, you layer what's going on and began to really take flight over the past two years around AI, right? So we kind of see data centers and the technology infrastructure as being a growth area for us that's going to grow above our segment average during the planning period that we discussed. There are a number of factors that really kind of get into that above and beyond the drivers I mentioned.
If you start to think about the aging of data centers, there are a lot of data centers that are now 20+ years old. There's going to be renovation work that's going to be required in those. If you think about data centers that were built even 6 years ago, some of those are going to be challenged as new servers go in that are kind of AI-driven servers that are consuming more power and generating more heat load. So even newer data centers are going to be faced with some type of renovation activity as well. So we kind of see that, and the sheer growth in number and size of data centers as being a positive factor.
The other thing that's, when you think about it specifically from an HVAC segment as well, you can look at market data in terms of square footage and number of data centers. But what's going on with these new chipsets and the power consumption that those chipsets are requiring, the growth in heat load or heat rejection requirements is growing significantly faster than just the square footage growth that you see within data centers. So from an HVAC perspective, you've got a compounding effect for the data center segment. So it's an important segment for us. Again, it's about 9% of HVAC. We continue to see that growing above our segment average over the planning period.
Understood. Helpful color. A quick one on the D&M side. Secular driver there, infrastructure spending seems to be very early stage. We know within your transportation platform, that's been a good guy. In recent past, I think you called it 40,000+ projects to which the products and services could be linked. How should we think about that catalyst going forward given the early-stage ramp in IHAA and other spending?
Well, as I'm sure you know, it's difficult to track precisely how those dollars start to flow given permitting. In our markets, the way I look at it is anything that's driving required construction activity, regardless of the specific sector application that's subject to that infusion of funding, we play either directly or indirectly and through our location inspection platform and others. The way I would think about it over the next couple of years is we feel like we're in a great position to, number one, monitor as specific programs come online early and intercept that demand by working closely with our customers. We don't overly rely on channel partners to take on that task. We monitor that very closely and just feel good about our ability to kind of catch that and intercept it as it comes online.
If you could repeat the last part of your question, I apologize, if there was a follow-on there, just in terms of the.
I was just thinking about growth trajectory going forward and how much of a catalyst the ramp in spending should be.
Yeah.
Understandable.
It's certainly a tailwind, and it's certainly above and beyond what we would see in the long term. In terms of actually quantifying and predicting the exact timing, it's challenging, but we know it's there.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you.
We'll go to Steve.
Hey. Morning. Appreciate all the effort and time you guys put into this. Very informative. I don't take this as a criticism, but I do want to ask about the guidance, your previous guidance. You got there a year early. It was very, very specific targets. This is more vague to the previous targets.
This is in reference to our $5 number? Is that correct?
Yeah. But you hit a year early despite all the turmoil. Now you're talking about an EBITDA margin, which you're already guiding towards this year, a doubling over five years. But you can get there a lot of different ways, some better than others. I'm just trying to understand why you're not providing such specific guidance since you were so successful at hitting it a year early despite so much turmoil in that period of time.
Mark, do you want to take that? Maybe I'll start with the beginning of that. I think the reference to the very specific guidance of the $5 per share. I'll start that part. We did that very specifically because at the time, in 2021, we had divested one of our largest businesses, our Transformers business, and we descaled our P&L so that we were going to keep the same level of corporate costs because we planned on growing back into that. At that time, it took us down to a number from an EPS perspective that was less than half of that $5 number. And we could see we had the vision to see what was going to happen with that.
But we knew that just looking at those numbers, particularly at the size company we were and the market cap we had at that time, we probably wouldn't get that recognition from the streets. So we really felt like we had to spoon-feed people that level of information. Now, going forward, we made a decision not to do that. I think we heard from a lot of folks when we first said that $5, we gave the other numbers behind that, "I can't believe you're doing that. You're going to put yourselves in a bind. You're going to go out there, and you're going to feel like you have a gun to your head to go do acquisitions to make that number." We didn't feel that way. We had the vision to do it.
