Hillenbrand, Inc. (HI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Hillenbrand's 2022 Investor Day. I'm Sam Mynsberge, Senior Director of Investor Relations. And I just want to thank everyone that has joined us here in the room as well as those joining us virtually. Before we begin -- moving to the next slide here. Before we begin, I do want to draw your attention to Slide 2 of the presentation. So as a reminder, our comments may contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the securities laws. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially. Also, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP operating performance measures today, including pro forma comparisons for our segments. I encourage you to review the appendix in Slide 2 of the presentation as well as our 10-K, both of which can be found on our Investor Relations website for a deeper discussion of non-GAAP performance measures, forward-looking statements and the risk factors that could impact our actual results. Now turning to the agenda. So we are very excited to be able to share our transformation journey with you here today. We have our CEO, Kim Ryan; and our CFO, Bob VanHimbergen, who many of you know. We also have other key leaders of our executive team here to talk about our company's purpose, our growth strategy, our Hillenbrand operating model, our segments, our industrial segments and their performance and how we see the growth opportunities there. Our sustainability journey as well as our financial overview and our 2025 performance targets. We will take a couple of 10-minute breaks throughout the day. And then after the presentations, we will have a 30-minute Q&A session with all presenters. And then for those of you in the room, we will have a sit-down lunch to wrap up. As I'm sure many of you saw this morning, we did announce that we've reached an agreement to sell Batesville. Obviously, this is an exciting time for Hillenbrand. So we're very happy that we are able to discuss our transformation, as I mentioned, and we will discuss the transaction in more detail, but really the focus of today is about the industrial segments and the opportunities that we see for growth into the future. Finally, as a reminder, the presentation can be downloaded from our website and through the QR code that we provided you. And for those viewing online, it is also available through the webcast portal. [Operator Instructions] So with that, I'd like to welcome up our President and CEO, Kim Ryan.

All right. Thanks, Sam. All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to meet with all of you this morning and share a bit more about the Hillenbrand journey, where we are in that journey and a bit more about our outlook for the long-term growth of the company, specifically in our industrial sectors, especially continuing on the announcements of this morning. So let's start off. We have, as of this morning, as some of you, I'm sure, noted that we announced our intent to sell Batesville from the Hillenbrand portfolio. Turning us now into a global industrial leader and a pure-play industrial company. This has been a long strategy that we have been working towards for a long period of time and is a very exciting time for us as an organization. We've also recently launched our new purpose statement, Shape What Matters for Tomorrow. We'll share that with you and share a bit more about how much that shapes both the culture and the future of our company as well as our growth strategies for the future. Having a clear purpose has truly informed those growth strategies, and we have [ appointed ] our investments and our organization at growing in growth markets that have not just opportunities today, but long-term secular trends that we believe will drive that growth in an attractive way in the new markets we're entering with our recent acquisitions as well as our base business in the plastics and durable plastics area. We will take those markets to the next level for Hillenbrand using a proven operating model that has been used to create value in all of our industrial acquisitions and will be used again to create value in our most recent additions to the portfolio and all of those designed to maximize shareholder value for the organization and for our shareholders. Now a brief history of Hillenbrand and kind of who we are and how we've come to arrive at this conclusion where we are today. We have -- we began in 2008 as a 1 platform, 1 company organization that was -- had amazing talents and capabilities, but was operating in a market of secular decline. So we immediately went about the task of understanding what markets we could take our skills and capabilities into that had opportunities for -- that had opportunities to grow, acquire companies and apply those skill sets. We began to make our first investments in the industrial company arena with the acquisition of K-Tron in 2009. And during the period of 2013 to '22, we continued to build on that industrial portfolio. And as of today, now 100% of our revenues will come from the industrial part of the portfolio of Hillenbrand that we've been working towards for a number of years. We've also been working on building out the operating model. So while we started with key capabilities in terms of talent development, strategy development and our capabilities around Lean. We've continued to add to that operating model, especially in the areas of commercial capabilities and innovation to grow our business. And we have continued to build out scalable capabilities, especially with the addition of Milacron in 2019 so that we have global functions that are available to all operating companies and the entire corporation around shared services for IT, HR, finance, global supply management and global engineering and all operating companies benefit from that foundation. Those that are in the portfolio today and those that join our portfolio for the future. Now over the last 12 months, we've continued to really advance this strategy. We defined our purpose, and this is something that was critically important to me in joining all of our industrial companies together in 1 unified purpose that reaches around the world and from the top to the bottom of our organization in unifying the organization around the intent that we have for our company and for the mark that we intend to make in our industry. We also completed 4 very strategic acquisitions in spaces that we have been exploring and building in organically for some time. We acquired 4 additional additions to the portfolio that we'll discuss in further detail today that operate in attractive end markets themselves, but are also impacted by global secular trends that we believe speak well to the growth of these industries for the future. We will integrate the companies that we have acquired using that proven operating model. And I've had an opportunity to experience that myself. So I have great confidence in our ability to leverage the skills and capabilities we built there. And we obviously will use that operating model to continue to create value and achieve the synergies that we set forth for the corporation. Now we announced this morning a definitive agreement to sell Batesville to LongRange Capital for $761.5 million, that is expected to close in calendar Q1 of 2023. Obviously, there is some work still to do about that. Bob will speak a little more to how we will handle our reporting period between now and then. But our focus really is the transformation that this takes us through, which is that this takes us into being a pure-play global industrial company and really clarifies and transforms your ability to look in and see the performance of this business. We think it allows us to really focus all of the energies, capabilities and investments of the corporation into the industrial sector. And that is obviously a benefit for Hillenbrand, but we believe that is the best path forward for the associates in our Batesville organization as well as they make the transition to new ownership. And finally, we believe that this gives a much greater transparency into the true performance of the industrial businesses, and it gives us a much greater outlook for improved growth and margin in the industrial businesses as we operate as a pure play. And now we'd like to share who we are as Hillenbrand, a pure-play industrial focused on shaping what matters for tomorrow. [Presentation]

