All right, great. Welcome to the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, everybody. My name is Casey Woodring from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team. Pleased to be joined by Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper. Marc's going to run through the corporate presentation, then we'll leave room for Q&A afterwards. Marc, all yours.
Casey, thank you. Nice to see everybody here this morning in San Francisco. Great to be back at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. I'm Marc Casper, Thermo Fisher's CEO. And what I thought I would do is first reorient you very briefly to the company, talk about our progress in 2025 against the goals that we articulated here a year ago, and then finish with an outline for our goals for 2026. We'll cover our financials and performance from that perspective at the end of the month when we report our results and give our guidance for the upcoming year. So, as a reminder of the safe harbor statement and the use of non-GAAP measures, you can find the reconciliations on our website in the Investor Relations section. So, the key takeaways from my remarks this morning really break down into the looking backwards and then looking forward.
So, when I think about 2025, it was a year of excellent performance. Operationally, the company really stepped up and navigated the environment incredibly effectively. You saw the consistent and active management throughout the year. At the same time, we significantly advanced our growth strategy, and that has allowed us to create value and strengthen our short- and long-term competitive position, and ultimately it was an active year of capital deployment where we're able to create long-term value through those actions as well. So, a very successful year in 2025. When I look ahead to the year that we're in, it's always helpful to remember that we serve attractive end markets with demand trends that are improving, which supports the improvement in organic growth from the current levels that we're operating in.
So, I'm quite excited about the next couple of years in terms of how the end markets will progress. And at the same point in time, we're incredibly well positioned to achieve strong adjusted EPS growth in the environment that we're navigating. So, to reorient you to the company, we continue to evolve, to change, and to strengthen our competitive position. We are the world leader in serving science. We serve science. We serve our customers. We have leading brands that are well respected by our clients. And I always enjoy the JP Morgan Conference because so many of our clients are here, and it's a wonderful opportunity to connect and refine our plans for the upcoming year. We are the industry leader in terms of scale, $44 billion in revenue, 120,000 colleagues in our product-related businesses. We invest about $1 billion in R&D every year.
We have incredible relevance to our customer success. I mean, that's really the thing that matters. We make a huge difference in enabling their success with our innovative technologies, our deep applications expertise, and the comprehensive service offering that we have. When you think about how our customers look at us, they think of us as their trusted partner to enable the important work that they're doing. Our company is passionate about finding a better way every day. We feel accountable to make today better than it was yesterday, and that's powered by a deeply ingrained business system called PPI, our practical process improvement, that allows us to deliver outstanding execution over many years. Our mission, with 120,000 colleagues that are fired up to come to work every day, it's because of our mission. We enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.
Enable is the key word. Our customers get the headlines, and we're proud to play that role behind the scenes to bring those new medicines to market, the new diagnostics, to make progress on a cleaner and safer world. These are all things that our technologies and expertise play a meaningful role across the globe. When we think about our end markets, we have a rich set of opportunities to enable our customer success. We serve four end markets. Pharma and biotech is our largest, about 56% of our revenue. The other three markets are roughly the same size, diagnostics and healthcare, where we enable cost-effective diagnostics, ultimately to lead to better patient care and empowering precision medicine. In academic and government, we enable the advancement of new science, if you will, and the insights that it unlocks.
And in industrial and applied, we serve a number of markets very focused on advanced materials, as well as in the clean energy area. Our market is large. $270 billion is underpinned by attractive fundamentals. We have about 20% market share in aggregate when you think about our competitive position. And what drives our market is we're all getting older. Increasing demand for healthcare. And if you look at the demographics of the world, you see an aging population that will drive an increased need for affordable healthcare. And we play a large role in supporting those efforts. There are amazing advances in life sciences and precision medicine that are creating new options on how to treat people. Many of you have heard me talk about the golden age of biology.
It is an incredible time in terms of understanding and applying knowledge in a new way to make a difference for society. And that ultimately drives meaningful growth in our industry. Our largest customer base, biopharma, is increasing the need for expert partners. When they think about their goals of increasing or shortening the time to market and reducing the cost of developing a medicine, they're really looking for expertise in that journey. And given the complexities of pipelines, that creates real demand for our industry. And opportunities that can improve the returns on investment in the drug development process also will drive expertise and demand from the life science tools and diagnostics industry. And then ultimately, in the material science area, the breakthroughs that are happening also, whether it's in semiconductor, whether it's in AI, spurs interest in our industry and ultimately demand.
