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Danny Allouche

Thanks, Deon, and hello, everyone. I'll first provide some additional color on our fourth quarter results and our progress against our long-term financial targets, then walk you through our 2025 outlook.
In the fourth quarter, we delivered strong adjusted earnings per share of $2.38, in line with our expectations, up sequentially and up 10% compared to prior year driven by benefits from higher volume and productivity. Compared to prior year, sales were up 3.5% ex currency and 3.3% on an organic basis as mid-single-digit volume growth was partially offset by deflation related price reductions.
Adjusted EBITDA margins were strong at 16.4% in the quarter, up 40 basis points compared to prior year, with adjusted EBITDA dollars up 6% compared to prior year. Regarding productivity, we delivered $14 million of restructuring savings in the fourth quarter and $63 million of savings for the full year, continuing our track record of optimizing our cost structure while investing to drive profitable growth.
We generated strong adjusted free cash flow of $280 million in the fourth quarter and $700 million in the full year, with solid working capital results, resulting in a 100% adjusted free cash flow conversion.
As you can see on Slide 12, we continue to execute our disciplined capital allocation strategy. Our balance sheet remains strong with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of two at the end of the year. This enables us to continue to invest organically in our business steadily and consistently grow our dividend, make acquisitions that help accelerate our strategies and strategically buy back stock to maximize our returns.
In 2024, we returned $525 million to our shareholders through the combination of dividends and share repurchases. In the fourth quarter, we significantly accelerated our pace of share buyback, purchasing roughly 700,000 shares, more than half of our re-purchases for the year. We will continue to execute our capital allocation strategy and take advantage of market opportunities.
Turning to the segment results for the fourth quarter. Materials Group sales were up 4% ex-currency and on an organic basis, driven by mid-single-digit volume growth, partially offset by deflation related price reductions. Organically, high-value categories were up high single digits, driven by strength in specialty and durable labels and the base business was up low single digits. Overall, label volume was modestly below our expectations, driven by softer demand and customer managing their year-end working capital.
Looking at label materials organic volume trends versus prior year in the quarter, North America was up mid-single digits, Europe was up low single digits, Asia Pacific was up low single digits and Latin America was up mid-single digits. Also, compared to Q4 last year on an organic basis, Graphics and Reflective sales were up low single -- low to single digits, and performance tapes and materials were comparable to prior year.
Materials Group delivered a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 17% in the fourth quarter, up 80 basis points compared to prior year, driven by higher volume and mix and benefits from productivity partially offset by the net impact of pricing and raw material input costs.
Regarding raw material costs. Globally, we saw very modest deflation sequentially in our fourth quarter and our current outlook is for a similar trend sequentially in the first quarter. Where applicable, we have passed along price reductions to our customers.
Shifting now to Solutions Group. Sales were up 3% ex-currency and on an organic basis, with base solutions up mid-teens in line with our expectations as the pair of volume remained normalized, and our high-value solutions were down mid-single digits below our expectations. Within high-value solutions, Vestcom declined low single digits, but grew late in the quarter, and we expect strong growth in the first half of 2025, partially driven by the new agreement we signed with a leading US health solution company that Deon mentioned earlier.
In our enterprise-wide intelligent labels, while sales were up 9% for the year, sales were down low single digits for the fourth quarter, below our expectations, with strong growth in the materials channel and mid-single-digit decline in solutions. We delivered roughly 15% growth in apparel and more than 40% in general retail were more than offset by a decline in logistics.
Solutions Group delivered strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.8%, down 40 basis points compared to prior year as benefits from productivity and higher volume were more than offset by higher employee-related costs, investment and mix.