Still love that video, and I love what it stands for about our company and who we are because the one of the most important assets we have as a company is the people that are part of this organization. And this purpose statement has truly been a unifying experience for all of our associates not just in terms of what we want to do and the role that each of them play in shaping what matters for tomorrow. But in the fact that they all have their fingerprint on both what we said we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it as an organization, the core values that drive our organization and the way that we align both our how and our what with the activities that we undertake and the products we develop, the way we develop our people and the people that we promote and develop in the organization and the partnerships that we undertake as a company. So this has been a passion of mine because of my passion for people and what people can come together to accomplish. And it's been an exciting and great year. And I could never have imagined that we could have accomplished this much, but unifying around this vision has been a part of the fuel that has energizer activities this year. So I could go on at length about this, but I will let our Chief Sustainability Officer, Tory Flynn, speak a lot more about this and the impact that we believe this is going to have on our partners, our communities, our people and especially our shareholders when all those things come together in a really positive way. So who is Hillenbrand? We are -- as a pure-play industrial, we are 60-plus locations around the world. I'll talk a little bit more about how important we think that is. We are 9,000 employees strong, $2.7 billion in revenue as a pure-play industrial and we operate in 2 major segments: Advanced Processing Solutions, or APS, which is 60% of our revenues and the balance of those industrial revenues comes from our MTS division, our Molded Technology Solutions division. These businesses operate again in 2 segments with global customers around the world. They are both large growing industries that we participate in with well-known brands who are earmarked for their capabilities in terms of technological capability, process know-how, highly engineered systems that are delivering into both markets. And while the markets may seem somewhat different, they're actually very connected and the information that we create in 1 division that being Advanced Process Solutions has great transferability into our Molded Technology Solutions, whether it's material science, process controls, management of long-term systems relationships with customers that has so much applicability across our value chain. We also are obviously able to take advantage of the scale that we now have as an enterprise in terms of our manufacturing knowledge, engineering capabilities around the world that are shared. Leo will speak a bit more about that and how we support our customers in long-standing relationships. Everything from the feasibility study on a line and the investments they make there all the way to the commissioning of that line throughout the useful life of our equipment, which can run sometimes as long as 30-plus years, we are the people who are there and supporting our customers for the duration of that relationship and helping them to maximize their investment. And through that trusting relationship, we've earned the right to their aftermarket business and support them in that part of the -- in that part of their investment decisions as well, which is a tremendous opportunity for us. We think of our business in terms of value chains. And Ulrich is going to speak a lot more about this when he has his presentation. But the value chains around our existing plastics business, whether you're talking about the pellet and production business of Coperion and Rotex or the product processing businesses in Milacron, Mold-Masters, Coperion and DME or you're talking about a recycling business that takes the products that come out of that, transforms the material into recycling that then goes back into the beginning of the process. There are many -- equipment, the process know-how, the technology and the systems expertise that happens in this side of the equation that can then be applied again on the food side of the equation. We'll talk a lot more about that. What this allows us to do is leverage complementary processing capabilities. These industries are what we would call close adjacencies in terms of transferability of capability in the enterprise. They both include highly engineered mission-critical equipment, and they both are characterized by deep customer relationships with a capital and aftermarket business. Today, I'm going to be accompanied by a really talented management team that I'm absolutely thrilled to get the opportunity to work with every day. They've been pivotal in helping us to achieve this strategy, to clarify it for the organization and to execute very proficiently against that strategy. Today, you're going to hear from next Leo Kulmaczewski, who heads our manufacturing COE as well as our Hillenbrand operating model. He'll explain a lot more about that. Next, you'll hear from Ulrich Bartel, who leads Advanced Processing Solutions as well as Coperion. Then Mac Jones, who runs Millicom Injection Molding & Extrusion, who will speak to you about our MTS segment. Tory Flynn, who is our Chief Sustainability Officer, and will help you understand our journey, our accomplishments and our commitments for the future relative to sustainability. And finally, from my partner, Bob VanHimbergen, who will share our financial outlook and targets for the future and then we will come back and give you some remarks before we move into the question-and-answer session of our presentation. Now our strategy is really developed in 3 areas, specifically, grow where we think about the types of products and capabilities we'll bring to the market. We think about the end markets that we want to operate in. And are those attractive today and are they influenced by trends that will make them attractive tomorrow. We'll think about how these -- how we grow in terms of innovation and how we grow in terms of external investments in these areas, specifically in regards to M&A and the opportunities that might exist to bring new capabilities, new technologies into our footprint through M&A, and I'll talk to you a bit through that. We'll also talk about enhance, and this is where we really deploy this proven operating model. And how we bring value to existing businesses and newly acquired businesses. And finally, how we optimize and how we take the cash proceeds from the business and reinvest them for the best return for shareholders. So first, I'll discuss grow. We operate this business. This is by no means all of the end markets that we operate in. You saw a few slides back. You saw the variety of end markets that characterize these businesses. But the most established end markets are specifically in the areas of plastics and chemicals. This is about $1 billion of our $2.7 billion in a large growing market, grows at about GDP. This is characterized -- this characterizes our APS segment. That's part of the APS segment. Then molded products are $20 billion market, again, growing at GDP. This is another $1 billion of our $2.7 billion. These are established businesses that we speak to you about every earnings call, every outlook that we do around the business. Internally, we've been building businesses and evaluating other end markets for in some cases, decades. In the case of food and pharma, Ulrich Bartel will explain to you, Coperion initially started out as did many of the competitors in this space as food companies. And we've always maintained a food business. So food has been a place that's been a part of our portfolio. And as we began to hone our capabilities and look for places to expand and grow and apply those capabilities food was a clear target area that we explored organically for a period of time and then began to define what we needed to be successful in growing that business much more dramatically. Hence, the acquisitions we made in regards to Peerless, Gabler and LINXIS, which really grabbed a lot of scale and opportunity for us. Took us from a sub $100 billion business to a $430 million section of the portfolio and dramatically increased our footprint in food. Similarly, recycling has been an organic initiative for a number of years. We've expanded now with Herbold, which allows us to bring full systems and makes us a leading supplier in the recycling space. And today, small market that we believe, and I think if you pick up any newspaper, you would agree that, that market -- that doesn't represent the opportunity here. That represents where we stand today for a GDP plus-plus opportunity of the future. And as a primary polymer supplier and a leader in that space in virgin materials, we must be on the forefront of helping to develop the materials and the processes of the future. So why do we think these are attractive markets to us? Why do we think it matters that we play here? These macro trends are what underlies our confidence in the ability of these markets to continue to grow. It's the expanding global middle class. It's sustainability initiatives that are undertaken by consumers, regulators, communities, our employees. But sustainability is not a buzzword. It is going to be a way of existence for companies going forward and the future of supply chain. If the last 2 years have taught us nothing else but the importance of having a risk-mitigated supply chain, I think we've all learned that lesson. In some cases, the hard way as we work through some of the challenges over the last 2 years. But we believe that our solutions, our solutions that drive scale, that drive quality, that drive energy efficiency and that can deal with very complex technical processes are what all of these markets are moving towards. Think about the demands that come from a growing global middle class, everything from the electronics they use to the construction for the new houses that they're building to the cars that they're purchasing that they want to be hybrid or electrified and the impact that plastics have as an example, on those markets. The ability to lightweight a vehicle comes from replacing steel and metal and wood products in a vehicle with lighter weight, high durability, highly engineered plastics in many cases, that makes those types of products a reality. And we believe that the global demand for those will continue to increase. Similarly, with food, that growing global middle class also has demands from the food markets. And whether that is for additional safe and healthy snacks and foods or whether that is for advanced types of processing like alternative proteins, we have lines that are processing all of those things. The LINXIS acquisition moves us more prevalently into these markets. Again, in sustainability, electrification of vehicles, we are in both the lightweighting side of that in terms of capabilities and on the battery processing and manufacture on the other side of that equation. And finally, reshoring is something I think many, many companies, including we have undertaken over the course of the last couple of years in order to mitigate supply chain risk. And we are located everywhere around the world to be able to accommodate this need for our customers. That growing global footprint of 60-plus locations around the world gives us a tremendous opportunity to serve our customers anywhere in the world they may be with local resources who understand local requirements and demands and can be available for everything from sales to test lab processes to servicing their equipment in more than 100 locations around the world where we can provide this. We can offer standardized designs and fulfillment for customers around the world, which is particularly important when you look back at that vendor list and you see the fact that some of our global multinational customers standardize their lines, they're looking to maximize their investments. And things like the standards we can provide, coupled with regional and global programs for parts replacement, things like that, that we can do to help them maximize or minimize their investment in assets that keep their manufacturing sites running. All of these are the things that we do to help our customers become more profitable, have better use of their capabilities and funds and those are the things that we believe we can facilitate with this footprint. Accelerating growth is obviously one of the focus areas for our acquisitions and the immediate access of those acquisitions to tap into our footprint for sales and service and design capabilities around the world is an immediate value-add to companies that we bring into the portfolio. And really helps us move forward on the synergy realization and value proposition that we can offer those companies as they bring capabilities to us as well. Obviously, the capital sales are an interesting and important part of our business, but aftermarket is an equally critical part of the business. And a key part of our operating model. You're going to hear from the businesses how each of them has aftermarket growth as a critical area of focus for their company. We do this because we believe that we have earned the right through great performance on the capital side, to be able to bring great value at the back end of the process. I'll mention a few of the capabilities that we have there. But most specifically, we believe that we have an opportunity to grow that at a high single-digit CAGR over the next several years. And this is because of the services delivered. This is a highly profitable part of the company that really must be earned through performance at the front end of the process in order to achieve these long-term relationships. Some of the things that we are capable of delivering to customers in this arena are everything from global engineering footprint to support them all over the world to a global footprint of service that deploys and helps to support their lines to keep running. Ulrich will help you understand why that is so critically important to them. Remote capabilities and operations from a digital standpoint that help them run their lines more efficiently and effectively over time. And finally, modernization, which helps them modernize their lines as the communities around them and the customers around them continue to make changing demands. So in terms of accelerating, we are very focused on what investments we can make inside the organization to continue to grow but we also continue to keep a very watchful eye on opportunities externally that may be able to add competitive advantages or our technologies that are unique differentiators that are part of the systems that we deploy to our customers. So we continue to keep a very watchful eye on M&A and the opportunities that exist there. And I would say that when we consider M&A, we start on the right side of this equation. And I think if you look at the acquisitions that we've recently made, you would say that they line up perfectly with exactly what we were targeting to do. We moved into attractive end markets with growing global secular trends that would support them. We'd use the acquisitions to create scale in applications and geographies. We expanded the capabilities that we brought into the enterprise, and we bought companies that could benefit from the operating model and the capabilities we have in place. Only when they pass those filters, do we take them over to the financial side of the equation, which says, can we create a strong, compelling return for our shareholders, are these brands that we believe will be augmented to the corporation, and are they in attractive positions in the end markets they occupy, and how close are they to what we know we do well. And these businesses, I think, fit the bill on all of these elements. You saw that we have spent about $760 million -- $740 million over the last 6 months to add additions to our portfolio in the area of recycling and food, and we believe we did that at attractive multiples that allow us to create value for shareholders and allow us to really cement a much more attractive future for our corporation. So now to enhance. And I'm not going to steal Leo's thunder and speak to all the elements of the operating model, although every one of us knows it well and certainly could do that. What I will say is that relative to the operating model, I think I had an experience that was second to none in terms creating true sponsorship for what an operating model to do -- can do. When I moved to Germany in 2015 to run our Coperion business, I went armed with this operating model in hand. And that, coupled with an extremely talented team who intimately knew the market and the technologies