But we wanted to come back with more of a programmatic approach, a bit more of an algorithm, if you will, to what we could do going forward. Because the reality is that we have a lot of capital. We have a lot of momentum behind us. There's a range of possibilities with respect to the economy. But we thought this was a better way to do this going forward. And we don't again, we get very, very mixed feedback on putting out specific stakes in the ground multiple years out and what sort of perverse incentives you may have to hit those specific numbers. And so that's the first part of that, Mark. I don't know if you want to address the rest of that?
Yeah, Paul, I think you covered it pretty well. I mean, it's not inconsistent, I think, with similar peers in their approach to kind of guidance and shareholder value creation. We like the framework approach because we thought it gave you a good algorithm, as Paul, to use that word, to really think about shareholder value and what we ought to be doing on a long-term basis as we continue to grow the business over time, delivering at a margin level that is at an attractive point and compounding that growth on average going forward.
Before you get one more in, just on D&M, obviously, last year, from a margin perspective, wasn't great. This year, you're guiding for flat. But you've pointed to a lot of the megatrends. Could you sort of put those two pieces together and when we could start seeing that?
Yeah. Maybe I'll start there.
Sure.
Yep.
That'd be great.
Yeah. When I look back at last year, it was a pretty unique kind of convergence of a number of different factors. We had, as I'm sure you're aware, some pretty significant revenue shift in terms of the mix between our higher margin locator business. And the decrementals there are pretty high combined with a huge improvement or ramp-up in some of the pass-through content that we came through that came through one of our large projects on the Comtech side. There were also some other, I think, unique and maybe non-recurring elements to what was driving our margin performance this year. And that gives us confidence that it will recover to our longer-term and historical targets going forward.
One was we still had some one-off gray goods purchases that were still making its way through and kind of priced cost and some components and some chipsets that we were purchasing. And then we had higher R&D expenses last year as well, that kind of strategically important investments for us. We're glad we made them, but higher than our average in the past. And we feel like that this year, we'll return to a more typical revenue mix and get back on track in terms of our positive year-on-year margin improvement.
On the lack of revenue growth, and to add to that, just was the M&A pipeline that's been quieter on the D&M side lately?
I feel really good about the level of activity. I'll ask maybe Michael to jump in in response to that. We're seeing a lot of attractive potential targets across all four of our platforms. More recently, I think L&I and Comtech, we're seeing some active targets in some of those spaces. We feel very, very comfortable and bullish with continuing our compounder strategy there.
Yeah. All I would add is that in 2023, we spent probably equal parts working on D&M opportunities that just didn't come to fruition for various reasons. The HVAC ones did. And I think we entered 2024 feeling the same way. We've got two or three really interesting opportunities, a couple behind it. It's spread across D&M. Transportation continues to be active and interesting, L&I, and then Contech as well. And Aeton's not far behind. So I think it's working.
Okay. Thank you, Larry.
Thanks.
Larry Demario, William Blair.
Looks like that mic isn't on for some reason.
Thank you. Larry Demario, William Blair. Can you help, first of all, reconcile the EBITDA margin target of 20%+? Obviously, we're basically there. Does it imply that deals going forward are dilutive? And that's why. And then secondly, to follow up on the HVAC side, continued M&A on that side, obviously, is going to come. Is the end game a full-system solution, or are we going to stay niche? And can you talk a little bit more about the pipeline? Because there's obviously a lot more competition on that side. Thanks.
Let's start with the EBITDA margin question with Mark.
Yeah. I'll start with that, Larry, and then I'll turn it over to my peer for the follow-up. Larry, I don't think that's the case, that they're going to be dilutive over the long-term period, right? I mean, our expectation is that we're at 20% we believe we're going to hit 20% this year and with a pathway to continue to grow those margins. As we acquire businesses, they could be at a level that's at or slightly below that initially. But our expectation is through synergies and through implementation of our business system, we can drive that up to levels that are consistent with the margin profile of the business.
Then, yeah, if we could talk a little bit about sorry, the second part of your question had to do with.
The HVAC end game. Are we looking for a solution, continue to buy niche, and what does the pipeline really look like considering there is obviously more competition from large players?
Yeah. Let's start with Sean, and then Michael.