Now shifting to our long-term performance. Some of you may recall that we embarked on our transformation strategy back in 2012, initially focused on strengthening our foundation, improving profitability and shoring up our portfolio and balance sheet. We then began to take a much more segmented approach to our strategy, improving our growth and margins in our base business as well as significantly increasing our focus on higher-value products and solutions as a mean to further accelerate our growth and expand margins.
Initially, our focus was organic until we earn the right to leverage strategic acquisitions as a means to accelerate our strategies as well as to enter attractive adjacencies. And over the last couple of years, we've begun to build a new chapter, including leveraging both of our businesses to connect the physical and digital.
Throughout this journey, we have relied on our heritage of excellent execution, continuous improvement and productivity which enables us to consistently deliver strong results in multiple ways and in various scenarios, all while we continue to deploy capital in a disciplined manner, invest organically in our business, consistently grow our dividend, acquire attractive assets at good value and earn a strong return on our share buyback. This approach continues to serve us well in the 2025 cycle despite having to manage through compounding crisis.
For the first 4 years of this cycle, our sales growth, excluding currency, was up 7% annually, above our target of 5%, including 2 points of growth from M&A, a key part of our strategy over the long term. Over the same period, organic growth was up 5% annually with high-value categories contributing roughly 3 points of growth. Adjusted EBITDA dollars grew roughly 9% annually excluding currency translation, with adjusted EBITDA margin expanding 110 basis points to 16.4% in 2024, ahead of targets.
As for adjusted EPS, we delivered 7.4% growth annually. While our reported results are lower than we have targeted for the cycle, we are achieving our strategic objectives in this period. Excluding currency and the impact of acquisition intangibles amortization expense for acquisitions that closed after our target was established, adjusted EPS growth was up more than 10% annually.
Finally, our return on total capital in 2024 was strong at 16%, continuing to be top quartile. As always, our focus will continue to be on optimizing the balance of growth, margin and capital efficiency to drive incremental EVA over the long term.
Now shifting to our outlook for 2025. For 2025, overall, we anticipate continued GDP plus growth and expanding margins with adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $9.80 to $10.20, up 7% to 12%, excluding the impact of currency translation. We have outlined the full year contributing factors on Slide 13 of our supplemental presentation materials.
To highlight a few of the key drivers of our guidance, we anticipate 3% to 4% organic sales growth with mid-single-digit volume growth. We expect our base business will continue to grow at roughly GDP levels in high-value categories to grow high single digits.
Assuming current rates, we estimate a roughly $30 million headwind to operating income from currency translation. We estimate restructuring savings net of transition costs of roughly $40 million. We will continue to target roughly 100% adjusted free cash flow conversion, and we will be migrating for our 52- or 53-week fiscal year to a calendar year, which will add roughly two extra working days at the end of Q4 2025.
In Q1, we expect adjusted earnings per share will be up slightly versus prior year, including a large currency headwind. As 2025 progresses, we expect the pace of earnings growth will increase each quarter driven by high-value solutions, rollouts, base label volume growth and productivity actions earn a year, taking full effect in the second half.
In summary, we delivered strong results in 2024 at the high end of our original guidance and expect to deliver strong results in the year ahead. At our 2025 mid-point, we will deliver sales and growth -- sales growth and margin above our long-term targets and generate approximately 9% adjusted EPS CAGR ex-currency all while keeping our top quartile returns. This also positions us well to deliver on the most recent 2028 targets we laid out in September. We remain confident in our ability to continue to deliver exceptional value to all of our stakeholders through our strategies of long-term profitable growth and disciplined capital allocation.
Now we'll open up the call for your questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) George Staphos, Bank of America.