is what brought together an organization that went from being a good company, although a company with high single-digits EBITDA margins as an operating entity to a company where we were able to double that in a 5-year period. Once we are able to improve the profitability and the alignment of that organization to the way we expected it to perform as a company, we were able to move forward in making investments in the company. First, organically and once those were able to deliver to our expectations, we began to look at inorganic opportunities. And we did this all over a several year period, but I got to watch this be repeated again as we purchased Milacron. I was involved in the due diligence for Milacron and also had the opportunity to run several of the work streams for Milacron. And I got to see us use this model again and use it faster. And we will do this again as we integrate LINXIS, Gabler, Peerless and also Herbold into the APS organization, where they have been through this process themselves. They have learned the skill sets, and they will apply them -- to apply those synergies and achieve our expectations for those businesses going forward. And it's an exciting time for us in that regard. Now in terms of optimize, this really speaks to our capital allocation framework. We will be aiming to create $1 billion of operating cash flows in these businesses over the next 3 years. And the way we think about how to deploy those cash flows in a way that will create meaningful value for shareholders is in a prioritization framework that we have consistently applied historically and will be applying -- will continue to apply going forward. The priorities for us begin with an investment, investment internally in the company. Think about things like sales channel, new product development, test labs, automation in our factories to increase capacity and efficiency. Those are some of the examples of internal investments. We -- those are our first priority. Then we move on to opportunities for M&A, where we can augment skills, capabilities footprint, as I explained earlier. Our next priority is returning capital to shareholders. We have historically done that in the form of dividends and share repurchase, and we will continue to do that in the future. And finally, we work to maintain an effective capital -- effective and flexible capital structure for the future by targeting 1.7x to 2.7x for our net leverage, and we will continue to focus on that going forward. Now when we're above that high end of the guardrail, we focus on paying down debt. Bob will share a bit more about our history and our historical results of being able to do that. When we're below that, we've repurchased shares. And you saw us do that over the course of the last year in an aggressive way. When multiples were high and we didn't feel that things met our M&A returns filter. So we very consistently apply this and we'll continue to do so. And we make sure that we operate in a way that is very consistent for shareholders. All of that, pulls -- comes together to create an outlook where we are targeting 5% revenue CAGR, 250 basis points of margin expansion, 100% free cash flow in this business and all of that rolls together to create an EPS accretion of 10-plus percent. And we are confident in our capability to drive this strong top and bottom-line performance in our industrial segments. Now for the rest of the day, we're going to spend some time so that you can understand many of the elements that I've spoken to in much greater detail from some of the experts on my team. We truly believe, though, at this most recent announcement this morning that taking this to the next level in terms of being a pure-play global industrial leader is a great future that our company is very excited about chasing. We believe we are well positioned for long-term growth in attractive end markets for today and tomorrow. We have a proven track record of an operating model that I don't just believe works, I know it works. We are focused on using all of those together to create outpaced shareholder value for our shareholders, and we have an entire organization of 9,000 people who are united around a common purpose for what we want to do, not just for our company and our shareholders, but the mark we want to leave in the industry and the world around us. So I will turn it over now to my colleague, Leo Kulmaczewski, to take you through the Batesville operating models or the Hillenbrand operating model.

Hey, thank you, Kim, and good morning to all of you. I'm Leo Kulmaczewski, I'm Senior Vice President of the Hillenbrand Operating Model and the Operations Center of Excellence. I've been with Hillenbrand for just under 2 years at this point. Earlier, Kim referred to the Hillenbrand operating model in her remarks. I will now expand on those comments, specifically where we have been and where we're going to take the model into the future. What are our key messages for today? The HOM will continue to drive performance across Hillenbrand as it has for over a decade in this company. The HOM provides a great playbook as we continue to integrate companies into the portfolio, and I'll expand on that in a couple of sections. And the HOM's foundation is our purpose. And we are leveraging the HOM as a tool to drive sustainability in our organization. More of a personal story. I remember our leadership sessions. It was about 4 months after I had started with the company that we held -- developing our purpose statement, Shape What Matters for Tomorrow. The first word shape was really a great choice. We spent a lot of time on that. It provided optionality and inclusion for all 9,000 associates inside Hillenbrand. Shape becomes personal regardless of the role you perform in our company. If you're a manufacturing associate, it can be build what matters for tomorrow. If you're in R&D, design and development matters. If you're in field service, install what matters, et cetera. I'm really pleased where we ended up with our purpose statement that we could be inclusive in the organization and include everybody individually and the entire organization. All right. Let's get a little wonky and get into the Hillenbrand operating model in some more detail. Looking at the first inner ring, it represents continuous improvement. We started at the top with understand your business. We move to focus on the critical few, then to execute the plan and grow for the future. The circle is continuous through multiple planning cycles on purpose and drives the mindset of the company. Improvement is never ending. Next, we move to the 5 practice areas of the Hillenbrand operating model. Starting at the top of strategy. This is our leadership practice where we make choices on purpose regarding investment and business direction over the next 2 to 3 years. Next, we have people. We have talent management processes that help us retain, develop and attract the best associates for today and for the future. Operational excellence is our Lean enterprise discipline to drive continuous improvement across all operational and administrative areas of the company. Commercial excellence helps us drive the customer experience in the most efficient and effective manner. And finally, innovation and technology needs to be viewed through two lenses. An external viewpoint that's involved in the development of new products and services to create business value and customer satisfaction; and in internal lens where technology is incorporated into our -- to improve business processes inside our company to be as efficient as we can. As Kim referenced, the HOM is continually improved through the years. It started with Lean fundamentals, which provide the mindset for operating with efficiency and continuous improvement across the company. Through the years and through several acquisitions, we recognize the need for the HOM to expand in 3 critical areas to build a scalable foundation, to unlock value and acquisitions, as Kim had referred to earlier; to support growth through commercial excellence, innovation and strategy; and to include digitization, sustainability and life cycle management as part of our value creation for the company. A large part of the value comes from our people and how we apply the HOM, the HOM doesn't just live in a playbook and it's not a series of documents. It is activated and lives through our people. It is not uncommon to see our employees standing in a plan forward discussing metrics and commitments that they've made to each other and that they've made to the company and also performing problem solving. You'll also see senior leaders in focus sessions working on the strategic framework of their business and their functions, making choices, as I referred to before, and I'll likely refer to again. Overall, the HOM is a repeatable and rigorous process implemented everywhere at Hillenbrand, and it's based on certain principles, tools and management competencies. The execution of the HOM starts with strategy deployment, where again, leaders make choices about where they're going to focus business resources. We keep -- we use Kaizen in our company, both for breakthrough and for continuous improvement. We keep score on the measurements that matter, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually and we take the appropriate actions based on what we measure and what we see. And finally, we improve the performance of our businesses through top line growth and through operational excellence. Operational excellence is a foundational part of the HOM that we use to drive productivity in businesses and functions and in new acquisition integration. I'd like to highlight a couple of examples. As Kim had referred to earlier, we built functional centers of excellence in IT, human resources, engineering and global supply management. These COEs allow Hillenbrand to drive excellence in existing processes and to provide a scalable foundation for growth. You can probably see and is one of my favorite words that -- when we do things together, we add on to the playbook over time. Each COE has a playbook that's been exercised and improved through multiple acquisitions, and it can be scaled as needed for future opportunities. One example of 1 of our COEs is the global engineering center in Coimbatore India. This team has a full suite of tools, software and capabilities to support every business unit and every business inside the company. They're doing some of the best multifunctional multidivisional work I've seen in my career through multiple companies. One example is that 1 of our North American manufacturing locations receives over 90% of their manufacturing program files directly from the GEC in India, supporting localized manufacturing in the U.S.A. Hillenbrand is a global company. We have global locations, global customers and global suppliers. We are committed to operate throughout the world and to leverage our scope and scale by driving footprint optimization. Operational excellence demonstrates annual productivity savings at Hillenbrand in the past, and will continue to do so into the future. So let's dig a little deeper into 1 of the COE playbooks that drives value into the company. Global Supply Management or the GSM team takes a holistic approach as far as the developing global supply chains. This team has driven tremendous value to Hillenbrand from its inception just a couple of years ago. There's 5 strategic imperatives that are shown on the slide. As far as for GSM, I'm going to focus on 2 of them today. The first 1 is protect the core. This includes supply continuity, which Kim referenced and has definitely been exercised over the last couple of years across a lot of businesses, delivering productivity savings, optimizing working capital, enabling new product development and mitigating risk. The team is implementing processes and best practices as part of the HOM to drive significant value across the organization. For example, delivering $50 million of annual productivity savings to manage for margin enhancement and offsetting inflation and $20 million of working capital savings through inventory reduction, supply agreements, consignment, et cetera. Also, we actively defend the inflation and deflation cycles. We mitigate, defend and negotiate on the up part of the cycle. We capture the deflation cycle. And equally important, we provide data and analytics to all of the businesses and to the business leaders so they can make decisions inside their business relative to pricing, opportunities, et cetera. Another key area where the GSM is making Hillenbrand more competitive, excuse me, is localization, make where we sell and buy where we make. We are strategically moving components and other goods closer to the markets that we serve to mitigate risk and to drive value inside of the company. The GSM tools and practices have become an integral part of the Hillenbrand operating model over the last 2 to 3 years. And we have a path to further build on our success by even enhancing our analytical tools, influencing innovation and supporting growth in the company. The HOM drives growth specifically through commercial excellence, in the innovation and technology practice areas. In the commercial area, pricing excellence includes principles such as price setting, discount management and project execution that drives value, consistent process and value creation. Segmentation is a core input into our strategic management process, where leadership once again makes choices on focus areas regarding innovation and growth. An example of pricing excellence occurred at our Coperion group, with a specific focus on aftermarket parts pricing. Parts are segmented into categories using critical factors such as technical complexity, intellectual property, supply chain flow, et cetera. Strong segmentation data allowed for the development of specific parts packages for specific customers as opposed to a generic parts list that people have seen a lot of times as far as with capital equipment. The pricing excellence process maximizes value for Hillenbrand, and it also improves the customer experience and the value for the customer and some of the uptime characteristics that Ulrich will be speaking about later. In the innovation and technology area, the Hillenbrand product development process has been launched. And we use a consistent process for road maps, for project execution and for project launch. Digital transformation is viewed through 2 lenses, as I had spoken about before, internally to improve our business processes and our performance through topics such as 3D printing, digital process transformation and improving our employees, the Hillenbrand associates' experience. Externally, we improve products and services offered to our customers, specifically with new IOT products on our capital equipment. Mac and Ulrich will be -- will get into more detail with our IOT applications as far as for Milacron and Coperion specifically, during their sections. The HOM is clearly part of the acquisition integration process. In the short term, value is achieved through the rigorous deployment of the HOM, functional COEs, operational excellence and commercial excellence. Longer term, the HOM supports acquisition integration through the strategic management process and the long-term synergies road map. Hillenbrand has demonstrated success with acquisition integration. Coperion has achieved 700 bps of margin expansion while growing 6-plus percent per year since acquisition. The Milacron business has demonstrated 200 bps of margin expansion since acquisition, additionally, yielding over $80 million of cost synergy. As you will hear later from Mac and Ulrich, acquisition integration occurs over time, and the focus points do change. The initial playbook is focused on integration into the functional COEs to drive scale, quick wins, opportunity assessments and teaching the Hillenbrand operating model to new associates. Achieving productivity and our synergy commitments is a significant focus point initially. Over time, the strategic management process becomes the emphasis for value creation with 1 primary focus area, revenue growth. The integration playbook is tested through past acquisitions and produces results. It will now be utilized in the recent acquisitions of Herbold, LINXIS and Peerless to once again produce meaningful results. In summary, the Hillenbrand operating model is embedded with our purpose, Shape What Matters for Tomorrow and how the HOM supports sustainability throughout Hillenbrand. The HOM drives performance and execution across our business functions, and Hillenbrand has built a scalable foundation that produces results. The HOM will continue to evolve over time to meet the business needs and to be a discipline we rely upon to drive meaningful performance across the globe, across the company. Thank you. With that, I'll now turn it over to my friend, Ulrich.

