Hi, everyone. Th anks for joining us this morning. My name is Brandon Vazquez. For those of you I haven't met before, I am the covering analyst here at William Blair, covering Dentsply Sirona. We're really excited to have with us today, Glenn Coleman, the CFO, and Andrea Daley, VP of Investor Relations. They're going to give us a bit of a company overview, and then, like usual, we'll go out to a separate breakout session following this for Q&A. I'm required to tell you for compliance reasons, please go to our website, williamblair.com, for a complete list of, disclosures and conflicts of interest. And with that, I'll turn it over to Glenn.
Good morning, Brandon. As Brandon mentioned, I'm joined here today with Andrea Daley, Head of Investor Relations. We are now about 18 months into our transformation journey at Dentsply Sirona, and I'm happy to provide an overview of our business to all of you today. Just a couple of housekeeping items here. Please take a moment to read our forward-looking statements in our presentation. Our most recent SEC filings list some of the most important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our predictions. Additionally, some of my remarks will be based on non-GAAP financial measures, and those are outlined in our appendix. Let's open with a snapshot of our business. For those of you who are not familiar with Dentsply Sirona, this should serve as a helpful introduction.
Dentsply Sirona is one of the world's largest dental technology and solutions companies, with approximately $4 billion in annualized revenue, and we've been in business for almost 150 years. We're headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. We have about 15,000 employees worldwide and trade on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker symbol XRAY. Our market cap today is currently around $6 billion. We serve over 100 countries around the world, and almost 2/3 of our revenue comes from outside the U.S. Approximately 1/3 of our sales are sold through a direct selling force or a direct sales team, and 2/3 through distribution. As you can see here on the chart, Europe represents our biggest geography. It's heavily influenced by our presence in Germany, which disproportionately contributes to our revenue profile.
To put that into perspective, Germany represents 10% of our consolidated sales. Having said that, with the U.S. being a little bit more than a third of our portfolio, we see the U.S. as a large source of continued opportunity for our company, while disciplined and selective geographic and product expansion in places like Latin America and Asia Pacific creates the potential to accelerate our growth. We have one of the most comprehensive end-to-end portfolios in the industry, supported with innovation and world-class clinical education programs. We operate in four business segments, starting with EDS, or our Essential Dental Solutions segment, represents about 37% of our overall business, and this includes endodontic products along with consumables, things like preventive and restorative products, so the drill-and-fill type products when you go to the dentist.
CTS, or Connected Technology Solutions, represents about 30% of our overall business, and here we have CAD/CAM products, which is everything from intraoral scanners to mills, 3D printing. And in addition to CAD/CAM, we sell treatment centers, instruments, and imaging devices. Ortho and Implants represents about 26% of our overall sales. Clear aligners are a big part of our portfolio here. We sell both direct-to-consumer with our Byte franchise, along with in-office brand called SureSmile. And we also sell implants, both premium and value implants. Premium represents about 75% of our sales on implants, 25% coming from value. And then wrapping up our... Oh, sorry. Wrapping up our discussion on our segment performance, Wellspect represents about 7% of our sales. This is a non-dental business serving the continence care market. Really gives us great diversification outside of dental.
It's a very profitable business, highly intensive cash flow business, so a really solid business that gives us that diversification. With more than half our sales coming from segments with favorable long-term dynamics, we think this positions us well to not only provide great solutions for our customers and their patients, but also bolsters our ability to generate above-market return for our investors. The dental market, which you can see here, is about a $30 billion global market. It's actually quite balanced across its core segments. Our broad portfolio opens up a large market opportunity for us. For each of the business segments that you can see here, you can see here the market opportunity that we have, along with our Dentsply Sirona targeted growth rates.
Starting with CTS, it's about a $7 billion market growing in the mid-single-digit range in a normal macro environment, and our target is to grow at least at that rate. We think we can do that with our strong CAD/CAM portfolio, along with our DS Core offering, which is our cloud-based software platform that connects everything within our digital portfolio. We believe we're the best company to partner with on our journey to digitalization and dentistry, and we know that because our customers have told us we have the number one digital portfolio in dentistry. That came back from a recent survey that we did with over several thousand customers. Implants is close to a $10 billion market. It's projected to grow mid-single digits, and we're targeting to get to that market growth rate by 2026.