George Staphos

Thanks everybody. Good morning. My question, can you talk specifically about what your assumptions are for growth and logistics within IL for 2025 and just, given the headlines today, there's news about a large a customer of yours seeing a large pull back in volume from one of their customers. What effect if any is that having on your your IL growth plans, both in '25 and longer term? Thank you.

Deon Stander

Hi, George. This is Deon. Thank you for the question. We, our plan for particularly in logistics segment is that we would assume slight decline between '24 and '25. And, and specifically as it relates to this customer, the impact that, that you mentioned, we have already factored that in discussion with our customer into our 10% to 15% il growth range.
As part of our partnership agreement, we have aligned volumes for 2024 from 2,424 to 2025. And and we're not assuming any further adoptions during the 2025 calendar, as I pointed out, more likely that those adoptions will continue in 2026. I will say that the experiences that we've learned through this initial adoption, this first category and the taking the learners that we've taken from it are going to really provide impetus for us as we go to the pilot phase that we with all the other major logistics providers.

Operator

Thank you. [George] --

Yeah. Hey guys, good morning. Danny, welcome to the call and that's also great news. Yeah, that you shared on Greg as well. So I guess first off on the material segment, you know, what are you embedding for core sales growth for 2025? And how does that break down between volume and price?

Deon Stander

Hi, [George]. Yeah. So our assumptions for 2025 and our guidance range are really based at the macro starting point and we're factoring in not much change in GDP overall. Between '24 and '25 based on the recent most recent forecast. And actually more particularly if you look at the forecast for retail volumes globally, they are slightly up in '25 versus '24 but still roughly at that 1% level, overall feedback from our customers actually.
And from end customers, depending on, of course, the end segment largely mirrors this and I suspect that reflects some of the degree of caution that is still out there both at the macro level, some of the policy level and some of the geo-political level as well. So our 3% to 4% range assumes GDP growth in the base businesses at the company level, somewhat adjusted for apparel, cannibalization in IL and in the materials business. We're assuming kind of mid single digit volume growth and a little bit of price within that.

Operator

Thank you. Jeffrey Zekauskas, JP Morgan Chase.

Jeffrey John Zekauskas

Thanks very much. Can you talk about raw material cost inflation or deflation for 2025?

Danny Allouche

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. So overall from a material inflation perspective, we're seeing a stable environment slight, like I said in my remarks, slightly slight deflation in Q4 and we expect to be slight deflation also in Q1 but overall stable environment into 2025. From a raw material price relationship. We think that the cycle is pretty much over. And so we are kind of caught up that said on a year over year basis, we still see some raw negative raw material pricing. In our model in our model for 2025. Given the time lag between the time we pass prices on a significant deflation we saw at the end of at the end of 2023.
So if you think about it, we typically said there was one to two quarter lag between when we see deflation, we passed the pricing and so we, we're modeling some of that into Q1 and a little bit into Q2 of 2025. And after that, we see it stable stabilizing going forward. We'll continue to manage kind of price raw material relationship in the way we've done in the past we over the cycle, we expect them to be neutral and that kind of benefiting from our cost out activities.

Operator

Matt Roberts, Raymond James.

Matthew Burke Robert

Good morning everybody. Thank you for the time. Yeah, I wanted to ask on apparel and general retail. So general retail accelerated in four other from 20% to 40%. Maybe you could talk about what drove that acceleration and how we should think about that progression in 2025 and similarly apparel decelerated. It seems you have easy comps on apparel in first half. So how should we think about apparel? Growth in first half versus the second half. Basically, I'm just, trying to get confident on the acceleration in each of those given kind of each end market and an intelligent label, intelligent labels has some unique timing impacts. Thanks.

Deon Stander

Thanks, Matt. Specifically, in general retail, we continue to see an acceleration for IL volume as we went through the year. And that's largely on a very large retailer continuing to drive compliance in the various categories that they've laid out for IL adoption.
And while they may announce them in time, it takes a while for those compliance to come through the supplier base. And we're actively involved in supporting that supplier base as they drive through that compliance piece.
On apparel, overall, we certainly saw significant volume in '24 at largely because of the comparison the normalization of volume in '24 relative to '23, when we saw the de-stocking. And particularly, in IL apparel, as we got towards the end of the year, we still had very strong IR growth in apparel. Not quite as strong as we'd anticipated in the fourth quarter because there's one or two key program pieces that just moved slightly from a timing perspective into this year.
When I look into general retail for 2025, we're going to continue to see strong growth as we move forward as that compliance both continues to accelerate, and new other general merchandise retailers are planned through the cycle for some degree of early adoption as well.
And then we look at apparel overall, we're expecting low double-digit growth in apparel in 2025 for IL. That's based on the apparel core business, the market itself being somewhat around GDP to GDP minus typically as we see because of the cannibalization of the core business from IL.
But in IL, specifically, that low double-digit performance is predicated on existing customers that we're rolling out during last year and continuing into this year. And then we have on the upside in that 10% to 15% range I talked about for IL. We also have some new customers planned for adoptions we go sequentially through the year, and those can always be adjusted for timing. We're real confidence in our apparel performance overall as we look at IL.
I will make the point that when you look at our IL volumes overall for 2025 in this 10% to 15% range, this 10% range for us represents known programs rolling now, delivering volume right now, we have a real strong line of sight to that. The additional 5% growth as we go through that is unknown programs that are likely to adopt. But again, there may be some timing variances as we go through that. And this gives us the confidence that in the long term, we're going to continue to see that 15% plus growth rate over the long term.