Thank you, Leo. Good morning to all of you. My name is Ulrich Bartel. I'm Senior Vice President of Hillenbrand, and I'm President of the APS segment. as well as Coperion. I'm since more than 30 years now with the company, and I had the opportunity to work in different positions, starting in Asia via the U.S. and Europe. And it has been really an exciting time to see the growth and the transformation of the company over so many years, and I'd like to share a bit of this transformation with you in the next like 20 minutes. So today, when we think of the APS segment, we think of a variety of end markets, which we are serving with our technology, with our process know-how and with our equipment. From full systems expertise to the service business. And these capabilities allow us to have and to further develop a very good relation with our customers. But as you can see here, we are the global leader in highly engineered solutions for the plastics industry, and we are the only global provider of full systems solutions. And we are very proud of taking our process knowledge from the plastics market into other end markets like food and recycling, the recently acquired companies where we have most recently expanded and acquired 4 new product lines, which expands our scale and our offering and will take us to leading positions around the world. And dramatically enhanced over the last few years, since Hillenbrand has acquired us in the fiscal year of 2013, has our performance, as you have heard before from Kim and from Leo. And one of the key factors for that performance was using the Hillenbrand operating model. And we are permanently, continuously driving this improvement culture in order to drive further growth through innovation and aftermarket growth. And we will also take, as Leo mentioned, the deep knowledge of this playbook into our integrations to continue to create shareholder value. APS at a glance, as an overview. We have right now around USD 1.7 billion of pro forma revenue at an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 19%. We are doing that out of 40-plus locations with around 4,300 employees. And you can see right now that last fiscal year, we had the majority of our business in Asia, a bit more than 40%, but the investment cycles in our business are basically traveling around the world. So the mix is changing from Europe, from North America to Asia and back and forth. And with our 40-plus locations, we are well set to handle these kind of requirements. On the other hand, our aftermarket is a bit shy of 30% of the entire revenue, but this is also due to the new acquisitions, which are slightly below the APS segment of today. We have, with the acquisition now, leading brands across the 3 growth platforms, basically, the old, (old) Coperion with the focus on plastics, then recycling with Herbold and the 3 food acquisitions. And plastics has been our key growth platform over the last few years with today of a revenue of USD 1 billion in comparison to the APS segment of USD 1.7 billion. And 1 of the drivers was also our leading technology and capabilities, which we are now also going to take into these new acquisitions. And we have the opportunity and the ability to grow and diversify further the APS portfolio. Our platform strategies and key initiatives are directly aligned with the strategy for the corporation, as Kim has highlighted today. And each of the platforms has a key role in the achievement of that strategy. And today, APS is focused on taking advantage of growth opportunities to end markets with, first of all, attractive growth rates, this is our main interest, then trends towards more complex formulations where we can play to the strengths of our process know-how, then the need for exceptional quality and for sure, high output, high efficiency requirements, which the market mandates today. But we definitely also remain focused on expanding our highly profitable aftermarket business across our installed base around the world. And today, under enhance, we also foster a culture of continuous improvement through the Hillenbrand operating model. We continue to invest in innovation, which is for us very important as well as commercial excellence with a focus on the voice of the customer and sustainability and our view of the market demands of the future, whether that is the formulation of processing capabilities for new advanced materials, for example, like biopolymers or for plastics material with recycled content. We're ensuring that our focus areas are adapting to a quickly evolving material environment. And where we continue to focus on world-class working capital metrics, we are also on focusing delivering strong cash flow for the enterprise. So as I had mentioned, our key focus is on 3 key areas: plastics and chemicals, recycling as well as food and pharma. And I would like to talk now a bit more about our biggest APS markets and success, this is plastics and chemicals. So we are, as I have mentioned, the proven leader in this segment since many years. And the total addressable market size is around USD 15 billion and the market growth roughly about GDP. And we have reached, meanwhile, an APS revenue of USD 1 billion. So today, when we talk about plastics production business, we are basically talking about 3 different areas, as you can see here on the slide. It comprises of equipment and components, compounding and extrusion systems and material handling. When we think of equipment and components, we mainly think about feeders, screeners, rotary valves, for example. And when we think about material handling, this is basically the glue between the different equipments. So that means transporting the pellets, transporting the powder from 1 equipment to the other equipment while always retaining the product quality. So no change of the product itself. The most demanding process step is the middle step, the conversion step, the so-called compounding and extrusion step which applies a lot of forces to the polymer. So first of all, it has to be sheared, it has to be heated. It has to be transported within the extruder under heat. It has to be devolatilized and additivation and so on. So there are many processing steps which are required. And all of that delivers then a plastics product, which we see in our everyday lives. So starting in the morning, when you press the snooze button at your alarm clock or when you go into your car and there you see the dashboard or the entire interior of your car or you put on your sneakers or use your mobile telephone or even the chairs where you're sitting on right now, I checked it this morning, by the way, at least half of them is plastics. So we are leveraging the full Coperion technology and expertise, and we are the only global provider of those solutions. And you know that optimization can not only help us to have greater -- help our customers to have greater confidence in their lines and also what we are delivering. But when we are designing the entire line, it allows us also -- it gives us the opportunity to deliver a smaller footprint for the customer. And this is his advantage because he will see less investment cost. You will see less space, smaller building less maintenance costs, less [ aberration ] cost. And eventually, this will also help us then for the next investment to be convincing, and that drives long-term customer relationship. I have brought along for you a case study, which is 1 of our recent most successful innovations, which we did. And it's really a nice story I like to tell. So what you see here on 1 slide is a development over several years. So we looked into our -- over the last few years, we are constantly screening the market situation. And we found a few years ago that in the area of the ABS market, we would see a huge increase of polymer demand. And ABS is a product which all of you basically know, maybe not under that name, but it's being used in the automobile industry, it's being used in electronics, in the toy industry. And it's a very basic polymer and we saw that over the next few years, we would see a lot of demand of production lines. Then we analyzed our technical capabilities, and we realized we couldn't do a bit better? We need to develop more unique value propositions for ourselves as well as for our customers. And so over some time, we went to work and our process engineers develop technologies, which we even could patent. So we have several patents now for that. And it led to the situation that we could double the throughput on the same machine size while improving the final product quality, and that's really an accomplishment. At the same time, and this is very important today, we also reduced the energy consumption of the extruder by 10% to 20%. And most importantly, we decreased the so-called volatile content of the fuel emissions by 80% to eliminate toxicity because you can imagine when you enter a car and the entire car, the entire interior smells of the plastic or when kids are playing with toys and you have the fumes coming out, this is definitely no good. So at the end of the day, that led to the situation that we basically got, as you can see here, almost all of the orders over the last few years, which we have in the market. And I almost would say this is a surprise to us that you can come on that level, but it shows with innovation, with new ideas, with technology, which we have around the world, you can really be a game changer in that field. And you can also imagine we are going to monitor further the market for similar opportunities and maybe for other polymers. Today, it's ABS, tomorrow it's polyamide or polyethylene. There are always opportunities, and these markets are moving around the world. So then with all the success, why even do we bother to move into food and recycling. As we thought about expanding into any end markets, first of all, we are thinking about what can we do best. And how to take them into attractive end markets with long-term growth outlooks, as I had mentioned before. And where are our capabilities, which have a high applicability in -- to create value for the customers. And we also looked at how our systems expertise, so how equipment of the -- or the equipment of the different areas like material handling, extrusion, feeders and so on, can play together. How to create the greatest output, the greatest quality and for the customer the most efficient way of producing those lines for a very consistent end product coming out. And finally, we also want to make sure, as Leo said, that we can leverage the ability of our Hillenbrand operating model in order to enhance the performance in these new markets. So let's talk a bit how we have taken our process knowledge and system capabilities and have leveraged this in to move into new markets. When we talk about plastics, recycling and food, we often get the question around how closely related are these markets because when you think about food and recycling or food and plastics, you would not assume that there is some relation. But as Kim has mentioned this morning, Coperion, where I'm coming from, has a long-standing tradition of more than 100 years and started out in the food area, 1875. And we always maintain the foot in this space over the last more than 100 years. In recycling, for the last many years, we have been focused with organic initiatives on recycling and how we can be an important part of the circular economy in this plastics field. And we began our investment thesis by focusing our organic growth initiatives for several years. To understand, first of all, the food and recycling market and also how applicable is our know-how and our capabilities in those markets and how we can differentiate ourselves from the competitors. And obviously, otherwise, we would have not acquired 4 companies. We came to the conclusion that we have a lot of value to bring to these markets, and we could be especially effective at doing so by acquiring those 4 companies in order to have a fulsome product scope for our customers. So all of that is now what resulted in the strategic acquisitions of the 4 companies. First of all, Herbold in the recycling space and then the 3 food companies like Gabler Engineering, LINXIS Group and Peerless. And these 4 acquisitions drove, just in that specific market of recycling and food, over $100 million revenue to meanwhile, $530 million revenue. And so we now have reached 30% of the entire ABS segment revenue just with recycling and food. So first of all, let's talk a bit more about recycling and where we see that sustainability is driving the demand for circularity. So some of our machine businesses are headquartered in Europe. And so you could imagine that we have been active in that field of recycling since many years. But just recently, recycling took a completely new level of interest around the world. And we believe that these requirements are developing in the recycling market especially towards us because we have the knowledge of how to design large systems. We know how to increase quality and how to increase the output. And we have technical knowledge and laboratories, which is very important for customers as well as ourselves to show the customer that his products are running with his formulation on our product and we are in a position to scale that up to higher production lines with higher throughputs and all of that is being served via our global service organization. So today, recycling is a total addressable market of around USD 2 billion, and it grows well above the GDP. And meanwhile, we have reached an APS revenue in the recycling area of around USD 100 million, which makes us 1 of the leading companies in that space. And we believe that we now have also the responsibility to play in that field because we are on the front end of this. You will understand that we know how plastics functions and their polymer properties and processing know-how is a key differentiator. And on top of that, as I mentioned, we also have invested in dedicated recycling innovation centers. We are just going to open up next January -- February one in Germany. And we have reference sites for all kinds of recycling approaches because there's not only one way of manufacturing recycling, but there are several ways. And I have mentioned here 3 of our ways, for example, the mechanical recycling where Herbold is playing an important role. This is 1 of the least demanding technically recycling steps, but it's pretty much populated around the world. Then via solvent recycling, already technically a bit more demanding, to chemical recycling, which is technically the most demanding recycling manufacturing. It basically takes the virgin polymer, which then has moved into a final product, like, for example, when I see the Hillenbrand drinking bottle, I think that is made out of plastics. And eventually, one day, it might be recycled and then taken back in this chemical recycling again to oil and gas and again into virgin polymer. So this is -- chemical recycling is really the closing the loop of the circular economy. And that allows us or gives us even the requirement to play in that field. And degradation of material, which is in the chemical and solvent recycling always a topic because you cannot keep the recycling level on always the same level. So with every recycling step of a plastic products, you go a bit down in quality. But in chemical recycling, you always keep, you maintain the quality. And through the acquisition of Herbold, these processing steps now have given us the capabilities to share the knowledge of Coperion as well as the knowledge of Herbold and build an entire recycling solution, even turnkey solution for our customers. And that is what you can see here. This is a complete system from a single source. So we are now able, with Herbold and Coperion together to leverage our full capabilities. And we are really the only provider of a full system solution out of 1 hand in the recycling space with scalable systems from small testing lines, I was talking about the innovation centers, to a full production line. And all of the service and testing capabilities, which are needed to ensure the quality of the product. So now let's change gears. We are now going into the area of food and pharma. And the 3 acquisitions now have accelerated our leadership in this space, and that is what I would like to talk a bit now. So the 3 brands have now strengthened our position in the food market. And the food market, the total addressable market is around USD 20 billion. Market growth is a bit above GDP. And meanwhile, we have reached an APS revenue of USD 430 million coming from just a year ago, USD 80 million. And you can see at the bottom that some of the world's largest and most respected food customers are belonging to our customer base. And they depend on us from initial commissioning via maintenance, via keeping the line running and modernization, which is also a very important part over the time as well as eventually new purchase decisions over the next few years. And we have a variety of key food applications we are playing in right now with those acquisitions. So for example, baked goods, snacks and confectionery, pet food, alternative proteins as well as other process foods. And all of this gives us now scale. We are now 1 of the leading global brands. We have also now dedicated engineering expertise. For innovation, we have sales resources, we have service channels and we have a proven system processing knowledge and capability. And on top of that, now dedicated manufacturing sites, just focusing on the food area. And as we look across the value chain of our end markets in this case, food. We want to make sure that the products and the capabilities that we add through an acquisition are really a key part of the value chain. So we don't want to move out of the value chain, we want to stay within the value chain. And here, you can see the different acquisitions we have done, starting with LINXIS, playing in the field of ingredient automation, in feeding, dosing and material handling, in the extrusion and mixing area as well as in the portioning area. Where Gabler Engineering, playing in the field of feeding and extrusion. And on top, even delivering an additional food production site in Europe. And last but not least, Peerless, playing in the field of mixing with an additional manufacturing site for food lines in North America. So you can see how all of these different acquisitions and different products are connected in the value chain and on top of that, that they are also closely adjacent. Also from the food space, I have brought along a very interesting case study because leveraging our technology in the 2 different spaces like polymer technology, as food technology, usually, you would not expect. But just recently, we had an inquiry from a customer in the food space. And one of the LINXIS Group companies called DIOSNA is active in supplying equipment for the dough production. And we realized that this inquiry of the customer, touching an entire full scope line, would give us the possibility to leverage, to utilize an equipment, which we are only using up to now in the plastics area. It's called [ Adalot ]. We don't need to go into the details. But the message here is basically we can combine technology equipment in the food space here, in this case, the brand DIOSNA plus the plastic equipment, which we up to now only have used in the plastics area. For sure, we need a few adoptions, but this is minor in comparison to the savings now we have in the DIOSNA food area because they don't need to have so many engineering hours in order to engineer this equipment because we have it already available. DIOSNA also does not need now to go out to the market and maybe look for sub suppliers who are in the position to manufacture this kind of equipment. So now we can combine and this is the story here. We can combine food and plastics into one step. So now lots changed a bit. We have talked a lot about how important it is to grow top line. But as Leo mentioned, we should also not forget profitability. And with our Hillenbrand operating model, we have the opportunity, and we are taking that opportunity to focus on 3 main areas. First of all, integration, as we have done this in the past with acquisitions as well as continued operational excellence and aftermarket growth. And on top of that, we have now an integration playbook that has been tested through prior acquisitions. And we will, as Leo mentioned, we will apply this playbook with the support of our operating companies and as well as our corporate resources. And we want to deliver to the commitments to create long-term shareholder value. And our integration teams are already working since a few months on deploying the Hillenbrand operating model, also unifying the different cultures because we are talking here about a lot of different cultures, unifying those cultures around purpose and executing our integration plans to drive our synergy targets. Because we have to say that the acquired companies, as you might have seen in the beginning, have a slightly lower than segment level margin and a lower relative aftermarket mix but we are confident with the integration playbook, with HOM, with all our experience to drive the margins of the acquired companies on the same or even higher levels as we have in the APS segment today. So as Kim has mentioned, we partner with our customers to deliver solutions throughout the lifetime of the equipment and systems which can be upwards of 30 years in some applications. And these systems are really mission-critical systems. They are used 24/7, 365 days per year. And for our customers, the cost of unplanned downtime can go into the millions. And therefore, it is important that we are close with our service organization, to our customers and our large global installed base also requires that we are close to our customers. And interesting is as well that our capital equipment creates a long stream of recurring revenue, which a total -- with a total lifetime value of 2x that of the original equipment. And on top of that, with significantly higher profitability. And you can imagine, by doing that, we maintain and develop a good relation to our customers. On top of that, we also look to create proactive opportunities by understanding their predictive indicators. So here, we are talking about predictive maintenance, for example, when a system needs to be modernized or a problem needs to be addressed, we use products like remote access to run machine diagnostics at our customers' places, which was, as you can imagine, extensively used now during COVID times, and we are monitoring the capabilities to help our customers to anticipate even problems before they even might come up. And I think you will be not surprised that all of those capabilities have applicability, not only in the polymer area, but also in the recycling and in the food area and eventually even in other markets. So as a continuous improvement-minded organization, we continue to demand also from our own organization, from our own operations a lot. So first of all, lead time reductions, standardization, Kim mentioned, very important. Working capital improvements, increased flexibility in our supply chain and we use value stream analysis in order to understand the deficiencies in our systems. And extremely important, we also leverage the global supply management group in order to drive quality with the products from our sub-suppliers to drive delivery today, very important topic as well as price improvements from our sub-suppliers. And from our Global Engineering Center in Coimbatore, India, we can drive the ability to leverage this engineering capability, which we are constantly building up there so that it can be utilized around the world. So now finally, I hope I could convince you that APS is well positioned to drive profitable growth. And that with all our knowledge, our expertise, our colleagues around the world and the basically 3 different continents, we can tackle those kind of problems and we can again reach the numbers as they are mentioned here. We keep on working on our -- on being the global leader in our highly engineered solutions, not only for the plastics industry. Because we also want to accelerate that leadership into our newly acquired companies. And deploying the Hillenbrand operating model in order to enhance the performance through, again, innovation and aftermarket growth, extremely important. And as I mentioned, we want to use the proven integration playbook to drive the synergies in order to reach the targeted growth rates. So thank you very much. I'm at the end of the presentation and good news, we have now a 10-minute break. Thank you. [Break]