Today, we are obviously not at that rate, and we've struggled in our U.S. business. Having said that, we've taken actions to address that performance. We've added more sales reps. We did that back at the beginning of 2023. We've stabilized our sales force, made significant investments in clinical education, including an event we have next week in Miami, where we have over 500 customers joining us. And then we've really expanded the referral network. That is critically important, when you talk about a specialist and the referral network and having that whole relationship and peer-to-peer programs. Moving to aligners, about a $5 billion market. It's an under-penetrated market. Still, most of, teeth straightening is done with brackets and wires. Very fast-growing.
We estimate the market's growing around 15%, and our plans call for us to grow faster than the market, and we're targeting 20% over the next 3 years. We expect to improve our share and our market penetration in areas like connected technology, aligners, and implants, as well as certain geographies, particularly in the US and Asia Pacific, and we have made, and will continue to make, investments in each of these faster-growing areas of our business. Shifting to EDS, we expect the market to grow in line with patient traffic, kind of in that low single-digit range. We are an established leader in EDS, and I think the thing for us to be successful here is to be innovative and continue to drive more clinical education programs. And then Wellspect HealthCare, also, participates in a very attractive market.
It's estimated to be about $2 billion, growing mid-single digits, and we believe it can grow at or above that level, especially with a number of new products that we've just launched or will be launching over the next 12 months. So overall, we think we can grow in that 4%-6% range in a normal macro environment. And our company today being $4 billion in revenues in a $32 billion market opportunity, means we've got a lot of opportunity still in front of us. In a nutshell, for those of you that have listened to us before, you've heard us say that we see areas of our business where just growing in line with the market is acceptable. That would be a good analogy to our EDS business.
Some areas where growing the market is actually progress and a stepping stone to greater performance, and I highlight our implants business fitting into that category. And then others where we have the potential to achieve above-market growth, and that would be for our orthodontics business and actually capturing market share. And that obviously, that would have to come with the right level of execution and delivery. We have, as you can see here, a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio across all served markets. We aspire to be a customer-centric organization, informed by robust customer insights. In fact, we conduct our own quarterly market survey with our customers. We usually receive back several thousand from our customers that inform us of what is happening with their practices. We've also recently completed a customer survey around our portfolio, and that gave us great feedback on a couple of things.
One, we were number one in digital dentistry, and that we have no meaningful gaps in our product portfolio. But this chart gives you a nice breakdown of the size of our business segments, our leading products and brands, and our market share positions. So if you start with CTS on the left side of the chart, $1.2 billion in sales. We are number one in full chairside, supporting same-day dentistry for crowns. We're number two in imaging with our Axeos and Orthophos product lines, and here we have both 2D and 3D imaging machines. And number three in intraoral scanners and treatment centers, along with instruments. So top three position really across everything within CTS. We also have DS Core, which is our cloud-based platform, connects our entire digital portfolio and helps to improve customer workflows and improve the economics of their practices.
So a big part of our strategy is investing a lot more in what we call our DS Core platform. To give you the sense of the traction that we're making here, we just launched DS Core last year. We have over 20,000 registered users today. Moving to indirect ortho and implants, about $1 billion in sales. We are number one in direct-to-consumer aligners with our Byte business. Number three, when you talk about a professional setting with GPs. Again, our in-office brand is called SureSmile. We're number four on the implant side. Both premium and value implants are part of our portfolio. We also have tissue regeneration, so we have a complete breadth of portfolio when you talk about implants. A key part of our strategy going forward is linking our implants portfolio to our digitalization play and DS Core.
So that'll be part of our future development. Essential Dental Solutions, about $1.5 billion in sales. We're number one in endo and preventive, number two in restorative. In Wellspect HealthCare, about $300 million in sales. We are number two in the continence care market, serving both urology and enterology markets. So bottom line is, we are a top player in all the categories that we serve today at a top-four player and relevant scale in the eyes of our customers. So let's talk about our strategy. It's clear to us we need to be a leader in digitalizing dentistry, innovative in products and services for oral health and continence care that's focused on both customer and patient needs.