Yeah. So I'll start on that. As you'd expect, from an M&A perspective, we're going to continue to run a pretty tight strategic playbook and making sure it's a broad strategic fit, not only with SPX's overall strategy but the one we articulated today for HVAC in terms of the type of products and positioning we're looking for. I think the other piece that's important is there's some element of segment synergy, recognizing that often these are independently operated businesses. But we do look for some element of synergy there. And so those synergies can occur, obviously, across the supply chain. But importantly, and I think it ties a little bit to your question, it ties a little bit to leveraging relationships and channels, be it through contractors, be it through other types of specifiers.
And so we'll continue to look for other components of the system that make sense to add to leverage those channel and sales synergy potentials that could be out there. I think we'll continue to look at some tight adjacencies around what we're calling the air movement platform around electric heat and around certain kind of sub-areas of cooling. But we'll look at continued adjacencies to those spaces too that clear that strategic kind of framework that we laid out today. We do see again, it's a very large market, both globally and here in North America. There's a lot of interesting niche areas to focus on. And then we've seen continued pipeline activity. And I'll turn it now over to Michael to kind of elaborate on that. But there's really, over the past couple of years, there's just been inconsistency of pipeline activity in the segment.
Yeah. I think that's right. I don't think in terms of what the market's presenting us and what we're chasing and calling on, I don't think that's changed a whole lot. Deals that we've done recently have been competitive. And so I don't think that's, again, gotten worse or better by virtue of being in an auction. You need to beat the landscapes that are participating there. And we're seeing broad interest. I think you're seeing still some sponsors that are interested, a lot of strategics that want to grow HVAC further. We haven't seen the large mega HVAC players come down into these spaces, which we think is strategically explainable. I don't think that this is where they're focused. But yeah, we feel good about where things are going.
Thanks. Maybe just one follow-up. On the D&M side, obviously, you talked about potentially doing up to $500 million deals. Are there larger platform-oriented deals that could be transformational on the D&M side or continue to build out niche-wise?
I'm going to start with John there.
Yeah. Maybe I'll start with that. Structurally, what we've typically seen in D&M, these are more kind of highly fragmented markets. We've done really, really well with our sweet spot has been $20-$100 million revenue. I used some examples today. They're highly complementary. There's many more of those targets out there. We would certainly go up market. But it has to come back and anchor very, very strongly to our strategic end goals that we've set. And I think it's a balance of being aggressive in spots but also being disciplined in terms of really understanding where we can the combination of these offerings can add more value and create incremental value. I don't know if you'd like to add anything to that, but.
No. Look, the headlines get captured by large-cap activity, which was down radically in 2023. We had some of our best time in M&A, most active period. So we're very happy to be. I'm very happy to be operating in kind of the middle market. It's target-rich. It's active. A lot of exciting, interesting, niche, highly engineered, specialized companies to go after. So I feel really good about where we start and then within our areas of focus, that there's lots of runway to pick up additional companies in adjacent markets. I think in terms of D&M, look, we apply a very generous 80/20 rule. We spend 80%-85% of our time on things that are right down the middle of the strike zone that we have the greatest chance of being successful around.
Then we do try to reserve 10% or 15% of our time to look at some of these larger, strategic, more transformative things. We're not ignoring them, but we're really focused on trying to stick to the strike zone, the core. Something opportunistic popped up, we want to be ready to take advantage of it. Okay. I think I saw the mic go to the team from UBS, if I'm not mistaken.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I have one follow-up question on data centers. We are hearing a lot about liquid cooling in data centers. How do you see that market evolving? How do you see opportunities for SPXC in that space? And how does that play out? And then I'll come back with a question on HVAC.
Yeah. Let me start there. Yeah. So yeah, in terms of liquid cooling or emerging cooling, I think for those of you who follow kind of know that that technology has been kind of utilized under development, maturing for at least a decade. And that's been occurring both at what I guess I'll call the rack or infrastructure level and then, of course, at the chip level. I think some of the challenges that the industry or those that are focused on that have wrestled with over time are both the cost of deploying that system and then the lack of redundancy that you get there.