So it is now 10:30, so we'll go ahead and get started again. And I'll welcome up Mac Jones, President of Milacron Injection Molding & Extrusion, to talk through the MTS segment. Sam?

I'm Mac Jones as Sam said, I'm a Senior Vice President at Hillenbrand, and I'm President of the Milacron business. I've been with the company just over 7 years holding positions in Investor Relations, finance and operations before being named President in 2019. It's great to be back in New York. It's great to be back in front of the investment community. It's been several years, so glad to be back. But I'm really excited today to go through the Molding Technology Solutions segment and all the progress we've made since becoming part of Hillenbrand. So just a couple of things on our segment. MTS is a global leader in the manufacture and distribution of highly engineered and customized systems as well as aftermarket parts and services for the plastics processing industry. Our product portfolio contains mission-critical technologies that enrich our lives every single day. From the time you woke up today to brush your teeth, for the time you checked your first e-mail, or even receiving medical care or getting a round of golf. Chances are items you've used throughout the day have been produced on the MTS technology. Since becoming part of Hillenbrand in 2020, we've been extremely focused on creating a culture of performance and execution. Utilizing the Hillenbrand operating model to identify opportunities and develop strategies to drive growth and expand our margin profile. Underlying our margin profile initiatives include capitalizing on our #1 position as a leading parts and service provider to our installed base of nearly 190,000 assets globally as well as our domain expertise to capitalize on innovation and the ever-changing demand trends of the plastics industry. Turning to our segment at a glance. Our total addressable market is approximately $24 billion and continues to expand. As there's a growing global demand for plastics products and there's a rapid conversion from other alternative materials to plastic, glass to plastic in medical and packaging, metal to plastic in the automotive sector, wood to plastic in large structural parts. In 2022, we topped $1 billion in sales, representing a 4% CAGR since acquisition and over a 30% improvement since the pandemic trough. Our margins have grown from 19% to nearly 21% despite significant supply chain challenges and headwinds. And we are confident the foundational changes that we've made with a renewed focus on technology and innovation have enabled us to -- positioned us for growth. MTS is comprised of strong brands that have been cultivated for over 150 years. Milacron, Mold-Masters and DME, are uniquely positioned as the only global business segment to combine mission-critical, high precision equipment, hot runner and tooling systems, and aftermarket solutions for the plastics industry. Geographically, we are well balanced and hold market-leading positions. We are a market leader in hot runner systems across Americas and Europe. We also hold market-leading positions in high-growth regions such as India and China. We are a market leader in injection molding in India, and we are a leader in hot runner systems across Asia. Today, we have a 75-25 equipment to aftermarket mix, and we have strategic priorities deployed to drive our base aftermarket business by 20% over the next 3 years. Our products serve a broad and diverse range of end markets and blue-chip customers. Each piece of the MTS portfolio provides our customers with reliability and innovation. Serving the entire value chain of the plastics processing industry, providing OEMs, molders and mold makers with improved functionality, sustainability, repeatability and energy efficiency. We also support macro growth trends such as electrification, recycled content and connected assets, just to name a few. Our product portfolio offers both breadth and depth, providing our customers solutions and value beyond just the hardware. The range of our products and technology provide our customers with touch points along every step of the injection molding process. As you heard from Ulrich, there's an opportunity to provide customers enhanced value through system solutions. This includes leveraging the MTS technology and expertise, lowering total cost of ownership and providing our customers with 1 point of contact. Our equipment business makes injection molding happen -- possible, I'm sorry. From providing application expertise to energy-efficient machines, to providing our customers with the auxiliaries and automation for their operating needs. Our molding businesses make injection molding happen with systems that optimize production to enhance molded part quality, increased productivity and overall -- lower overall part cost. Our aftermarket businesses keep the whole process running optimally. In addition to the parts and services required, we also provide solutions to drastically improve the way our customers run from thermal insulation to advanced screw design to predictive analytics. And the common thread that runs throughout our products and our customers' operating requirements are our digital and IOT solutions, M-Powered and smart mold. Now earlier, Kim introduced the Hillenbrand strategic priorities of grow, enhance and optimize followed by Ulrich, who shared how the APS segment aligns and it's no different for MTS. Our focus areas include capitalizing on secular growth trends, innovation and aftermarket penetration, continued deployment of the HOM to drive productivity, develop talent and reinvest funds, and to deliver consistent financial performance and disciplined working capital management. As you heard from Leo, the tenets of the Hillenbrand operating model are the foundation. It is how we've strengthened our business today and how we will continue to deliver. The single biggest impact since acquisition -- for the MTS organization since acquisition has been the implementation of the HOM. It has drastically changed the mindset and the culture of our MTS businesses as we've taken the time to truly understand and focus, evolving our organizational structure, product lines and talent. And we've benefited from the learnings of our APS colleagues, which have enabled us to accelerate margin expansion. We believe that leveraging the HOM is a competitive advantage. And coupled with renewed focus on technology and innovation, underlies our strategic focus to drive sustainable growth. We look to expand our technical and digital innovation to drive business efficiency to benefit our customers, to create recurring revenue streams, to maintain alignment between product solutions and sustainability, key components of our purpose and our core values. To invest in accelerating aftermarket growth through strong customer relationships, strategic partnerships and product solutions. And we will support these efforts by continuing to utilize our HOM toolkit to drive efficiency around processes and deliver productivity, margin expansion and lower working capital. We believe that we have an obligation to lead our industry to a sustainable future with solutions and innovation that address not just today's problems, but help shape the future. We are a partner with possibilities, innovating from the needs of our customers, their customers and the planet. Our innovation theme focuses on doing more with less. Less energy, less virgin resin, less waste. And we look at the entire ecosystem for the best solutions beyond just the total cost of ownership, but for our customers' total cost to produce. And being a partner with possibilities, driving to deliver sustainability for technologies, which will provide long-term impact. So I'd like to take a second now and show a few innovation examples of how MTS is solving problems across our industry. Today, consumer and regulatory demands are driving the increased use of recycled materials and recycled content. Governments around the world are continuing to levy taxes for products that don't meet minimum levels of post-consumer recycled material or PCR. These minimums will reach 50% in the coming years. This opens up possibilities for 1 of our technologies, Co-injection. Our Co-injection technology enables our customers to meet and exceed future requirements, today. Our patented solution enables 50% PCR, eliminating replacing virgin and expensive concentrates. This is 40% more than our competition, and it comes with no impact to cycle time or performance. So again, I know it's almost lunchtime and we just had a break, but I can't help myself to try to explain a little bit more how tech Co-injection works. But it's essentially like a sandwich. And so the 2 thin layers of the bread and the large PCR layer in the middle is your meat and your vegetables. So take that for what it's worth, but it's a good way to understand how the plastic part is produced. But I think a great practical example here is 5-gallon buckets. I know a lot of people don't think -- spend a lot of time thinking about 5-gallon buckets. But you'd be amazed that 5-gallon buckets hold everything from paint to pickles, and there are about 250 million of those produced on an annual basis. So at an average weight, it's about 400 million pounds of virgin resin for those buckets. So there's a lot of folks in the audience and I'm sure online that have computers and they look pretty financially savvy. So if you take our technology and use the 50%, that could offset almost 200 million pounds of virgin resin usage on an annual basis. Our customers are also looking at ways to improve their bottom lines, consistently pulling levers to getting optimization across their production, all while advancing their sustainability efforts. For manufacturers of large structural parts, this is even more critical as the cost of resin and energy. Our L-Series platform is the leader in low pressure injection molding, enabling optimization across many facets of production. In low-pressure injection molding, foaming and gas-assist technologies reduce the amount of virgin resin without sacrificing parts strength. Our L-Series platform allows our customers to do a few things. One, it makes the part 15% to 30% lighter on average. It also, on average, reduces energy consumption by 50%. It also increases the manufacturing flexibility, allowing our customers to produce multiple parts, different parts at the same time. And lastly, perhaps the most unique about this technology is the ability to use 100% recycled material or flake, which is called in the industry. Flake is a recycled material that's essentially just ground up and put right back into the manufacturing or into the machine without any further compounding steps. So another great example so I get -- an easy example to understand is how it applies to the pallet market. For context, there are about 5 billion plastic -- 5 billion pallets used annually. Today, approximately 10% of those are plastic, and that continues to rise. For pallets, what's interesting about the market is you're starting to see a shift in the materials that you saw 20-plus years ago when glass was shifting to plastic bottles for what we're drinking here today. There's a quicker accelerating conversion from the wood to the plastic today. So you're starting to see that shift. A wood pallet generally gets 10 turns before it has to be destroyed. A plastic pallet gets over 200 turns. And then at the end of that life [ cycle ], it's obviously more durable. But also at the end of that life cycle can be put right back into the recycling stream. Our L-Series platform makes these particular pallets that you see on the screen today, 8 pounds lower than the average pallet by the conventional method. So you can imagine the amount of savings you would have on resin as well as the freight and transportation, energy costs on the life of that pallet over the years. Supporting our innovation efforts, we are also evolving and modernizing our approach to the aftermarket using statistical information and data science to create growth opportunities. We have a large installed base of assets globally with approximately 40,000 injection molding machines and extruders and 150,000 hot runner systems. Each asset has an aftermarket lifetime value. As an example, the aftermarket opportunity for machines is 2x to 2.5x value than the original equipment purchase. And the aftermarket revenues that come with that are 15 to 20 percentage points higher than the original equipment. For the aftermarket, we've taken a step back to analyze, learn and reset our approach. No different than our APS segment. One of the largest costs for our customers is when a machine is down. Also, older machines are less productive and require more downtime as core components continue to wear. Maintenance resources are declining and skilled labor is in short supply. Our aftermarket growth model is based on being data-driven and proactive. First and foremost is a customer focus. We are designing our products with the aftermarket in mind, improving serviceability and the time it takes to get assets back up and running. We also continue to add to our digital capabilities, deploying technologies like M-Powered and smart mold and driving increased insights and actions, both internally and externally. And lastly, combining or -- providing a complete offering with a partnership focused throughout the life cycle from service contracts to training. So the last example I'd like to share today is our commitment to technology and our investments in software and digital solutions. We view this innovation as an extension of our business from a hardware provider to an essential solutions partner. In today's industrial world, the digital software is a must have, it is the single source of truth tool to optimize operations for our customers. Each customer in our industry is on a different digital journey, but the adoption has accelerated and will continue to grow as customers look to address challenges across their operations. MTS was the first to market in IOT for the plastics processing industry. In 2018, we launched a full suite of M-Powered technologies. This suite ranged from remote management to asset optimization, OEE trending to predictive analytics. M-Powered allows our customers to make better, smarter, fact-based decisions. Essentially, it lowers cost, allowing our customers to be more competitive and profitable while also supporting sustainability efforts. And a great example of how a long-standing MTS customer has applied M-Powered technology is NYX, a Tier 1 automotive supplier. By simply enabling the M-Powered technology, NYX was able to reduce its scrap rate by 23%, bringing it to below 1% as a total cost of sales. And this was just the beginning. Today, NYX and others are partnering with us on additional ways to improve and utilize M-Powered solutions to effectively operate machines, identifying when to replace parts, to offset the concerns of skilled labor shortages and to drive overall efficiency and profitability. Looking at our progress, the MTS journey started in 2020. And since that time, we've embraced the HOM and introduced process discipline and created operational muscle for growth. We've also spent a lot of time attracting, retaining and developing talent with an intentional focus on diverse thought and creating inclusive and equitable work environments globally, right-tuning skill sets and investing and developing leaders for tomorrow. We've made a lot of progress since acquisition and taken learnings from Ulrich and the APS journey before us that we've been able to apply. Identifying areas of concern and making tough decisions to consolidate sites and exit product lines, digitizing processes and increasing efforts on digital technology. Doubling down on areas of strength and market leadership to increase capacity and modernize our footprint. And the early signs are encouraging. Our -- we've seen our margins improve from 19% to nearly 21%, again, despite extraordinary levels of inflation and supply chain challenges. During this time, we've maintained the margins in our hot runner business while growing our margins in our injection and extrusion businesses. And we expect these margins to continue over the next 3 years. We've also seen a 2-turn working capital improvement as we completely reengineered our sales, inventory and operations planning processes globally. And as you heard from Leo, we introduced a global supply management organization across the enterprise and streamline processes to optimize terms for working capital. At MTS, we have a significant opportunity for continued growth through disciplined HOM execution, capitalizing on powerful secular growth trends and market fundamentals and focused investments in markets and regions where we lead. Building on our legacy of quality products, domain expertise and global reach, leveraging our strong brands, customer relationships and leading innovation and technologies. MTS is well positioned to deliver 4% revenue growth and over 200 basis point margin improvement guided by purpose, driven by innovation and inspired by sustainability. Thank you. I'll now hand it over to Tory Flynn, our Chief Sustainability Officer.

Thanks, Mac. Good morning, everyone. I'm Tory Flynn, Hillenbrand's Chief Sustainability Officer. I've been with the company for nearly 7 years, holding roles in Corporate Communications, Public Affairs, government relations as well as integration management. As you've heard from our leaders today, sustainability is on the forefront of innovation, allowing us to engage with our customers in new ways. And as I'll share with you also today, this provides us lots of opportunity even though we're only 18 months into having a formal program. As Kim mentioned earlier, global trends are really driving secular demand, macroeconomic environment and the world that we live in. And this is giving us opportunity to really lean into sustainability and drive it and adapt and engage through our people, products and partnerships. As Leo mentioned earlier, the Hillenbrand operating model is a tool that we've been able to stabilize and apply throughout our entire organization and are starting to lean into commercial operations as well for sustainability. And as I will share with you as well today, sustainability is giving us opportunities to also engage with long-term shareholder value. Whether driven by consumer demand, regulatory environment or the caring of the world we live in, sustainability and macro trends are giving us new ways to operate that we haven't necessarily done before. If you look at the model, our sustainability model, it represents the trends that we've heard from our stakeholders. We went and assessed 350 of our internal and external stakeholders in what we call a materiality assessment. This is our focus. This is what drives our reporting, and this is also how we've organized our operations to drive it through our organization in partnership with Leo. But plastics is at the forefront of all of this from a macro trend standpoint. As you heard my friend Ulrich say earlier, sneakers to cell phones, Mac highlighted paint to pickles, durable plastics is at the core, and we're really able to lean into this. However, it is an area that is being increasingly regulated, and you're starting to see this through increased regulation in PCR content or post-consumer recycling content. It's a great time to own a recycling company. Now when you see this, it's also increasing by 20% just in Europe alone. But our customers are now able to source a complete system with Coperion, but plastic is not the only thing that is being regulated. You're also starting to see this in energy. Some countries are starting to demand production to hit certain records and levels. And we're starting to lean into that, too. Because if you go back to our core values, because we make what matters, it matters how we make it. For sustainability to truly succeed, it cannot be a separate strategy. It has to be fully embedded in the way that we operate our sustainability strategy. And so when you think about our business model, our Hillenbrand operating model, sustainability is a lens at what we look through this. And with thank goodness, we're in the field of continuous improvement because I can't think of a function that is more central around continuous improvement. And I've spoken to some of you during breaks and you've highlighted, oh, I'm excited to listen to your sustainability journey. Folks, we are on an odyssey. And as we really lean into this practice, we have an opportunity to really drive performance improvement. We're doing this in partnership with Leo. If you take the operational excellence element of this, let's take energy as a key focus because I know that, that's a global trend that the world is focusing on today. We have created an energy toolkit that we've been able to deploy across our company, creating a standardized practice to really engage our organization, create a greenhouse gas emission strategy and also work towards decarbonization within our operations. This also helps us with reporting and disclosures. If you take that same element and apply it to commercial excellence, and innovation, energy is at the core. So when you think about energy, it's an area where we think about from a standard of everyone is concerned about it. I recently had the opportunity to go to the K Fair, the largest plastic trade show in the world. And even though operations and our equipment was on display, I would argue that in the field, energy was. People and our customers were asking about kilowatts per hour of our equipment. They were asking about the decrease of greenhouse gas emissions, not just ours, but anyone at the show. And this is now a tool that we're able to leverage through the Hillenbrand operating -- and in partnership with HOM to really drive meaningful performance in how we operate our equipment. Matt gave the example of M-Powered to reduce waste. However, it also helps reduce energy waste. The equipment literally changes energy consumption based upon the throughput material that is put in it, allowing us to increase a great product for our customers while decreasing energy and cost. Whether it's the energy in our buildings or helping decrease the energy in our customers, the Hillenbrand operating model allows a consistent standard of practice across organization and others to drive improvements. Now on our odyssey, the biggest advantage that I have is having a CEO and CFO that are committed to sustainability and understand the opportunity that it has to drive long-term shareholder value. That embedded with our purpose allows us really a strong foundation to come out of the gate to start really implying and pushing this forward through our organization. In 2019, we formalized our commitment to sustainability through the United Nations Global Compact. And in 2021, we formalized our commitment to the function and actually set up an organization to really drive reporting and consistent standards. And we've been able to do that through -- including our disclosures in energy, emissions, emissions compared to working hours, diversity of teams, you get the point. All of this is available on our Hillenbrand website, but where we started was within our 4 walls. Before this, we did not really understand the capability and our data. And this is all publicly available now. As we move forward in our progress, we're starting to work up and down our sustainability value stream. Working with suppliers, working with our customers because sustainability is not something that can be done in a box. It requires systems thinking. And we're doing this through starting our work on Scope 3 emissions. Starting to capture water starting to really work with our supply chain and reduce further risk. This is an opportunity for us to engage further. Now when it comes to our people, labor has always been a competitive advantage. But I would argue, putting it sustainability at the forefront now is the best time with the great resignation on our heels as well as an entirely new generation entering the workforce, who might I add is 3x more likely to select a company because of an environmental or social stance. Sustainability becomes a tool for talent attraction. My partner in this journey has been our CHRO, Aneesha Aurora. And the way she thinks about talent is that purpose and culture needs to be fully embedded in an organization and embedded in our purpose are behaviors, behaviors that drive governance because behaviors matter just as much as results. A culture of inclusion is at the heart of diversity and equity. Having diversity of thought in the workforce can help us execute further and drive for the progress of everything that you've heard today. We need great people to execute. While we have made significant progress and addressing diversity in our Board and senior leadership. We are now starting to engage and drive that through our broader organization. But that takes time, and we need to do that through commitment from our senior leadership and Board, which we have an engaged purpose, core values that speak to that in addition to business resource groups and partnerships with our communities. But it is also more difficult than it looks. We are very focused on engineering. You've seen a lot of the equipment presented today, and we have engineers within our organization. But when you only have 1/5 of the world's engineering degrees go to women, this makes how we attract talent and thinking differently about our pipelines and partnerships, all the more important. Now when it comes to our products, I believe we have tremendous opportunity. 83% of regulatory matters relating to packaging, focused specifically on plastics, with 147 of those occurring in Europe and Asia, a great way that matches our global footprint. In addition, there's over 137 countries that have set carbon neutrality commitments, setting regulations on reducing production levels of emission. Now what this means is that plastics are not going away. What this means is how the world thinks about materials is transforming. And at our core, even though you've heard from Ulrich and Mac about how we're great with and excelling plastics. At our core, we are an industrial company that specialized in the material handling needs of our customers, and we do that every day. A great example is through a customer called Refork. They came to us for a solution for a plastic fork. They wanted something more environmentally friendly. And we were able to partner with them and build a bio resin version of that. Another great example, as you heard Mac speak to earlier with the PCR content in the sandwich. This is being regulated at 50%, but we're able to meet that demand of 50% without impacting the quality of the product and meeting regulations. Something that some of our customers can't even say that they can do -- I'm sorry, some of our competitors can't even say that they can do. Or Coperion where I've had an opportunity to meet with our customer that we sat down with in Abu Dhabi, and he cares deeply, deeply about sustainability and wanted to create a circular economy closed loop system, and we were able to do this through the recycling equipment. But we not only partner with our customers. We also partner with our communities. Earlier this year, we released a strategic partnership model. A way to engage in a more symbiotic way with our communities, focused on 4 key areas: education, diversity, environment and health. With the hopeful outcome of continuing to engage our employees, increase education and increase exposure to end markets. And we've done this through some of the partnerships that you see here on the screen today. We're doing this through the Arbor Day Foundation, where we're planting trees in areas that need it for reforestation, which also decreases our emissions. We're doing this in a partnership with Purdue University, where we are planting a large scale piece of equipment in their food science center to hopefully attract and engage more engineers specifically for that end market. And we're also doing this through net impact, a global nonprofit that is on more than 400 college campuses worldwide through a case competition, where we are looking to address plastic leakage, which essentially is the plastic that doesn't make it into recycling. This spurred interest not only from the university students. It also spurred interest from the Coca-Cola Company, who approached us and wanted to partner with us on this engagement, creating additional inroads for our employees for diversity of thought and employee engagement. Whether it be planting trees through the Arbor Day Foundation, planting ideas through net impact or hopefully landing a future employee in our plants. Our partnerships are allowing us a great opportunity to start to flex our sustainability muscle. While we have made great strides in our sustainability performance, I know that we have opportunity ahead of us. And with our recent acquisitions, we will return to addressing our materiality assessment and really looking at that and having a better understanding of what our stakeholders want to see us focus on you, what you want to see us focus on. In addition, we know that climate change is important. And for us to really have a true understanding of our approach to climate change, we need to go beyond our already disclosed Scope 1 and 2 emissions and approach our Scope 3 emissions. After we have a better understanding of that, we will begin to set science and a decarbonization goal. And finally, we've heard from the investment community, we recognize that the task force for climate-related financial disclosures or TCFD is very important. That is certainly on our horizon. And we will continue to do everything that Kim mentioned in being a purpose-driven organization we're going to deeply embed diversity, inclusion and all the core values that we highlighted earlier. Now before I turn this over to Rob. I believe that sustainability provides us a tremendous opportunity, not only to manage risk, which I know that many of you look at it as a tool to manage risk. But for us to really lean in and engage with our customers. This is a great tool for us to also pull the lever and engage our employees in new ways, innovate with our customers and most importantly, drive long-term shareholder value. Thank you. Rob?