We need to be great partners and do so with a committed and engaged team, with compliance and quality at the core of everything that we do. We're continuing to operationalize and advance all five of the strategies that you see here on the chart. We cascade these objectives through our organization. We have aligned our goals around them, from annual operating plans to annual bonus plans, to individual work plans. We've moved deliberately to execute on these through our operating model, our processes, and our investments to transform Dentsply Sirona. We've also made, I'll call it, several intentional leadership changes over the past 12 months, including a new and tenured Chief Human Resources Officer with a track record of facilitating cultural change, a new Chief Quality Officer who partners closely with operations to heighten the focus around quality across our organization.
And then most recently, we added a new and seasoned leader as our Chief Technology Officer. And I highlight these positions specifically because as we think about shifting the culture and transforming this organization into a stronger growth engine, with the core tenets we talk about, these roles, together with an increased focus on compliance, stand out as central to our efforts. While 2023 was a transition year for our company, we now have many of the building blocks in place to execute on our plans to transform the company across our product families, geographies, and functions. Our team has been very focused on execution and transformation. Execution, so we meet the first of our strategic goals, that's achieving our annual growth and margin commitments.
We recently completed an organizational realignment, started in 2023, which resulted in a streamlined organization, and this resulted in about $200 million of estimated annualized run rate savings across our organization. A large portion of which we've reinvested back into the business to support growth, and I'll call it foundational initiatives that are critical to the long-term sustainability of our business. This includes things like SKU optimization, ERP system investments, plant and network optimization, and commercial investments in some, some of the fast-growing areas I talked about earlier around implants and ortho, along with increased clinical education across our portfolio. On this next slide, let's walk through the current state of the organization and where we're going over the next three years. This provides more details on some of the comments I just made on the prior slide.
With many of the transformation actions currently planned or underway, we expect these initiatives will come together to drive significant PNL benefits. It starts with the organizational efficiency initiatives and that $200 million of annualized savings from the restructuring plan that I just mentioned. We've also completed a significant amount of work on SKU optimization and expect a meaningful reduction, call that about a 60% reduction, largely in our endodontics and restorative portfolios. This is gonna help simplify our network and yield several benefits, including reduction of inventory obsolescence, lower sustaining engineering costs, improving working capital and lower inventory requirements, and a reduction in our facility footprint. We expect this will lead to gross margin improvement once these initiatives are completed. We're just at the start of our facility optimization plan and believe we have a much larger opportunity in this area.
To date, there's been 3 small plant closures announced, along with 3 distribution centers closed. We expect a total reduction of anywhere from 15%-25% in our manufacturing footprint, which, combined with all global supply chain transformation efforts, should generate savings and lead to gross margin expansion in the latter part of our three-year plan. We're also making significant ERP investments of over $135 million to move to a common ERP platform, which is SAP. Today, we've got 14 different ERP systems and expect to consolidate to one platform for quote-to-cash, distribution and logistics, and procure-to-pay by the end of 2026. Lastly, we're focused on a more consistent and effective new product launch rhythm and have significantly improved the rigor and focus of our R&D investments.
We expect to see several new products launched in the second half of 2024, and we'll provide more details on those product launches as we get closer to the launch dates. So to summarize, even with a portion of the savings reinvested in the business, we do expect that this is gonna lead to significant EBITDA margin expansion by 2026, with at least 100 basis points of expansion each and every year. So clearly, you should see we're gonna be a very different company moving forward, and this is transformative for us. Innovation is and will continue to be the cornerstone of our strategy. And to that end, we have recently added a new Chief Technology Officer to the company, Kevin Boyle, who brings a strong commitment to and a track record of driving disciplined, insightful innovation and to solving unmet clinical and process needs through deep customer intimacy.