We serve a good market that has long-term durable trends. When I think about all of that in the context, we're able to execute at a very high level because of the PPI Business System. It was introduced in the company in 2002. It's who we are and how we work. Most importantly, it's the culture and the mindset of every colleague of finding a better way every day. It improves our productivity, our quality, our customer leads. Ultimately, the results that it delivers is competitive advantage, successful acquisitions, and differentiated financial performance. It really is the secret sauce behind Thermo Fisher Scientific. When you take that combination of attractive end markets, a unique trusted partner status with our customers, a disciplined business system, we have a track record of delivering exceptional financial results.
If you look back over the last decade, we've averaged a 10% growth in the top line and have been able to convert that into low double-digit growth in both adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow growth as well over the decade. So, a year ago, we were together. I actually think in this same room and many of the same faces. So it is truly great to see you. And what we talked about was these goals. From a revenue perspective, execute on our growth strategy, which is a proven strategy to drive share gain. And that was a combination of advancing our trusted partner status as well as launching incredibly relevant high-impact innovation. Operational excellence delivered differentiated performance through our PPI Business System. Effectively execute our capital deployment strategy and progress our corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Ultimately, our goal for the year was to deliver excellent performance in 2025 and enhance our long-term competitive position. I always like to give the report card. I always view ourselves as tough graders. I'm very proud of what the team accomplished last year. I think in any assessment, I actually think the market environment is incredibly important to understand what the world looked like. At this conference a year ago, the optimism was very high, really a very positive sort of first week in January, second week of January. Ultimately, the industry, our customers in particular, had to adjust to a series of new policies that created uncertainty. If you think about February through April, there was a lot of change that occurred. What I would say is that our customers navigated that environment incredibly well.
I'm not surprised by that, but they rolled up their sleeves and really figured out how do they thrive in the environment. And we, as a key enabler, actively manage our company so we'd be the right partner for them in the environment and for all of our stakeholders, including our shareholders. And when I think about it, the environment was different than what we thought, but it was one that we were built to thrive in, and we did. And I'm very proud of those efforts. So, on the top line, an incredible year of new product launches. And this is just a small snapshot. And on every earnings call, I try to highlight a few. And it really is important because our customers are doing incredibly important things. They want the right tools to enable their work.
In terms of the golden age of biology, great new mass spectrometer launched, sold a record number of Orbitrap Astrals, a great complement to the work that we're doing with our Olink technology as well in terms of proteomic analysis. Research and discovery, very meaningful launch of our next-generation cryo-electron microscope to really provide insights down at the molecular level of what's going on at the molecule level. From a drug development perspective, a very strong set of launches in our bioproduction business to enable fully scalable bioreactors. What's incredibly important about that is you go from the benchtop in the early stage all the way up through the largest single-use bioreactors at 5,000 liters with the exact same technology and performance characteristics. That has really become the expectation of the customer base, and it really is driving great growth for our business.
In precision medicine, in terms of cancer and oncology and the diagnostics that we were able to get FDA approval and FDA clearance on, a very, very meaningful year in terms of patient care. In terms of our next-gen sequencer, getting FDA approval as a companion diagnostic, and with our EXENT solution for multiple myeloma diagnostics, really another area where we've had great progress in terms of the FDA, and then from a materials perspective, we launched the Thermo Scientific Vulcan Lab, so the Vulcan Lab is an automated system to allow semiconductor customers to understand what is exactly going on in the fab, and it's their way of identifying quality control, and you cannot quite visualize with any slide. You have to actually walk through an enormous building, and all you see is Thermo Scientific electron microscopes and effectively a lights-out operation.
All of the samples come in automated, all of the analysis done, and you see a couple of technicians just making sure that everything is running smoothly with an incredible fleet. And that's really what the deep understanding of how we know our customers work to ultimately deploy innovation to make a huge difference for our customers. From a trusted partner status, another key element of our growth strategy, it was a very strong year. In an environment that was changing, we stepped up and helped our customers navigate that environment. Through the first nine months of the year in pharma and biotech, we delivered mid-single-digit organic growth in terms of our performance to that customer base. And that was well ahead of where the industry was.
And the interactions with our customers have been very positive, and it really is creating new opportunities for us to drive market share gains. And lots of examples of different collaborations that we're always talking about as case studies and a year that I'm very proud of how we progressed those relationships with our customers. So the top line was very strong. The second element of a good year was how the PPI Business System helped us navigate the world. And as soon as we started to face tariffs and some changing environment, the team stepped up and really delivered meaningful additional cost actions to appropriately navigate the environment. We increased our cost reduction target by about $300 million back in April, and we were able to exceed that performance during the course of the year.