Good morning. Thanks for joining today. So I'll tell you what, I am extremely proud of what this team has accomplished in the last 9 months since I've joined the company. As Kim and the management team have highlighted, we've been on a transformation journey we made a step function change in the last 6 months. We had a big announcement this morning, as I'm sure you've all seen. We've acquired 4 fantastic businesses in food and recycling. This team continues to perform well and drive top line performance, but also bottom line results through a very dynamic environment. Leo's talked about the operating model and the value that brings each and every day. but it continues to evolve and identify new opportunities for us. And then so as I think about my time here and the 9 months that I've enjoyed here, I think about my past and I came from an organization that was much larger. And I've worked in divisions that had 30,000 employees and at the global level, at over 140,000. And I've certainly worked with some talented people. By tell you what, I couldn't be more excited to work with my global finance team this management team and not just the ones that presented today, but those that are at home listening and driving our business forward each and every day. So as I think about just the business right now, we enter fiscal '23 with a tremendous amount of momentum. We've had strong orders in fiscal '21 and '22. And we now have record backlog entering into fiscal '23. And that gives Kevin myself a tremendous amount of confidence in achieving the targets and the metrics that we laid out just a few weeks ago on our earnings call. I'll talk a bit about the disciplined capital allocation program that we've had here, and we've been disciplined and we'll continue to be disciplined as we move forward and we focus on certainly organic growth but also M&A. And so as Kim highlighted, we did deploy $740 million on these acquisitions. And we'll continue to look at those opportunities as we move forward and ensuring that there bringing nice strong financial returns, but also expanding on our strategic priorities. And then we'll continue to have good, strong shareholder returns. And so we've deployed and returned cash to investors through dividends and share buybacks, and we'll continue to have that profile as we move forward. So as I sit back here today, I think about just the trend that we've been on with execution. I think about the operating model and what that provides to us this very talented organization, this backlog, we are well positioned for long-term growth. So just unpeeling the onion a bit. And so just reflecting on the scale that the industrial businesses have -- that we've built and how they performed over the last several years. You can see that back in 2017, our revenues were just above $1 billion. And as we sit here today, we're closer to $2.7 billion. And certainly, this was enabled by the Milacron acquisition we did in fiscal 2020. but also highlight the organic growth that we saw in the APS business at 7%. Now shifting to earnings. EBITDA was at $178 million in fiscal '17. And that's grown to close to $525 million here in fiscal '22, a CAGR of 24%, again, enabled by the Milacron acquisition. But also look at the EPS CAGR organically, a 9% improvement. And certainly, the HOM has been a significant driver for that performance. Margins, as you can see, 17.3% up 200 basis points to the 19.3% we landed at in fiscal '22. Now the 1 thing I'd highlight is certainly the HOM and volume drove a lot of that. But think about price cost. And so certainly, in fiscal '22, we had some headwinds with price costs entering the year. But together with the global supply chain management team and partnering with LEO and providing best practices and communicating with our commercial teams. We did get price cost covered in the second half of the year and entered fiscal '23 now with backlog that's at 100% plus price cost covered. But when you apply that to the margins, it's certainly dilutive and in '22, those was moved by 160 basis points. So excluding that, our margins would have been up 360 points from fiscal '17. And so as we look at the next few years, you're going to see the trend line will continue on both revenue, margins and EBITDA. So I mentioned backlog does provide a tremendous amount of confidence to Kim and myself on delivering the commitments we made and I'll just provide a little bit more color on the growth that we've seen over the last several years. And certainly, you can see from fiscal '17, backlog goes just above $600 million and now landing at $1.762 billion. It's about 3% growth year-over-year. But if you unpeel the onion, really, the biggest driver is our volume impact. And so volumes were actually up 9% from fiscal '21. We have the benefit of price cost coverage. And we did pick up about $80 million of backlog from the acquisitions of Herbold and Gabler. Now it's excluded from that backlog is the impact and the benefit we'll receive from LINXIS and Peerless as those did close in the first quarter. that benefit of $150 million will be reflected in our Q1 earnings and the numbers we'll show here in just a few months. Now the 1 headwind we did have, so we had favorability in strong volumes and pricing and the acquisitions. But certainly, foreign exchange was a negative impact to us and roughly about $215 million of negative headwind. And so excluding that, we would have been close to $2 billion of backlog. Now as I think about how this flows to revenue, about 75% of this backlog will flow through fiscal '23 revenue. That number is down a bit from what we've had, I'll say, pre supply chain constraints. That number was closer to about 80%. As supply chain continues to normalize, we could see that number getting close to 80% in the back period of the 3-year projections that we've shown. So I talked a bit about the HOM and certainly, the businesses, and Leo's talked as well about the benefits we saw in the P&L but also applies to the balance sheet and working capital and cash flow. Then it starts off with AR on DSO. And so the operating model ensures that we've got the right terms with customers. And on the back office side, we are ensuring that we've got the right invoicing protocols in place and we're invoicing on time and also collecting cash on time. On the payable side, the global supply chain management team has metrics as well and ensuring that we're leveraging the size of Hillenbrand ensuring we've got the right terms with vendors. But also in turn, we've got the right quality of product to take care of our commitments to our customers that we're driving the value that we've signed up for. It applies to inventory to ensure that we've got the right levels of inventory to make sure that again, we can meet the commitments of our customers, but also that we're not tying up inventory and cash sitting on the balance sheet. And so as I reflect on the last 3 years, the industrial businesses have generated cash flow of $740 million. And that approximates 125% of free cash flow conversion, again, supported by some of the impacts of the operating model. But also with some of the best practices we have with some of our large orders in our APS business and in our MTS business with receiving cash advances upfront on large orders. And so in fiscal '21, we did see some of that benefit of getting that cash upfront. And we'll continue about those protocols as we move forward. Now as I think about the next 3 years, cash flow, as Kim's highlighted as well, -- we're anticipating free cash flow of $1 billion over the next period here. Now cash flow conversion will be about 10%. From a quarter-to-quarter perspective, we're going to have some ebbs and flows and lumpiness just with some of the cash advances we see in 1 quarter, but that next quarter, we'll see some execution. But certainly, over that trend line, we're going to be at 100% conversion. As I think about working capital turns, we're targeting 10x. Now really, this gets us back to where we were pre-Milacron. So pre-Milacron, we're at 10. We knew when we acquired this business, there were some opportunities there with really the entire working capital portfolio. And so we have improved that business over the last couple of years. We will continue to improve their working capital turns as well as continue to apply these practices to APS, but also with the acquisitions. We knew with these 4 acquisitions, we had opportunity to improve some of the inventory levels as well as, again, leverage the scale of Hillenbrand and get better terms with some of our suppliers. So I do want to spend a minute on what Hillenbrand would look like in a down cycle and to really have to split our business by these cycles. And the first one I'd highlight would really just be the short-cycle business. primarily our hot runners and aftermarket portfolio. And so this business will be the first to see a downturn and really enter it quickly, but also be the first businesses to react and recover on the upside. Our mid-cycle businesses, which really reflects our injection molding business as well as some of the smaller APS machines will generally follow the flow of a down cycle. And then we have our large APS systems, which are generally part of multibillion dollar investments that customers are making. These orders are placed several years in advance. And so these will generally be the last to see the impact of a downturn and also the last to come out of it. Then you have our food business, which is generally less cyclical in nature as a portfolio. So when you look at our business in whole, we generally have and expect a more stable performance through an economic cycle. So I talked a bit about capital and the discipline that we've had. And so we have been disciplined around capital allocation. We will continue to be disciplined around capital allocation. And our first priority is going to be with organic growth. And we expect about 2% to 2.5% of revenues to be invested organically with over half of that to be focused on innovation and driving growth with the remainder being focused on sustainability and maintenance. And even with those programs and projects, we do expect to have strong financial returns that will continue to drive bottom line performance. Tim talked about the acquisitions and applying $740 million towards these great businesses. We will continue to look at strategic M&A that with good bolt-on businesses that will continue to have strong financial performance, where we do expect to have earnings per share growth in the first 12 months as well as ROIC exceeding our WACC targets within 3 to 5 years. And generally in that 5-year range, if they're more strategic and larger in nature. As I think about return to -- returning capital to shareholders, we've demonstrated in the last 12 months that we've returned $266 million of cash back, about $62 million through dividends and another $204 million through share buybacks. We'll continue to look at share buybacks when our leverage is below our guardrails of [ 1 7 ] but I'd highlight in the last 2 years, we have executed that. And as Kim mentioned, we've deployed and returned $325 million back to shareholders through those buybacks. With that being said, our focus right now will be to pay down debt. And so this slide really demonstrates the commitment that we have made in doing so. And it started with Coperion -- but I'd highlight the Milacron acquisition, where we did spike up to 3.8x. But within 5 quarters, we were at and below our guard rails within the fifth and sixth quarter. So this is here today. Obviously, with these acquisitions, our leverage is closer to 2.8, but we have a very high degree of confidence that we'll be back within our net leverage guardrails of 1.7 to 2.7 by the end of the year. So as you're aware, we did announce the transaction today with long-range capital to sell Batesville -- that deal does include cash of $750 million, but also a subordinated note of $11.5 million for a total transaction of a little over $761 million. We do expect this to close in our second fiscal quarter, which is the first calendar quarter of $23 million. With the size and the nature of Batesville, this will be disclosed as held for sale and reported as discontinued operations here this quarter. And certainly, as we think about guidance, we will be updated guidance on our first quarter earnings call. So just to summarize just financially. Certainly, Kim provided some color and Mac and Ulrich have shared their views and where they see their businesses growing. But our total Hillenbrand business is going to grow at a 5%-plus CAGR over the 3-year time horizon, with margins expanding at least 250 basis points driven from volume leverage, the benefit of the HOM as well as bringing our new companies up to segment-level profitability. And this will all result in double-digit earnings per share growth. And again, I'd highlight free cash flow conversion of 100%, again being deployed towards organic growth, M&A and an attractive return to shareholders. So as I think about where we are, I'll tell you, I'm extremely excited. We've got this fantastic culture of continuous improvement with a track record of performance over the last several years. Again, we've got this record backlog that gives Kevin and myself a tremendous amount of confidence as we enter into fiscal '23. We've been very disciplined around capital, and we'll continue to be disciplined around capital allocation. But with this highly engaged workforce, I'm confident we are well set up for long-term success. So with that, I'm going to invite Kim up for some closing remarks.

