Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the presentation with Stevanato. My name's Matt Larew. I cover tools and Stevanato here at Blair. Pleased to be joined this afternoon by Executive Chairman and CEO, Franco Stevanato, as well as SVP of Investor Relations, Lisa Miles. Two quick things here. The breakout session is in Jenny B. That's where we'll do Q&A. That's upstairs. The second thing, for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit williamblair.com. Again, very pleased to have Stevanato here today, and I'll turn it over to Franco.
Thank you. Grazie. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you to William Blair to host Stevanato Group in this very important conference. Let me have the chance to introduce to you Stevanato Group. At Stevanato Group, we play a mission-critical role for the biopharmaceutical and diagnostic industry. Over the last years, Stevanato Group has delivered a steady double-digit revenue marginality growth. We closed 2023 with EUR 1,085 million and almost 27% EBITDA margin. That grew over by 600 basis points since 2019. Our track record of excellence put us in a leading position in our core markets. We are market leader worldwide in pen cartridges and EZ-fill vials, and we are the number two in pre-filled syringes. Also, we are the market leader in glass converting, the critical technology for manufacturing containment solution.
We are, in Stevanato Group, a global partner of choice, working with the top high-growth client of the biopharma, pharma, and diagnostic industries. We are serving actually more than 700 customer globally, including the leading, leading player on the market. We have a long history of success. We've been in business for more than 70 years. But for the last 50 years, we focused exclusively in the pharmaceutical industry, and that is why, in 1971, we made the strategic decision to internally develop our engineering division for developing the technology of glass forming in order to own the technology, improve speed to market, flexibility, quality, and productivity for all our pharma customer. This is still today one of our main competitive advantages, recognized as an industry standard on the market.
Over the last 25 years, Stevanato Group has become a global company in response to the demand from our global customer worldwide. First, we focus on people, and a big portion of our time has been dedicated to pull together a leadership team and a board of directors that can guide Stevanato in the future. Then, altogether, we've been accelerating our growth to three main axes. First, we've been developing an integrated research and development, and we expand our offering and proprietary drug containment solution and drug delivery system. Second, we've been performing a successful acquisition and integration of competencies in high-precision plastic injection molding, inspection, and assembly of drug delivery systems. Third, we've been expanding production worldwide, building state-of-the-art manufacturing plants and scientific tech center all around the world.
We became a public company in 2021 in order to raise capital through primary offering to invest immediately in the business to meet the increasing demand that we have actually in the high-value product. Now, in the next slide, we are going to see where we are going to invest our money in order to support the growth of our customer. We have a global diversified manufacturing footprint. Through 16 sites in nine different countries, we offer our customer outstanding security of supply, one high-quality standard from all the plants, and we offer scientific analytical service through our tech center in Boston and in Padova. Today, we are focused on building our new facility in Fishers, Indiana, expanding our capacity in Italy in two different locations, and longer-term progressive development of a new facility in China.
All this acceleration is driving by customer demand for high-value solutions. Let me walk through how we serve a pivotal role in the pharma value chain. Our activity are mission-critical for pharma, starting from drug development. We support pharma and biotech customers with our unique integrated capabilities, specifically with drug containment solution, bulk or sterile, analytical testing, lab as service, drug delivery devices, and regulatory support. Then, during commercial phase, we are with a full portfolio from containment drug delivery systems through manufacturing process with line for inspection, assembly, packaging, and sterilization. SG actually offer these competencies as integrated solution to meet the customer needs, contributing to our unique value proposition of integrated systems, processes, and services, covering the entire life cycle of the drug, from early stage development to high-volume commercial.
This is unique in our industry, and more and more, our bio customer is looking the advantage to have one partner that can serve the full system for their therapeutic drugs. At Stevanato Group, we look our business as a single value proposition delivered through two segment: biopharma diagnostic solution business, that represent 81% of our revenue in 2023, and engineering, which is 90% of our revenue. Starting on the left, we have a full portfolio pharmaceutical glass products, including cartridges, vial, and syringes, with our core—which is our core market. Our portfolio of high-value products like Nexa, Alba, EZ-fill Smart, meet the most stringent performance and quality requirements of biologics. In drug delivery device, we offer a full range of platform solutions. In and in vitro diagnostic solution, we develop and manufacture tailor-made consumable-... for in vitro diagnostic and including molecular diagnostics.
Our engineering segment include manufacturing line that range from glass forming, to visual inspection, to assembling and packaging devices. Our range of products are supported by our scientific analytical service with our technology excellence center, both in Europe and in the U.S. We are working with our clients in the very early stage of their pipeline and development activities. Let's make an example and drill down to a customer study that illustrate how we bring all of our capabilities to deliver a fully integrated solution. In this case, the study that we have done for Merck Serono. We work with them in the early stage to design and execute custom test protocols to select the right primary packaging solution for specific therapy.