And that's beyond the normal level of reductions and increases in productivity that we have. We just felt it was the right thing to do, and the team did a very good job of delivering strong bottom-line performance. So top and bottom line, very strong. When I think about capital deployment, it was an active year. I always think about putting it in context. And when you think about our capital deployment strategy, it's focused on strengthening the company and creating long-term shareholder value. And from an M&A perspective, we completed the acquisition of Solventum's purification and filtration business. We closed that in September. We also acquired a manufacturing site from Sanofi to expand our drug product capabilities in our clinical development and manufacturing organization. We announced the $9 billion acquisition of Clario, which we expect to close before the middle of the year.
We were active in investing in our business. In addition to the R&D investments that I highlighted earlier, we invested over a billion foreign capital into our business, and that all fuels long-term high ROI investments. And as always, we were active returners of capital, $3.6 billion between buybacks and dividends. And when you think about it in the context of the last decade, we've distributed $4 billion in dividends, growing our dividend every year. We've repurchased $20 billion worth of our shares, and we've deployed $50 billion in terms of M&A. So very active and consistent with our long-term targets that we've had. When you click a bit deeper, Solventum is a great complement to our purification and filtration business, a great complement to our bioproduction business. We have leadership in cell culture media, leadership in single-use technologies.
This is our entry into filtration, and it's a good platform that we can grow over time. Last year, the business was expected to generate about $750 million on the full-year basis, both pre-acquisition and post-close. And as we integrated into our company, we expected to be amid the high single-digit organic growth business and delivering meaningful synergies by year five. So it's a really important business in terms of serving our customers' unmet needs. We also did a smaller acquisition, but very relevant and topical because of the U.S.'s focus on reshoring pharmaceuticals to the United States. And we are the market leader in serving sterile fill-finish, which is the final form of biologic medicines, any injectables. And we bought Sanofi's site in Ridgefield, New Jersey, to expand our U.S. capacity, and that will allow us to accelerate those reshoring efforts for other clients.
It's a really nice acquisition and highlights the nature of the partnership that we have with Sanofi. So it's an exciting addition to our portfolio. And then finally, we announced the acquisition of Clario, a meaningful acquisition, a technology leader in endpoint data solutions, has differentiated technology, advanced AI capabilities, proprietary data assets, and incredibly deep scientific expertise. And the business is expected to generate last year about $1.25 billion of revenue. It is a business that is high growth. It'll be accretive to our organic growth as a company. It has high margins, and it'll be accretive to our margins. And we expect it to have double-digit return profile as well. So it's a really exciting acquisition. It'll be meaningfully accretive from an EPS perspective and further strengthens our position as the trusted partners of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Customer feedback has been incredibly positive.
When I think about the dialogue, our customers can't wait for the transaction to close. And that's exciting, and we look forward to that milestone that's coming up this year. And then finally, in terms of the recap on the year, corporate social responsibility. It's important to our customers. It's important to our colleagues, and we're committed to it. And when I think about the year, we're active in our communities in terms of facilitating education of children around the world, of a passion around health equity and using our technologies to bring healthcare and access to healthcare to those that can less afford it. And from an environmental stewardship, another year of great progress. Today, over 56% of our global electricity is sourced from renewable energy. We're on track to hit our target of 80% by 2030. 33 of our sites have now achieved zero waste status.
So really a very strong year in terms of environmental stewardship, and we advanced our corporate social responsibility initiatives last year. So a successful year. And my gratitude to the colleagues at Thermo Fisher Scientific for delivering against those goals. So let's look to the future. 2026, one of the things if you go back and look at the company, you have a consistency of strategy, a consistency of focus, and an ambition to be meaningfully better in the current year than the year before. And when you think about the goals, we're going to focus on executing our growth strategy, and we're going to gain market share. When I think about that, it is a blend of advancing our trusted partner status as well as another year of just awesome innovation.
We're excited about the product launches that are on slate for the year, and we can't wait for them to get out to the hands of our customers. From an operational excellence perspective, of course, we're going to actively manage the company and leverage the PPI Business System to have outstanding execution. But we're also going to be very active in deploying advanced AI capabilities to drive additional cost productivity as well as further differentiate our products and services. We've announced a number of collaborations, one with OpenAI, one with NVIDIA, all to continue to position the company for long-term success. We're going to effectively execute our capital deployment strategy. We'll deliver the strategic and financial benefits of the 2025 acquisitions and the ones that we'll close this year. And we'll continue to execute against that strategy. And of course, we'll progress our corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Our goal is to deliver an excellent 2026, enhance our long-term competitive position, and create meaningful value for all of our stakeholders and our shareholders. And when I think about the year, incredible excitement about what's ahead. And having had the opportunity to be with our extended leadership team last week, we're already up and running and ready to go for a great 2026. So with that, look forward to Casey and the dialogue.