All right. So I hope over the course of the last couple of hours, we've been able to share with you why we are so excited about the future that we have laid out for Hillenbrand. Why all of the steps in this journey have been purposeful and working towards the goal of really becoming a large, growing industrial concern, a leading global pure-play company. And we have we have really made great strides towards that in the last year. Large growing markets. We're operating in new markets with new assets that are very closely tied to capabilities that we have as an organization in markets that we believe will grow today and into the future based on many macro secular trends that are working towards the capabilities and skills and assets that we have as an organization. We have a proven operating model that I know from my own personal experience is a repeatable and winning process for our organizations and something that inspires our people that links to our purpose and that creates great value for shareholders. And we have an efficient capital allocation process where we believe we have consistently applied our methodology where we have earned the trust and confidence of our organization and how we will invest and of our shareholder base in how we will invest their dollars in our future together. So we are very excited about what we have in front of you. We will have more time today to take questions that you may have about our organization or some of the information that we've shared here today. We're happy to take those questions and share the knowledge of the team and our excitement for what the future holds. And for now, I think we'll just take a quick a 10-minute break so that we can set up for a Q&A session, and then we will rejoin and we're excited to have the team up in front of you. So thanks, and we'll meet you back here at 11:35. Eastern time. [Break]

We'll now start the Q&A session. Just a reminder, please do submit any questions you may have through the queue. We're going to do our best to get through all of the questions today. But obviously, if there's anything we cannot get to, we will look to follow up with you separately. Okay. So first question, what is the cadence that you expect your long-term goals facility to 5% organic revenue growth and 250 bps of margin expansion in light of near-term economic uncertainty as well as the expected timing of operating synergies from the recently acquired businesses? Bob, do you want to start?

Yes, I can take that one. Yes. So I think about just our fiscal '23 guidance that we gained, but thinking about just some of the softness we saw in the MTS business late in Q4 and early into Q1. Now that was all embedded into our guidance. And so obviously, with our backlog, we have confidence in delivering '23. But what I would expect is in fiscal '24/'25, the MTS business to improve a little bit from their '23 numbers. We'll continue to see aftermarket business, we're expecting mid-single-digit growth in that business -- in those portfolios really over that same trend line. So it's really not a spike in the aftermarket piece. But we'll continue to see the acquisitions, the 4 acquisitions continue to improve but, again, not a spike in any period. So I think I would assume that fiscal '23 cadence that we gave and then really just continued year-over-year performance, but it won't be a hockey stick at any point in time.

And I think one of the things that's important to share is, remember that this business is characterized by short-cycle, medium cycle and long cycle. And when we talk about long cycle, we literally see, as Ulrich mentioned, years in advance as feasibility studies start as outlook consumption needs are conducted. So we have a long, long window into the demand curves. And once those pellets get created in Ulrich's organization, all of that has to move downstream to be produced into engineering plastics, into products downstream. And so we can really see the waves of investment that come in these markets, and that is -- that closeness to the market and the customers in those spaces is what gives us a lot of transparency into the food market or into the plastics market and then, obviously, into recycling coupled with that. In the food market, with the acquisition of LINXIS, that same intimacy with large providers and the customer list that we saw there. Again, we see the long cycles. We see the projects that are coming on the horizon, and we're able to predict those things into the future with these medium- and long-cycle projects.

Great. Moving to a question from the topic of this morning. Can you talk through the net proceeds expected from Batesville and then how we would expect to use those proceeds?

Yes. So as we did highlight, so we do have a gross sale price of $761 million. But with the Batesville business, if you're not aware, it does have a very low tax base. And so we'll see some -- certainly some tax leakage on the sale. We also have, obviously, working capital troughs we're going to be working through. There are some seller costs associated with the transaction. And then finally, I'd highlight Hillenbrand and Batesville was one business. And so there are some shared assets that we have on the facility and some IT systems. And so there are going to be some separation costs that we're going to have to obviously stand up. And so as we sit here today, we think net proceeds will probably be about $500 million, give or take.

And those would all be as we indicated in July, and we'll reiterate here, those proceeds are going to be dedicated to -- those are expected to go towards debt paydown as we indicated in July when we first embarked on this discussion.

Okay. Great. So throughout the day, we did talk about aftermarket and how we see that as a good opportunity for growth over the next 3 years. Ulrich and Matt, can you both talk about some of the areas within your business that you see the most opportunity?

Okay. start. So first of all, in the newly acquired companies -- mentioned in recycling as well as in the food space, that we are a bit below the average segment margin of our plastics and chemicals business. So there are opportunities, no matter of the region, it's just opportunities. And then secondly, in the classical polymer business, as the cycles are moving around the world, we have opportunities, especially when Western companies are investing in the new lines because they are closer to investment and staying with the OEMs, so with us, than going to any pirates. So there are -- basically, we see a double opportunity. And then on top of that, when you look into polymer business, when a customer is investing in new capital equipment, he usually also buys spare parts together with the classical equipment, which is called start-up spinoffs.

Ulrich, could you just mention a little bit about modernization, so people understand that context why it's so important?

Yes, good point. I mean we have -- we have mentioned that we have since many years in the business, in the polymer business basically since the beginning of polymer. So we have a huge baseline of lines around the world. And after some years, in some cases, it's 10 years, it's 15, it's 20 years, these lines need to be upgraded. And here, we have a substantial business, which is also substantially growing, very profitable, where customers are coming to us or we are approaching them and saying, "Hey, your line is not up to up-to-date anymore, and we can increase throughput. We increase quality and so on and so on without replacing the entire equipment. Just a bit of doing on the process section on the motor and so on, you can upgrade. And these are also -- this is for us, right now, a growing market due to our good base of supply lines over many years.

Yes. So I'll tag on. Everything works said, mostly applies to my business, too, but I'll also add a little bit of the data element. I talked about in my presentation data is not just on the commercial tools that our customers use on the aftermarket side, but it's information that we gather internally, and I talked about creating recurring revenue streams with customers. But all that data that's available for us, we're able now to internalize that. We've done a reassessment of our entire product lines, making sure that we have the right things in stock so we can service those customers quicker, better, faster but then also utilizing that data and curating all that data to then to then look at how we produce the product. So we used to talk about digital twin technology and things that we could start to be quicker, better, faster on the design of our equipment but also remote diagnostics. So you take that data. You start to curate it. Now I can -- instead of spending necessarily on a service technician out to the West Coast, I can get on the phone. It's 6 in the morning to solve the customer's problem at the same rate for the most part. So that's a huge benefit for our organization. And I had talked about it through my presentation about how customers are continuing to adopt. And I think there was definitely an acceleration based on the COVID situation where we were able to get in with our customers and really provide some of those solutions for them because no one could enter their facilities. And so now that exposure, no different than how we mitigate our risk on certain things. Our customers are continuing to do the same thing. And so we're seeing an uptick in that area as well.

Great. So obviously, over the last 6 months, we've built some really good scale in our food business through some of the acquisitions that we made. Can we maybe talk about the breakdown of revenue across that food portfolio between traditional snacks, other processed foods and some of the maybe emerging areas like alternative proteins and then what gives us the confidence in the outlook for growth in those spaces?

So the businesses that we acquired, as we've indicated, have a large footprint in the first 3 elements of that snack, confectionary, pet food. Those are primary market focus areas of the companies that we acquire. Also alternative proteins is a part of what they worked on, and it's a part of the existing Coperion business. While that's a smaller segment of the business, the capabilities there exist in both businesses. We'll continue to build upon that not exclusively, but in conjunction with other end markets that we serve. LINXIS, in particular, has a strong footprint in the bakery goods and the pet food areas, which will augment some of the focus areas that Coperion had previously. And Coperion had a high focus in confectionery and also snack foods and cereals in terms of their capabilities. So all of this comes together to create a pretty robust and diverse offering of applications all in that food space that leverage all the same similar technologies.

Great. So another one on M&A. So pro forma, after Batesville, net leverage should be down below 2x within a few quarters. So can you talk through what sort of additional M&A we might be considering in the current year? Or will we be more focused on integrating and further deleveraging? And then maybe talk about longer term what additional capabilities would we be focused on acquiring.

Yes. So maybe I can start and just provide this context. Yes. So all the Batesville proceeds will be used to pay down debt. And as I highlighted, in our disciplined approach on capital, we do focus on deleveraging. And I'm not sure we're going to get to leverage below 2, but it should be in the low 2s by the end of the year. But M&A, I mean, we're not turning that off. Certainly, we'll continue to keep the discipline around what acquisitions expand our strategic focus and what have strong financial returns. And as we know, we did have 4 fantastic acquisitions we did conclude this year, but there are also some that did meet the criteria that we passed out. And so we'll keep that discipline as we move forward.

Yes. And I would just add to that. As Bob mentioned, we don't turn the M&A sign on and off. I think it's important to constantly be engaged and aware of the types of capabilities and technologies that exist. And those you collaborate with, those you compete against, and those parts of the lines that we buy out today because it's critical that, as we determine that we think we can bring some type of differentiated value, that we maintain relationships that put us in a position to potentially cement these relationships for the future. So I would use Gobbler engineering as an example. Gobbler engineering didn't just come on the -- just didn't come from a banker on a list of, hey, go buy x company. This is a partner of ours for a number of years, who built conversion equipment for us, lowered technology extrusion equipment for us that we were buying out and using in our lines. And over a long period of time, as we understood their capabilities, and they understood our needs and we understood their access to the market, we could determine that we, in fact, were a great match for one another, that we augmented one another well. And when they determined that they would sell their company, we were a natural set and a partner in that discussion. And that allowed us to move quickly, to move at appropriate margins and to have already a view of what we might be able to create together through that collaboration. So from our point of view, keeping our -- keeping that M&A hat on all the time is an important -- it's an important enabler for allowing a strategic company to make those types of acquisitions when we're competing with a lot of other buyers out in the marketplace.

Okay. A couple for Matt. Matt, can you talk through what are some of the biggest changes in MTS adoption of the operating model?

That's a good one because I got to with the -- 7 years so prior to the acquisition.

[indiscernible]

Absolutely. Absolutely right. No, I think it was one of those things that we knew as an organization, we needed really some of the guiding principles as a business of the former Milacron. So coming in to Hillenbrand was kind of a landing spot. It was fantastic to finally have a home for our business. And so when we first got into it, the first thing we embraced was the HOM. And that, coupled with our strategic management process, those are 2 elements that we didn't have any development or muscle into the organization. So being able to embrace those with the support that we got from the COEs I think it was one of the major things that allowed us to really benefit throughout the pandemic because we were able to look at productivity. That was forced -- we have targets every year. Having the resources from the COEs, that changed completely the way we looked at manufacturing. I think today, if you've ever been larger manufacturing sites, it will not look anything like it did 7 years ago. And so I think, for us, from an operating cadence or at least the profile, what's changed is that discipline that we put in through the manufacturing process first. And I know Leo talked about it's more than just operating on the plant floor, but that's really where the benefit was for us when we started out. And so we started to see that progress come. And I think that step change is really what allowed us to drive that 200 basis point improvement that we've seen thus far despite all the challenges in inflation and supply chain.

And Matt, maybe an example of how transformative DSM was for you guys, as an example?