Then, from there, we identify and provide the most appropriate containment solution for their products with our Nexa platform on syringes. And finally, we work with them to develop an automated assembly system with the flexibility built into assemble different device configuration for the different therapeutic drugs for the customers. So it was our ability to provide all of that to our customer as a single organization that allowed them to operate much more efficiently, extract the real value for all our collaboration. This, more and more, we see with all our top customer. Biosimilar is becoming more and more a standard. Our wide range of capabilities and expertise, combined with our expanding global footprint, will help us meet growing customer demand. We are targeting high growth end markets, where large-scale macro trend are driving demand growth, especially for our high-value products.
The biggest of these trends are aging population, increasing prevalence of chronic disease, and expanding access to the healthcare all around the world. Alongside that, there is considerable growth in biologics and biosimilar, that have more sophisticated packaging delivery requirements. Next, increasing self-administration and the movement of healthcare delivery from hospital to home environment are driving the need of high performance containment and delivery solutions. Finally, biopharmaceutical companies are choosing to outsource non-core capability, allowing them to focus on drug development. It is where our EZ-fill platform is make a big success in this moment. All these factors are driving demand for our products and services. We are well positioned to capitalize on these secular tailwinds, and thanks to our unique value proposition, we are continuous to grow growth with our customer.
With this, Stevanato Group is strategically, operationally positioned to capitalize on these trends and turn them into growth driver for our business. We are expanding our industrial footprint to meet the increased demand, enhance our proximity to customer, and provide customer with a redundant, localized supply chain. Our priority capital investment are targeted at increase our capacity for high-value solution, which is where we see the most demand in the market. We continue to invest in research and development organically, but also via partnership, to drive innovation across all the element of our solution: glass, device, engineering, and process automation. And we are building a pipeline by partnering with most of our strategic customer, as well as emerging biotech company, to bring to market a number of new programs and asset that will support our growth for the next year to come, mostly with our high-value solution program.
Here we are. This is where we are putting most of our investment in the last years. So you can see, starting from the left, the headquarters in Piombino Dese, where we are already put the most sophisticated technology around the EZ-fill product. Then, the greenfield plants that we are building in Latina, where we already start all the validation, installation of the line last year. Today, it is fully working, 24-hour, seven working day. And the biggest investment that we have never done in the history of Stevanato Group, because we are approaching EUR 500 million investment in order to support our domestic American customer all around biologics, in particular for syringes, ready to fill, Alba technology, cartridges, ready to fill, and syringe with bypass.
Today, we are actively with a big group of engineers to do all the validation for our customer and intensively install line in order to support the big growth demand for biologics in United States. This plant is in Fishers, outside of Indianapolis, where really we will more and more focus all our effort, energy, and money. The plants in China, we put in standby because we see a priority of demand for our biologics customer, most based on Europe and in United States.
On the top of this, in Fishers, we are also progressing with another 2 big programs for what we call auto-injector, because more and more our customers, like I mentioned to you with example, Merck Serono, in insulin they are looking to have one partner, like Stevanato, that is provide to the same campus in Fishers, Indiana, to serve syringes, cartridges, ready to fill, and also the technology for auto-injector. Some economics around our investment. As I mentioned, as I was mentioning, I will reiterate, as this is a key, we are investing in demand-driven CapEx, and almost entirely in high-value EZ-fill capacity. Have in mind, so what we anticipate is a one-one proportion. EUR 1 invested will generate EUR 1 revenue per year when fully ramped up. It is important to also underline the return we are seeing.
EZ-fill is much more accretive products and will be the main driver for margin expansion at the group level. We are expecting a return on investment in the north of 20% for each product, like we did in Piombino Dese in our headquarters. We are carefully managing this large CapEx cycle, and we have several risk mitigation factors. Again, I want to remind that our investments are demand-driven by our customers, and we are a critical supplier with legacy relationships with our customers, with multi-year contracts, also with forecasts that go beyond five years today. So with the rise of biologics, we are also experiencing increasing demand for high-value solutions that meet the scientific requirements of highly sensitive treatments.
These are high performance, best-in-class technologies that deliver value to our customer by reducing the total cost of ownership, delivering higher quality, higher safety products, shortening and de-risking the time to clinical and to market, and mitigating the supply chain risk. In turn, the same products create more value for Stevanato Group because they translate in higher unit price with higher margin, allowing us to grow faster than the market and expand margin. High-value solution in 2023 represented more than 34% of our revenue, and it continues to grow in the next year to come. Pharmaceutical innovation is driving advancement in a more complex biologic drugs and paving the way for new therapies that address chronic disease and more challenging disease management. Biologics are a broad category of product, often administered by injection, is where we are really building our capacity, our expertise.