All right. Great. Thanks, Mark. That was a great overview. I guess during the presentation, you described how Thermo Fisher progressed its strategy through 2025. So Mark, let's spend a little time here just to start. Let's talk about 2026, how the company is positioned into this year, why investors should be excited about investing in Thermo Fisher.
Yeah. So when I think about 2026, I think we start with the market context, just how do we think about the industry. There's great excitement in our customer base. Biotech funding is improving. You're seeing some announcements that generates an investment cycle. The pharmaceutical industry feels very confident about how they're working with the U.S. administration, and there's confidence in investing in their pipeline. So the large customer base is excited. The understanding of biology has never been better. That creates new opportunities in the pipeline. So I actually see an improving set of end markets. It'll be methodical, but moving in the right direction, and our company has never been stronger. We entered this year with incredible momentum. We delivered a very strong 2025. Our team is very confident about the strategy, the expectations of what excellence is.
And we're just getting going in terms of what's ahead of us. And this is a great year for the company. And we have a proven growth strategy, and we supplement that with smart capital deployment that creates additional value. So 2026 will be a special year.
Let's turn to your largest end market here, pharma and biotech. Marc, can you remind us how Thermo Fisher serves pharma and biotech customers across the value chain and give us a sense of how that part of the business has performed year to date in 2025? And as a follow-up, how have customer conversations evolved following MFN? And what are some of the what you're seeing near-term and long-term in terms of reshoring opportunities?
Yeah. So if I think about how we serve pharmaceutical and biotech, we equip the labs. We resupply the labs. We provide deep technology and applications insight into the biology for our customers. We help our customers design their clinical trials. We execute those clinical trials. We help our customers develop the physical medicine. We scale it from a concept all the way through commercial manufacturing, whether we do that in our own facilities or we do that through our enabling bioproduction technologies. And we've put together a set of capabilities that nobody else has in terms of the unique position that we have in the market. So a very comprehensive set of relationships across our biotech and pharmaceutical customers.
When I think about the tone and how they feel, I think, as we said earlier last year, customers were confident that they would be able to navigate the environment successfully. That's different than actually navigating the environment successfully. So I had high confidence. They had high confidence, but they actually have navigated it very successfully. And that's the important thing, which is the agreements that have been reached provide clarity and certainty and an excitement about investing in pipelines. And you're seeing the spillover effect into biotech. And so I actually think the environment is very strong. And then ultimately, in some of those commitments, as you know, there's a very big focus on reshoring more production and activity to the U.S. And that is going to be a tailwind in 2027 and 2028 for this industry.
And the way that we participate there, Casey, is in two very different ways. Our pharmaceutical services business, which is our contract development and manufacturing business, has won a number of contracts to help customers move production from Europe or Asia to the U.S. And the fastest way for a client to do that is actually to use existing capacity. And so we're winning new business. And part of the reason we acquired the Sanofi site was really a capital expansion, if you will, to be able to help customers do that. But in the midterm, meaning in the 2027-2028, as new facilities are built, our technologies will be specced in bioproduction. Our instruments will equip the labs. And so it'll be a meaningful tailwind over time in our industry. And we're excited to support our customers' efforts in that.
That's a good segue into talking about a few of your businesses, maybe starting with pharma services, your CDMO business. Marc, can you update us on how pharma services has performed year to date through 2025 and the level of visibility that you have as we look ahead to 2026? As a follow-up to that, given the administration's focus on domestic manufacturing, the backfilling of legacy COVID programs, your planned capacity expansion through Sanofi that you just mentioned, how should we think about the opportunity set for pharma services going forward?
Yeah. So if I think about the long-term growth characteristics of our pharma services business, it's a high single-digit growth business is the way I think about it. There'll be times that it might be a little bit above that. There'll be times that it'll be a little bit below that. But it's an incredibly strong business. We have leading capabilities in drug product on the sterile side. We have leading capabilities in all of the clinical trials, logistics, packaging, comparator sourcing, all of the things to run a clinical trial, as well as important offerings in drug substance as well. So when I think about that business, it has benefited, as I said earlier, about the reshoring efforts.