Danny Allouche

Yeah. And I can just jump in. just to make sure -- because I think your question was a little bit of our first half, second half post on apparel IL. So we do expect growth in Apparel IL to accelerate throughout the year as some of these programs that Deon mentioned kind of rolling out.

Operator

John McNulty, BMO Capital Markets.

John Patrick McNulty

Yeah, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So maybe just a follow-up on that logistics customer with the announcement that was out today from them. Can you help us to think about the cadence of how those volume declines may roll through as we look through 2025? Is it lumpy? Or is it relatively smooth? Have you seen any of that impact already, whether it was in the fourth quarter or in early '25?
Thanks.

Deon Stander

Thanks John. From our perspective, it's very difficult to call how that volume performance and that particular customers transition will happen during the year. They've given some guidance on that, I think more generally and thematically our strength and the way we're thinking about that partnership with them, we know what volumes we have aligned with them for 2024. We've built that into our guidance and we're going to and their commitment to us is on that, that volume leverage which sorry on that volume level, which continues to provide us significant majority share in that account as we move forward.

Operator

Josh Spector, UBS.

Joshua David Spector

Yeah, thank you. Good morning. I just wanted to ask on solutions margins. I know sequentially kind of messy but you know, sales are up a pretty decent amount, but the EBITDA increase is relatively small. So I don't know if how much you attribute that to mixed cost or you know, increase investments that you're doing. So one, what happened in the quarter and then two as you look over the next year with the rollouts that we're talking about, what do you think the incremental margins look like in solutions?

Danny Allouche

Yeah, thanks Josh. Yeah. So I think you called the biggest issue which was really mixed in the quarter. You know, we, as you heard the high value solutions within -- so high value solution within solutions was down in the digits. And so that was a big impact. The other thing there were, there was also a small relatively smaller kind of double, double cost on our Mexico plant that we've, that we've started in the quarter.
And so that was another another impact I would call out that margin year over year or for the full year have been up from '23 to '24. And to your last point of your question, we do expect margins to continue to expand next year as we accelerate kind of a high value segment growth. So, the for example, the Ves program that Dan mentioned earlier, il etcetera, all these elements should drive our growth, our our margin higher in 2024, in 2025. Sorry.

John Eble

And maybe just one quick thing to add Josh. You know, as Danny mentioned, the mix that we expect next year should potentially result in a higher flow through than average. And I think you kind of know in this business, we tend to tend to need about two points of growth on the top line to cover general inflation in most years. And then we tend to see about a 30% flow through after that on volume.
So depending on where the growth comes from and obviously, with the expectations for better growth in the high value categories, we could see a little bit above average in 2025.

Operator

Mike Roxland, Tourist Securities.

Michael Roxland

Thank you. Deon, Gary, John, (inaudible) my questions, I'm happy to hear that Greg is doing better.
Yeah, you mentioned I just wanted to follow up again on the logistics customer. You mentioned that you're, the logistics customers committed to those volumes for you this year. And that, that those volumes obviously include the adjustment that they made even more of their customers. But the volumes last year, from that, from logistics customer were also choppy. I mean, I'm sure they went into the year, maybe promised you a certain level.
The their business is a little choppy and they didn't execute at the level that you expected it to. So what gives you the confidence that they're going to be able to keep the volumes, they promised you this year. And then just secondly, quickly you met a couple of quarters ago, you mentioned a delay in some customer deployments. Now getting pushed from '24 to '25 give a better sense now of when they should be deployed in '25 [communicating] wise the vertical they will (inaudible)
thank you.