But if you kind of step back again and tie it to some of the comments I made earlier about what's driving HVAC growth within data centers, the challenge is that the chipsets today are generating so much heat that, as an engineer or two explained it to me, is that we're challenging the physics of air movement to do the appropriate level of cooling. So what we see on a go-forward basis, particularly in data centers that are heavily kind of outfitted with AI-oriented servers, that's going to be some type of hybrid approach to cooling in that there will be a portfolio of designs that are kind of implemented by each of the hyperscalers, each one looking slightly different. And then some of the more independent players will have their own design system as well.
In terms of cooling at that chip level or cooling at the rack level, we anticipate a hybrid. But the other thing I'll call out and to recall too is that if you think about chip cooling, you still have a heat load rejection requirement of the liquid that you have that's touching the chip or kind of surrounding the racks, right? And so in a data center, you have a cooling that's occurring within the four walls of the data center but kind of near or outside or kind of adjacent to you have what I'll call a cooling plant that's rejecting heat. For us, we have opportunities on both sides, right, in that cooling plant but then also kind of closer to the server. Today, we participate in that market both through our engineered air movement sector as well as our evaporative cooling sector.
So we think just the ongoing growth, increase in heat load, you'll end up with a portfolio of products that are going to solve those problems. In terms of our interests, I mean, again, I think we're looking at any type of product that kind of meets that strategic screen that I talked about earlier. I mean, immersion and liquid cooling could be one of those. It's not one we specifically have targeted. But we are definitely looking at what I'll call both clean room and data center and technology environments and the broader HVAC needs there. Hopefully, that helps. It's maybe a little broader than you asked, but.
Yeah. That makes sense. And a broader question on HVAC, I guess. After the series of acquisitions over the last few years and all this outside growth in data centers and industrial, how do you think the cyclicality of the HVAC business has changed today, right? There is less emphasis on boilers, which is more stable, replacement demand-driven, versus you see more new construction, new installation-driven these days. So just wanted to get your sense of how do you see the cyclicality of the business.
Yeah. One of the interesting things I think about SPX as a whole but specifically HVAC from a segment is, I mean, we're going to be one of those companies or one of those businesses that's going to be challenging to have just a small handful of stocks that are a look-through or a couple of indices or metrics like the Architectural Building Index or Dodge that kind of really kind of enables you from an outside in to understand what's going on. A bunch of businesses like that, we're going to fall in that category. I kind of refer back again to the slide in Gene's section on page 20 that highlights the diversification. On that particular slide, we actually synthesized it for you in terms of the number of end markets we put there.
But if you start peeling back the onion, even within that industrial sector, you see that there's batteries in there. There's semiconductors in there. There's power in there. There's food processing. There's chemical refining, metals, mining. I mean, it is kind of a broad brush of the entire economy. It goes back to the theme we had earlier that HVAC is everything. So we get this incredible amount of diversification, which supports the business. And then this aspect that you mentioned that 60%+ of our business is replacement revenue. And so that just provides us a solid foundation, again, frequently at a higher margin rate as well. So it's just a tremendous foundation.
What that diversification allows us to do in the part that is new construction-related is as various sectors are hot or cold, much like the economy that we're seeing today, there are clear winners, and there are clear losers. We're able to kind of benefit or see that shift around over the planning period that we're discussing, right? And so some of those segments, AI, data centers get a lot of press for good reason. But we're seeing other segments like health care, anything tied, again, to a clean room environment, which cuts across a number of industries, the hospital example, the pharma, biotech, critical ventilation. There's a number of those material verticals for us, all of which are growing above GDP now. And those are helping offset some segments that are below GDP or perhaps even negative.
So that diversification and the repair-replacement kind of foundational business, I think, helps give us confidence in the overall growth rate. And again, I'll point back to the macro. I mean, sustainability is a lot of things that are driving some fundamental kind of tailwinds for the business too.
Any other questions from the room? Going once. Going twice. Okay. Well, listen, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here today. It means a lot to us to have this level of engagement and the good questions and the support. We look forward to delivering on the promises that we've made here today. We look forward to catching up with you all throughout the year. Thank you very much for coming.