Yes, yes. So the global supply management organization, we had a lot of low-hanging fruit, right? So we had not only that across all of the MTS businesses but just the overall structure and maturation of how to deal with global supply management. We were -- I would say we were more of a procurement-based organization. And now we've developed -- put in that COE and that strategy, and we continue to embrace the talent. We brought a lot of external folks in who are really knowledgeable and they know what good looks like. And so that benefit really supported again and elevated us up, that 200 basis point improvement.

Yes, one of the things I think Matt talked about in his section as well is it's the -- and again, I speak about it is that there was the COEs and the plant floor and the visual management and everything that has to go on. And that's very traditional, I think as far as the acquisitions and lean thinking. But the -- understand your business and making choices that strategic management are doing both of those together is really a big part of our playbook and a big part of how acquisition integrate takes place. We don't do it to overwhelm the organization and try to make them do 2 things at once because it's frankly a different audience that you're looking at from an operating and a COE standpoint versus a strategic standpoint. But I think during your section, you mentioned that specifically about we understand and then the making choices is a really critical part of where we go forward.

Great. Thank you. So Matt, one more for you. So maybe talk about -- as we think about '23 and now that we to the growth targets through '25, talk about some of the end market dynamics that you're seeing and what you're maybe thinking about the future.

Yes. I think as we look out to the future, one of the areas that really looks -- that provides some of the expansion that we see on the margin starts in our aftermarket, we've talked a little bit about what we do from a parts, the retrofits, rebuilds as part of our business as well as Ulrich's but then also the digital capabilities. That's one. But from -- if you go back a couple of quarters, we've been talking about it. I know Bob has shared it in our earnings release, we talked about some of those construction markets slowing it towards the middle of the summer, and you saw some of those other markets kind of continued path there. Right now, we don't -- we kind of see that. It has obviously an impact as we look out over the rest of '23. But we ended the year with such a strong backlog. It's nice to be able to buoy that. And then we still have a window here to kind of assess how long this duration will last or at least, call it, the folks are pulling back on decision-making. Pipeline still remains -- it's really strong, and I think that's what we'll see is there will be certainly a time fence at some point where we'll start to see that. And I'm sure Bob and Kim will talk about that during future earnings calls. But right now, again, we know what happened in the summer. We know what came into our fourth quarter. We know how we entered the year with a strong backlog. And so again, I think we'll continue to monitor that as we go.

Great. Thank you. So turning to a question on leverage. Talk to why is 1.7 to 2.7 still the right leverage target especially after moving Batesville and potentially more cyclicality in the portfolio going forward. Just maybe talk about capital structure and how you're thinking about it.

Yes. I mean, again, you think about our just overall capital approach, again, with $1 billion of operating cash flow generation, it's actually pretty consistent. Actually, obviously -- it's a couple of hundred million better than what we've had in the past. And so when you look at just the profile of the cash generation and some of the fundamentals we have with getting cash upfront on large orders as well as the continued improvement in working capital at 10 turns, we're very comfortable with the 1.7 to 2.7 that we don't need to change those net guardrails again, what's the cadence of cash flows and the benefits that we do see improving throughout the organization.

And when the 1.7 to 2.7 was determined, as we did our recession analysis in the organization, and as we began to look at the types of assets and the types of things that we might invest in as an organization, we believe that, that range level has the greatest optionality to be able to execute our strategy. We didn't for -- or at least not for long periods of time, do we want to exist above those guardrails. Below those guardrails, we feel like we can potentially be missing opportunities to either buy back shares or to invest in other internal opportunities. So that was not an arbitrary analysis that was done when we first came up with those guardrails, and many of the influencers that dictated that decision the first time are what we've reevaluated and reassessed as we considered the Batesville sale.

Great. So kind of to that Batesville sale as well, does that prompt us to look at anything differently from an M&A standpoint? Are there any other end markets we might be attracted to? Or how do we think about that going forward?

I would say right now, from a strategic standpoint, we are very focused on integrating the businesses that we have. We do have road maps for those businesses. One of the questions earlier was how do you think about M&A in the markets that you operate in today. We always think in terms of value chain. So when we say value chains, we mean the entire process flow that we participate in and the full system solutions that we offer. Those full system solutions include our branded machinery in them as well as buyouts periodically that we bring into our systems. So we're constantly looking at the technologies that we don't already have in-house to see whether or not those bolt-ons or tuck-ins make sense. I would say, in the near term, we're very focused because we still see opportunity in the new markets that we've entered. Certainly, in the areas of recycling and food, we continue to have a road map. You can imagine the companies that we acquired also had their own strategic road maps that line up with those things. So it's an expanded list of targets that we now have a perspective on. So we'll continue to evaluate that. And I would say for now, we will continue to stay focused where we know we are close adjacency to what we know how to do well, although we always have discussions about the possible that sits out there but that is not on our near-term focus area. Integrating, achieving synergies, tucking in technologies that make us more competitive and integrate our growth.

Great. Looking at the targets for 2025 at the 250 basis points of margin expansion, maybe talk through the drivers there? How much of that is coming from the acquisitions? And maybe how much is coming from just reduced operating leverage and cost reductions?

Yes. So just -- I'll give a little bit of flavor on that, Sam. So the biggest driver of the 250 basis point improvement is certainly going to be the operating model that Leo laid out. We'll also get the benefit of some volume leverage Also, we've talked about the mix -- both Ulrich and Matt talked about the mix and the improvement in the aftermarket piece. And so we'll certainly see an uplift there. And all of those really, especially operating model, is going to continue to improve some of the acquisitions that we've had and get those acquisitions up to segment level margins. But the other components are really going to be inflation and price. And so those are generally going to offset over the 3-year time horizon. And then the last variable is going to be just continued investment into our business.

Great. Maybe talk a little bit more about the cyclicality of the portfolio. Obviously, we presented some of the balance that the portfolio provides us. Talk about kind of historically where we've seen historical peaks and troughs within the business elements and how that -- a little more detail on how those are impacted by cycles.

Yes. So what we have today is a lot different from what we've had in previous cycles. And so we did see a more pronounced decrease historically with a down cycle. But what the difference between today and back several years ago and even during COVID is really just the strength of our backlog as well as the size and the scale of our APS business. And now with Milacron, we do have obviously, a balanced portfolio with the short cycle in mid-cycle. And then obviously, with the food, right, it's going to be less cyclical in nature. And so the big difference is really going to be from the last one. It was a different size business with a different scale of backlog, and now we're at a much different backlog position that we've had historically.

The other thing that I would interject into the cycles discussion is, as we've grown companies like Coperion, as we've more than doubled the polymer business inside Coperion, we did not add capacity inside our own 4 walls. And so part of the concern around cyclicality is, obviously, what have you added in terms of fixed cost that doesn't go away when you have ups and downs in terms of your volume. So what we worked on for the last 3, 4 years was developing partners. So many of the capabilities to achieve the volumes that we've created over the last 3 years have been achieved through driving continuous improvement in our own facilities so that we could increase capacities there. Once we had reached the capacity of those facilities, we leveraged partners that we've developed that we've literally spent years developing. But when we see down cycles coming, and again, the lens on some of these things is very long, but when we see down cycles coming, we have the ability to ratchet down external volume very quickly and the use of those partners quickly if we see those cycles changing. And I think that flexibility is a critical concern when you think about how dramatically a company can be affected by recession or changes in demand. I think the other thing that's important to note is that these are -- especially in the mid-cycle and long cycle businesses, these are multibillion-dollar investments that stretch over years. The time between a feasibility study, a FEED study at the front end and the actual commissioning of a plant can be 4 years in that duration. And so people don't start and stop. It's -- to put it in terms we all understand, you don't start and stop building your house in the middle because something happened to the interest rates. Because the cost of stopping is so detrimental and the damage that, that can do to your projects is so detrimental and getting back in line to try and be ready to catch the volume demands when they come is problematic. And so large global multinational customers often anticipate the volumes and invest through the cycles so that they can be ready when the demand reaches them. And again, that is, I think, a critical input and an important part to understand about the Hillenbrand businesses, especially as it pertains to those $2 billion of plastics businesses that are still a huge part of our basis in industrials.

It's also the reason why I don't have cancellations in our backlog.

Yes.

Great. So maybe kind of to piggyback on that, can you give any update on what you're seeing in the markets today? And any actions that you're taking in response to some of the slowness that we've talked about on our last call?

I would point us back to our quarter 4 commentary around what we saw in the markets. As Matt mentioned, in the MTS segment, we saw softness in the back half of the year, some of that driven -- some of the decision delays in China due to the 0 COVID policy, which I believe came to a close on December 9, not that anyone of us were watching or anything. So that obviously had an impact on us as the just general around recession, which didn't, again, take the pipelines down but did cause some delays in decision-making. And as we've indicated on our APS business, we continue to see -- we've seen very robust pipelines and decisions, and you saw us report quarter 4 orders were at a record level for quarter 4 decisions for our APS business. So that's kind of the color that I would add around that.

[indiscernible]

Great, one more on targets. So thinking about the top line CAGR of 5%-plus. Does that include any future M&A assumptions?

No, no, it doesn't. Those are our, I'll say, organic or pro forma -- pro forma I'll say because it includes the acquisitions that we did, obviously, this quarter, but there's no M&A included in those targets. Those will be about 4% and 6%, that Matt and Ulrich highlighted.

Great. This is maybe a good one for Tory. How do you plan to drive a perception of a plastics company given the environmental issues that can be associated there given that we are a key enabler of solutions that could potentially be a positive for plastics?

Yes, I think that that's -- it's a great question and something that I'm faced with every day. I think when you think about plastics, it is durable plastics. So think about all the examples that we shared today, durable plastics, but also compare that recycling. We're in a great position. And as plastics continue to increase, the demand is not going down for plastics. The increase of even recycled plastics is increasing. So from a PCR perspective or post-consumer recycling material, the demand on both sides of our business is there. We are addressing this, I'd say, very much daily through partnerships, working with our customers, some of the examples of even changing materials. There is demand for plastics. There's demand for materials. And at the core, we are an industrial manufacturing company that has expertise to transform any material. And that's what's really exciting about where we are.

I would just say, Ulrich, maybe you want to talk a little bit about what the development environment has been around materials so that people can get a little flavor about how much that has changed during your tenure with the company.

Yes. So when we talk about polymers, for example, like I mentioned, biopolymers, so biodegradable material because these are 2 different pairs of shoes. We see a huge investment over the last few years into those markets. And basically, we can use -- we can leverage our existing process knowledge, our equipment in order to go also in these more complex solutions. So for example, you can think of a plastic film, which is [ degradating ] -- [ plant-degradating ] over the time because it's used in agricultural field. because it maybe shall cover to keep off some birds or whatever. After a certain time when the plants are big enough, this material is degradating and not causing any harm to the environment. So in that area, there are a lot of developments taking place right now. And for us, it means we can use our, we can leverage our existing technology.

Great. Great. Maybe talk about the EPS structure, given kind of the buildup in recycling and food, which -- obviously, we talked about how complementary that is to the existing plastics business. But talk about how those different parts of the business are structured within the APS segment.

I mean, first of all, we have to say that even though the technology has had some similarity, but the customers are different. When we're talking to a food customer, this is most likely never going to be a polymer customer. So that means, on the front end, we have to have dedicated sales channels to food as well as to plastics. But when it comes to what I mentioned to engineering, to process technology, to the equipment which we are manufacturing, assembly, then suddenly it starts to get interesting. And there, we see a lot of similarities. So therefore, from the organizational point of view, we have exactly organized it like that. Sales channels, service channels to the customers are different. But all the other downstream areas, so when an order, for example, takes place, a development takes place, we have connected the forces in order to develop products together. So for example a feeder which can be used in the polymer area to feed a powder or a pellet can also be used to feed some cereal, for example. The differences are not so big. You just have to make sure that for the food equipment, for the food application, this equipment can be cleaned and processed or cleaned and placed how it's called, which is not required for plastics, but it gives us the opportunity to develop products for both applications in a similar way without losing anything.

Great. All right. So we are a little over time. So with that, I will turn it over to Kim for final comments. And then again, we'll look forward to catching up with everybody here at a later date. But Kim, turn it over to you.

All right. Thank you. So I hope today, we've been able to instill a little bit of the excitement that we feel around the markets that we serve, the growth that we believe is in front of us, how those things directly align with the skills, capabilities, talents and purpose of the Hillenbrand enterprise for the future. We are excited to have announced the changes that transform us into a pure-play industrial today as we begin the next steps of our journey. And I've worked for this company. This was my first job leaving the university 33 years ago, and I've watched the transformation of this company through many, many iterations over time. And I can tell you that I've never been more pleased to be a part of what we've created here. I've never been excited about the future. And I'm thrilled to have a team right along with me that shares that excitement and has infused it into an organization of 9,000 people who intend to deliver on what we've shared with you here today. So thank you very much for being here. Those of you who have come in person and braved the weather reports and all of that, and for those of you who have hung with us on the line, we appreciate your attention and your interest in Hillenbrand. Thank you very much, and have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you.