Deon Stander

Yeah. Thanks, Mike. On the confidence on the logistics volume, I think we have high confidence based on what we know now. We've learned a lot, as I said, Mike, through this kind of first adoption, and that learning in that kind of first and second year really matters when you come to sort of being able to plan out what is going to happen sequentially from a volume perspective, service priority and also innovation that we bring to bear in the count as we continue to help them progress on their IL journey as well.
I think overall, we did see some choppiness in the volume as I talked about during 2024 and some of the products didn't have RFID packages enabled packages they went through. That's all been resolved now.
And I contend that the their use of the technology has significantly continued to improve, and they're talking about, as you know, in their journey, moving it not just from where it is in the last mile fulfillment center to the van, to the delivery point and ultimately actually back to the source as well. And we're involved in all those segments of their development and providing both innovation support and actually expertise as well.
Referring to your second question around delays overall. It's not atypical, Mike, that we see. And particularly in some programs, they may ship one or two quarters depending on how the timing of those goes. We've seen that historically right since the start of this journey. There's nothing material or significant in any of those changes.
And it's part of the reasons why when I look forward into this year to 2025, and I talked about that an incremental 5% growth, we have planned those rollouts based on what we know and discussions we've had and the successful pilots and trials per month, two months of the quarter, depending, and that's why we have this range of sort of 10% to 15%.
I will also just take a step back, Mike, if you don't mind, and just reflect just the history of what we've talked about for the business, and I really want to reemphasize the strength of the franchise that we have. We don't have just one lever that I know a lot of attention is on IL. We have multiple high-value categories that we talked about. We have Vestcom, we have Embelex, we have our materials group, high-value segments.
These contribute currently more than we currently have for Isle. IL has the greatest growth profile, but each one of these is going to grow significantly in 2025 on existing and new customers that we're going to roll out. And I talk briefly around what we saw for our Embelex business and for our Vestcom business as well.
But that's not just the only leave on growth. We also have our base business really anchored in consumer staples, providing GDP growth around the world -- we have a really strong balance sheet that we're able to use to leverage in a disciplined way to drive earnings. We have a talented team and our market positions are really strong as well. And if you think about over the past 10 years plus years, how we've been able to deliver them matter the circumstances, we have the levers in our franchise to be able to pull either singularly or collectively, that will continue to allow us to deliver double-digit earnings growth as we move forward.

Operator

Michael Leithesd, Barclays.

Michael Leithead

Great, thanks, good morning. Can you maybe just speak more to the initial capital allocation plans this year? I think in the slide, you talked about ample capacity for M&A and buy back. So I guess just how does the M&A pipeline currently look and then the debt coming due this year? Do you intend to refinance all of that or pay some of that off with cash generation?

Danny Allouche

Thanks Michael. Yes. So overall, our capital allocation strategy really hasn't changed and remained the same as what we've did over the last few years. You know, we've always said that we would like to have a strong balance sheet that we can pursue strategic acquisitions that can help accelerate our strategies or growth margins, et cetera as well as take, take advantage of market dislocations.
And so for 2025 we will continue with the same playbook, we can continue to pursue M&A that is strategic to us that we can acquire attractive valuation as well as take advantage of market dislocations in the market to share buyback like we've done in the fourth quarter. So I don't see anything materially changing. We're in a great spot to be able to drive earnings growth as well. As well as the EVA and we'll continue to execute on that.

Deon Stander

Michael, let me just double click on something Danny said at the end there. I just want to re-emphasize how as an organization, both the leadership level through the organization by program, by business unit, we are truly EVA focused, really makes sure that we optimize this balance of growth, margin and capital can see. And we have the balance sheet to be able to do that to drive any one of those levers as we see as well as a really strong foundation for the way that we can continue to compound earnings as we move forward.

John Eble

And one thing just to add on the on the debt side, we yes, we do have EUR500 million coming due in March. So that'll be repaid and we actually issued a EUR500 million of senior notes in early November in the same regard at 3.75% to full repayment. So don't anticipate needing to, to raise in the near term.

Danny Allouche

Yeah. Thanks, John. One just to link one other thing to this is that you can see on our supplemental materials as well that we're calling out interest -- net interest expense. We expect that to be slightly up next year because of that refinancing that we did at a higher rate than the bond that came due -- that is coming due in March.

Operator

Thank you. Anthony Pettinari, Citi.

Bryan Burgmeier

Good morning. It's actually Bryan Burgmeier sitting in for Anthony. Thank you for taking the question. Just there's a lot of discussion on potential tariffs in the United States right now. Just wondering if you can remind us, does Avery ship a meaningful amount of products from Canada and Mexico in or out of the United States? I know there's an RFID facility that ever built in Mexico. I'm not sure if those come into the United States or if they could face tariffs. Just general thoughts on how tariffs could impact Avery as we watch these play out.
Thank you.