There can be challenges to stabilize and administer due to their complexity, sensitivity, as most of the time, viscosity. As a result, biologics have a unique storage and packaging requirement. That is, that is our high-value solution, such EZ-fill, Nexa, and Alba. They are specifically designed to address even the most demanding biologics. Over the last couple of years, biologics have been an important growth driver for our business. Excluding revenue related to COVID-19, revenue for biologics accounted for 28% of our BDS segment revenue, compared with 90% in 2022 and 60% in 2021. This increase in revenue from biologics also coincide with the timing of our target capacity expansion that we are performing year by year in order to support the increasing demand of our customer.
The takeaway is that we are currently seeing strong secular tailwinds in biologics, creating solid demand for high-value products for Stevanato Group, and we expect continuous advancement in biologics, including monoclonal antibody, GLP-1s, mRNA technology application, biosimilars. What is important to underline is that in the strategy of Stevanato Group, we want to, besides some big macro trends that we are taking, we want to spread our risk in increasing the portfolio of products, splitting by therapeutic drugs, by customer, by region, because we want to have a very healthy growth in biologics with all the different products that the market is doing. Let me share now some dynamics that we are seeing today in our market. The pandemic brought some complexity in the supply chain, and we are still in a phase of normalization.
During COVID, demand for vials accelerated quickly, both for COVID and non-COVID application. This, coupled with supplier extended lead time, created scarcity in the vial market, and customers stockpile to de-risk their supply chain. As COVID fade out and lead times are now back to the pre-pandemic level, customer are working down inventories. This result in a temporary softening demand for both bulk and ready-to-use vial. In this context, customer, and us, by consequence, face challenges precisely in identifying the right timing and intensity of this fade out. In this context, in fiscal 2023, we backfill approximately EUR 93 million in COVID-related revenue and deliver double-digit growth, supported by strong growth in high-value solution by our prefills syringes.
In the market, vials are used today approximately more than 13 billion vials globally, and we believe once the market rebounds, that vials will return to normalized growth rate, so before pre-pandemic in 2019, where the growth rate is low single digit on bulk vial and double digit for ready-to-use vial, where we are actually today for the ready-to-use vial, the market, market leader. So the message is we are facing some temporary headwind in 2024, that is starting from 2020, 2023, but we are looking the end of this tunnel at the end of the year. Moving to the financial result, the revenue decrease in the first quarter was mainly driven by lower revenue from glass vials in the BDS segment due to the industry-wide de-stocking, which we believe is transitory.
In the first quarter of 2024, revenue from BDS segment increased 2%. Segment growth was impacted by the industry-wide vial de-stocking. Revenue from vial decreased 43% in the first quarter of 2024. This was offset by strong growth on syringes, like I mentioned before, this big growth that we have in biologic. Our product diversity help expand our mix of high-value solution, which represent 33% of our total revenue in the first quarter and grew 50% year-over-year. In the engineering segment, the first quarter of 2024 revenue decreased due to the lower sales from pharmaceutical visual inspection and assembly of packaging line. As previously discussed, our main priority in 2024 is executing the large volume of work in progress and shortening the lead time that we have actually with our big customer.
We have hired additional labor resources to support this effort, along with other important long-term projects that we have with our customer. The temporary industry-wide de-stocking also impacted our margins in the quarter, specifically the lower revenue from accretive EZ-fill vial, in addition to the underutilization of our existing capacity that we have in bulk line. Margins were also impacted by the engineering segment and temporary inefficiencies that are causing the greenfield plants that we are building up. In closing, just to summarize, Stevanato Group has cemented its leadership position as a mission-critical partner in the pharmaceutical supply chain. We have experienced significant growth, and we have been building the organization to support our long-term objective. Our number one priority in 2024 is execution.
We are laser focused on ramping up our new capacity to meet the rising customer demand for all our high-value solution for our customer, such as Nexa syringes and our EZ-fill cartridges. We are also strengthening our process and driving efficiency across our global operation to best manage our future growth. These are exciting time for us in Stevanato Group. We offer a unique value proposition of integrated solution and differentiated product that resonate with all our customers. We operate in attractive end market with long, secular, double-digit growth. This factor favorably position us to drive durable organic growth, expand margin, and deliver long-term shareholder value. Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Great. Thanks, Franco. I think we're done a few minutes early, so I'd say if you want to-