It's also benefited from just really strong, consistent execution in terms of just doing a good job for our customers and doing that in a way that reduces the capital intensity required within the innovators. It's been a really strong business. Obviously, it took time to work through the repurposing of some capacity from COVID vaccines to other capacity, but that's behind us. If I actually think about over time, the growth prospects here really pick up, and we're well positioned within that business.
Let's turn to bioproduction. Growth here has been strong and consistently above many other industry participants. So can you just talk about what's driving that performance and then maybe touch on how the addition of the legacy Solventum filtration business is really expected to enhance your bioproduction portfolio moving forward?
Yeah. So when I think about bioproduction, so I break down that industry, if you will. It's an attractive industry into four segments: the media and serum and the supplements that go around that. We're the market leader. The single-use technologies that are used in the production of medicines, and we are the market leader. When you look at the purification and the resin business, we are a niche player with a rapidly growing business. So we win a large proportion of new molecules, but we're not the industry leader today, but we have a business that's growing well with an incredibly bright future. And in filtration, we had not been a market participant. One of the lessons of the pandemic was, as a company, we are incredibly focused on customer success.
And you have to think about how do you price and what message are you sending to your customers, especially when they're dependent on you. And we took a very much customer-focused methodology through the pandemic. Some of the players in the filtration segment took a huge opportunity to raise pricing in a meaningful way. It was noted by the customer base. And when we had the opportunity to buy Solventum's business, customers were excited. I mean, they're really excited about speccing us in, and it's going to be a business that does incredibly well. So it's a business that's performed well. We've gained share over many years. It was growing last year in at least the first nine months in the mid-teens organically. And I'm very proud of the team's performance.
Let's shift to your clinical research business, the CRO. From an organic revenue growth perspective, the year has been playing out pretty much in line with how you framed it last year at this time at our conference. So what really stands out, though, is the strength in bookings really across the business. So Mark, can you help us understand what's driving this momentum? And then looking ahead, how should we think about the sustainability of that demand and the implications for growth and visibility as we move through 2026 and beyond?
Yeah, so Casey, when I think about clinical research, in a way, it's a business where you have a tremendous amount of visibility. You get an authorization. It takes you many months to get any revenue from that and a couple of years until you're really at run rate, so you can see the pattern of how the business is going to perform. And when I look back at last year through the first nine months, it performed exactly as we expected. It was the business that we expected authorizations to be very strong, meaning new wins. And we expected revenue growth to progress each quarter, and it did, so the business returned to growth, and authorizations were well ahead of revenue and very well positioned, so why are we gaining share?
Because accelerated drug development capabilities, the insights that we have for how the physical medicine is made and ultimately how you do the clinical research and how do you shave time out of the process, it's real. Customers understand that. We've won an enormous amount of business because customers believe that they will get to market faster because they work with us. And the momentum there is very strong. And there are a number of fine peers in the industry, and we've carved out our role and approach, and it's working well. And that business has a lot of tailwind as we enter 2026.
Maybe turning to your analytical instruments business, year to date, organic growth has been running at a positive low single-digit rate with mid-single-digit growth there in 3Q. Marc, can you talk about what's driving performance in both mass spec and electron microscopy? And then separately, how are you seeing customer demand trend here and how should we think about performance going forward?
Yeah. It's all about innovation. If you think about who are the customers for our instruments, it's really the leading researchers in the world, whether they're in academia, whether they're in the pharmaceutical or biotech industry. If you're doing research and your goal is to publish, or you're doing research and your goal is to develop and discover and develop a new medicine or a new diagnostic, you have to have the best tools or effectively your odds of success are meaningfully lower. And when you think about the products that we launched and the relevance that it brings, whether the funding environment is strong or whether the funding environment is weak, the best researchers around the world get funding for the tools that they need to do their cutting-edge research. And that has served us incredibly well.
The Astral Zoom, the Krios 5, these are great products that unlock insights that drive demand. The funding environment is actually quite muted. You have hesitancy in the U.S. academic environment. You have China going through its own economic recovery. So the end market isn't strong, but the team's done a nice job in terms of being able to grow the business.
You touched on academic and government customers there. So let's turn to that end market. Marc, can you comment on your latest view on customer activity really across your key regions? And then as a follow-up, you were one of the first to really flag that the fiscal 2026 NIH budget might come in about flat. While we don't have an official budget yet, what's your latest thinking there?