We plan to continue investing into building out a cohesive digital environment, connecting additional elements of our portfolio, and moving clinical applications onto DS Core over the next 24 months. You can see a few examples here with a number of our launches that took place in 2023, focused on our digital workflows, like orthodontic outcome simulations for our SureSmile product, and additional functionality for DS Core, as well as expansion of milling and printing materials. We also introduced some new products in our instruments portfolio, with improved ergonomics and integrated technology to locate the apex in endodontic procedures. And then finally, our Wellspect business has launched new continence care products with several innovative products still in the pipeline and still to come. Overall, we spend about 60% of our R&D dollars on new product development.
It's about $170 million-$180 million a year, and much of this is directed to our connected technologies and workflows to drive long-term profitable growth. A simplified portfolio will enable us to allocate more to new product development over time. We also continue to evolve our R&D capabilities. In software engineering, we've augmented our teams with external partners to accelerate our transition to cloud technologies. Similarly, we're adding further capability to our focus on AI. And for our material sciences team, we're investing in manufacturing and processing know-how for digital materials. So let me now cover our three-year financial targets. Our long-term financial targets include organic growth in a 4%-6% range in a normal macroeconomic environment, which is about 1% higher than our total addressable market opportunity.
We expect to generate over 500 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement, with about a third coming from gross margin improvements and two-thirds from SG&A efficiencies. We plan to deliver growth and profitability while still investing in areas such as R&D and our commercial organization. The net result in 2026 is a targeted adjusted EPS of $3, which represents a greater than 60% increase over the next 3 years. Given our progress on our transformation initiatives, we feel confident in delivering on the improvements for items that are in our control, which represents about two-thirds of the improvement in adjusted EPS. However, the organic revenue growth assumes we see a return to a normalized macro environment in 2025.
We also expect to see a meaningful improvement in our free cash flow conversion and expect to see about 100% conversion in the latter part of our three-year plan once we move past some of the one-time cash outlays for things such as our severance associated with our restructuring program, plant shutdowns, our ERP investments, et cetera, and also deliver profitability and working capital improvements. Our capital allocation priorities are clear to us. Our highest priority is reinvesting for growth and efficiency in our business, including the commercial organization, clinical education, R&D, and our ERP systems. We also expect to see a shift of more CapEx being spent in growth investments, such as potential facility expansions for new product launches for our Wellspect business versus sustaining engineering, and that's all enabled by our SKU rationalization work that we're undertaking.
Today, we have a healthy balance sheet with access to significant liquidity and the ability to tap up to $700 million through commercial paper or our credit facility. We also have 80% of our debt locked in at fixed interest rates of about 2%, which helps mitigate risk and exposure to a higher interest rate environment. We intend to opportunistically pursue strategic tuck-in acquisitions and enhance our growth or positioning while minimizing any distraction from our transformation work. We plan to return at least 75% of our remaining free cash flow to shareholders through higher share repurchases and dividends. We most recently announced an increase of 14% in our dividend in the first quarter of this year, which is our fourth consecutive annual double-digit increase in our dividend.
We also announced a $150 million share buyback we expect to execute in Q2, and that was on the heels of a $150 million share buyback that we announced and executed in Q4 of 2023. Lastly, we continue to maintain a strong balance sheet and have a target leverage ratio of 2.5 times or less. Today, we're slightly above this at around 2.7 times, but expect to bring this down to our targeted rate over the course of the year. So wrapping up, I'd like to summarize our perspective as to how we can drive meaningful shareholder value over the next several years. First, we're well-positioned in attractive industries with the largest end-to-end portfolio that is more than 45% digitally connected. This positions us well with favorable demographics, practice consolidation, and improved access to care.
We also have an attractive and financially accretive position in the continence care segment with our Wellspect HealthCare business. We have leading brands and strategic objectives that focus on high-growth areas like aligners, implants, and our digitalization strategy, all enabled by DS Core and Continence Care. Second, we have a clear and actionable plan to accelerate a profitable growth, which includes a focused R&D strategy that delivers a regular cadence of new products and solutions for our customers. This, coupled with our new DS operating model, will drive better accountability and execution. We've strengthened the key elements of this model: win as one team, grow through innovation, and drive disciplined execution with our recent leadership changes and appointments. We've already made great progress on our transformation journey, which is expected to drive meaningful margin expansion over the near and long term.
Then lastly, we will remain disciplined with our capital allocation strategy by maintaining a healthy balance sheet and generating strong cash flows. As we noted at our recent Investor Day in November of 2023, we know Dentsply Sirona is still a show-me story. We've worked diligently to restore the trust with many of our stakeholders, especially with the investment community and our customers. We believe that executing on our plans and transformation objectives will enable us to drive meaningful improvement in our performance and drive us towards a target of $3 of adjusted EPS in 2026. I thank you for your time and attention this morning. We look forward to sharing the progress with all of you as we progress throughout 2024, a year I believe will be an inflection point in our profitability for this company. Thank you.
Maybe with a couple minutes we have left here, you know, when we go to the breakout, we'll ask a couple more company-specific. But I think what might be helpful, especially for those kind of newer to the story or learning, and you guys have talked a lot about how you do surveys, and you try to understand what, what's going on out in the field. One of the, I guess, concerns that I have when, when investors or investors have when I talk to them about dental in general, is: what is happening with the end markets?
Mm-hmm.
What needs to happen to reinvigorate these markets? And, you know, some are concerned, are there some kind of permanent breaks in the end market? So maybe just with a couple minutes that we have here, talk to us, what are dentists telling you in your surveys is happening in the end market today that's impacting them so much? And what are your thoughts, or what are they telling you, and what needs to reaccelerate the market to get back to normal growth rates?
Yeah, I mean, we probably do the most comprehensive survey in all of dentistry. We in some cases get 3,000 or 4,000 surveys back in a particular quarter. The number one concern is increased costs they're seeing in their practices. Still dealing with staffing shortages would be a second concern, especially in places like Germany. Reimbursement, in some cases, shows in the top three or four lists. So those are the biggest concerns. Obviously, when you think about higher interest rates, it's creating pause on a lot of the higher-ticket equipment items, imaging machines, treatment centers. And obviously, it also has an impact on their customers. Their customers, especially in some of these specialty cases, finance a lot of their dental procedures.
And so with higher rates, people are postponing decisions to go to see the dentist or a specialist to get the work done that's needed. And so, the overall environment right now is pretty sluggish. The patient volumes are stable, but clearly the biggest challenge they're seeing in their practice is cost. And so I talk a lot about DS Core, our digitalization strategy. You know, we have an opportunity to really improve the workflows of their practices with our digital strategy, and that will get more patients through the door every day. It'll improve the economics of their practices. In fact, at a recent event, one of our KOLs spoke about improving her economics in her practice by close to 50%. So it's a meaningful change when you get into this digital area of dentistry.
So that's what we're doing to help our customers on the cost front. And, yeah, obviously, as we go forward, hopefully this challenging macro environment will start to shift and become a bit of a tailwind for us. But right now, it's still very challenging.
Interest rates get brought up a lot, and I guess the follow-up question I'd have to that, again, to the topic of when do things get better? We're now in a period where it sounds like interest rates may be higher for longer. I'm not an interest rate expert, but this is what others are saying. Is this an environment where dentistry will just remain compressed until interest rates come lower, or is there a time where we digest what we're going through now, and before interest rates come down, we can see a little bit of an acceleration?
Yeah, I think we've got to address the situation with higher rates. We have to assume they're gonna be out there a bit longer in terms of staying where they're at. I think things can improve if you have alternatives for customers. So important to have both value brands with premium brands. In many cases, customers may not want to spend $120,000 on an imaging machine, but if there's an alternative at $50,000 or $60,000, maybe that would be interesting for them. So we've recently relaunched a product that's at a much lower price point to help with the situation. So we're not sitting still waiting for the macro environment to get better.
We're trying to give our customers some options that will help them from a cost perspective, offering, you know, more attractive financing terms as well for some of the equipment areas. But, you know, I think it's largely gonna be dependent on rates coming down, but we're not sitting still as we wait for that to happen.
Okay. With that, we'll end 1 minute early to try to give everyone a little bit of a head start to the breakout room. We are going to Jenney A.
Thank you.