Yeah. So academic and government is about 15% of our revenue. About half of that is in the U.S. And so when I think about the environment, last year, really the U.S. was the focus for certainly investors and certainly for us in terms of the changing environment. What I would say is I think there's a reasonably high level of confidence that we will have a flattish NIH budget that will be perceived quite positively by the customer base. I still think we're seeing a level of customer caution. The government shutdown was the longest in our history. We have a relatively short-term continuing resolution. So if I say the one end market that we will be cautious in our expectations for this year will be that one. It's not a large part of our total revenue, about 8%.
But I would expect, until we get the budget passed, customers will be a little bit cautious, and then you'll see spending increase once we get the budget finalized.
Okay. That's helpful. Maybe let's talk capital deployment here. So Marc, it's been a very active year on the M&A front. You acquired the Solventum assets, the Sanofi site, now the announced acquisition of Clario. Can you just maybe walk us through why Clario was the right strategic fit for Thermo? And looking ahead, how should we think about your appetite for further M&A or potential divestitures?
Yeah. So when I think about our M&A strategy and the priorities, it's a very simple strategy. It's been consistently applied, which is an acquisition has to strengthen the company strategically. Meaning it has to have a very logical and clear fit. It has to be appreciated by our customers so that when they read it, they don't need our explanation of why we did it. They get it intuitively why it's a good fit and that our shareholders are excited by the acquisition. It's going to generate strong returns in terms of the expected IRRs and ROICs that we're going to generate from those acquisitions. And at the same point in time, we always characterize risk of acquisitions. And we don't do transactions that we think have binary risk.
We buy businesses where we can clearly understand what the risks are associated with them so that we can deliver against our commitments to our stakeholders. Clario is an awesome business. It is a business that is incredibly well-respected technology provider to moving clinical development forward, providing the endpoints you need to determine the safety and efficacy of a medicine. We know this business incredibly well. As a large CRO, we use all of the providers of endpoint solutions. We understand fundamentally who the players are, and Clario is phenomenal. It is a nice complement to our labs business, which is the core of the endpoints that are used in clinical research. That'll allow us ultimately to have a tech stack for our customers that will provide an even better approach for them to be able to advance their clinical research.
We're very excited about it. We expect it to be $0.45 accretive in the first year of ownership and be accretive to growth and margins for the company.
Maybe we can close on the financial framing you laid out in mid-2025. You outlined expectations for 3%-6% organic revenue growth in 2026 and 2027, followed by 7%+ growth in 2028 and beyond. So Marc, why is 3%-6% the right range for the next two years? And what gives you confidence in achieving that 7% plus longer-term growth rate? And then just quickly on margins as well, what are the key drivers of expansion over the next two years as you commit to a level above your prior algorithm?
Yeah. So in the middle of the year, coming out of some of the changes in the market, there was a wide range of views of what the environment was. And given our experience and given our customer relationships, we felt that it would be helpful to our investors to outline how we would see the environment play out. And as we looked at the different factors, we saw the progression of improvement in the end markets. And what we assumed is that it would be methodical. And it doesn't mean it won't be faster than that. We said over the next couple of years, meaning this year or next year, we would expect the range of growth to be 3%-6% in terms of the top line for us. And embedded in that is our continued focus on meaningful share gains.
Meaning that you'd have kind of low-single-digit market growth is what we were assuming, but improving as the quarters progressed. We felt that that was a reasonable floor on what the outlook was. Then as we exit that period, we believe that the long-term fundamentals in the industry are such that for us to be able to return to 7%+ organic growth, we're extremely confident in our ability to do that. In that mid-single-digit growth environment, we wanted our investors to know that we're focused on driving great operational income growth or operating income growth and really manage the company actively. With the 50-70 basis points of margin expansion each year and the mid- to high-single-digit EBITDA growth, complement that with additional capital deployment, it allows for a very attractive EPS growth environment in this period.
We don't have a perfect crystal ball, and we hold ourselves accountable every quarter to delivering outstanding performance, so if we're conservative, then you'll see us raise our expectations, but our confidence in to be able to operate within that range is extraordinarily high, and I think that's very helpful to our shareholders to kind of know what the base case is, if you will, going forward, so we're excited about it. The PPI Business System will drive, and our colleagues will drive that margin expansion earnings growth, and we're very excited for the year ahead.
Great. Well, we have less than a minute here. Just quickly, Mark, what are you most excited for 2026 for Thermo Fisher?
Getting going and we have an awesome opportunity, an incredible team and this is our year so thank you, Casey.
Great. Well, thank you, Marc. Thank you, Thermo Fisher. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. Enjoy the rest of the conference.