Deon Stander

Thanks, Bryan. Let me start at the high level. Our direct exposure to tariffs is very limited. One of the strengths of our business is that we're really good at scenario planning. We've proven that over time. And no matter where there are policy changes, geopolitical risk, we tend to have scenarios planned out for those.
I'd also say as a point of general reference, we largely procure and produce and sell in the same region. And when we procure internationally, we have multiple suppliers that we're able to leverage. I essentially say our global network is also allows us to have the capability to flex production wherever we need to that's a really strong key competitive advantage for us.
Let me talk a bit specifically about -- I know there's been two discussions on two sort of areas. So one, around China. China, for us, about half of our China business is actually in our Materials group, which the vast majority of which is basically sold is labeled in the Chinese market for label consumption in the Chinese market.
The other half is in our apparel business, which we add tags and labels to garments that are largely exported to the United States and Europe. And we have seen and supported our brands over the last 10, 15 years and helping them manage migration if they see fit, to want to move production from one country like China to another like Vietnam or to Honduras, we are able -- we enable that to do that given the strength of our network around the world.
If there may be some modest indirect exposure in this area to tariffs in the event that higher costs on apparel effectively translate to somewhat the lower -- that may be a possibility.
In Mexico, specifically, we do have some more direct exposure there. We just recently built, opened and established and are running our New Mexico Intelligent Labels facility. But as part of our scenario planning that we have enough network capacity if we need to choose to move it around, including in the United States, should we need to do that as well overall, Bryan.

Operator

George Staphos, Bank of America.

George Staphos

Yeah, hi. I wanted to go to Slide 7, and ask kind of a two part question Vestcom. Before I turn back into Q. So you say that in total high value categories this year will be 2 points to 3.5 points of volume. Il assuming your forecasts are accurate, that's 1 points to 1.5 points as I take it, which would leave 1 points to 2 points residual.
If I then look at materials, materials are saying you're looking for mid single digit growth out of your high value categories of materials, which is about over a third of the materials segment and that in turn is whatever three quarters of the company. So that's another point plus that doesn't leave a whole lot of growth. I've done the math right? For growth in Embelex or Vestcom even though it sounds like you're positive on both. And certainly Vestcom, you talked about a new pharmacy customer that you're bringing in.
So help me square that circle in terms of if there is growth in Embelex and Vestcom, while we're not necessarily seeing maybe more growth in high value. relatedly, can you talk about what the growth in Vestcom should be? You gave some call up later. What growth are you looking for Vestcom this year? And what's the contribution to earnings there?
Thank you, guys.

Deon Stander

All right. Let me see if I can unpack that, George. I capture those questions. So let me just start with Embelex overall. We expect Embelex to grow double digits this year. high single digits to low double digits, depending on kind of the performance overall. And that's really anchored in a couple of things.
The actual industry for personalized engagement and fan engagement has continued to be very strong throughout the years as well. And we've seen that industry -- our own business growing 15% plus over the last 6 years. particularly in this year, we're going to continue to see further rollouts of new customers.
And this is both at the product level. So imagine in performance athletic, the badges, the branding, the that go on to some of our prior performance to lead customers, particularly as one performance that led cut to recover as they move through this year.
On the Team Sports side, where we continue to win new team sports for decoration, both names and numbers, whether it's in Europe or North America and some of the professional sports league. And then also actually in stadium as we're providing the full customization facilities in many of the professional leagues.
Now a great example that you into the Intuit Stadium and saw exactly how our customized personalized in Stadium, which we drive (inaudible), which we drive not only the hardware to software, but all the technology and the actual physical apparel itself.
So we anticipate Embelex will continue to grow. There's also the additional piece of the preparation of the start of the World Cup 26, which always adds another boost typically for a very large sporting event.
Turning to Vestcom. Yes, certainly, our new customer that we want to continue and roll out during the first half will add substantially to what we believe Vestcom is going to sort of grow, again, high single to low double-digit growth for this year. It's not the only customer they've won. They're going to continue to make progress with some new customers and particularly on the Media Solutions side as we leverage this increasing scale of that network where we touch 60,000-plus stores to drive media sales for both CPGs and retailers themselves.
And so when you look at our range overall, Geroge, the upper end of our range, could it be stronger based on everything going away. Yes. But I'd just reinforce at the upper end of our range, we're looking at 12% earnings growth overall. I think, John, did I capture all the questions there? I think I did.

Operator

Thank you, Mr. Ebel. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to you for closing remarks.

John Eble

Thanks Janine.
We are confident we will continue to make strong progress against our long term goals in 2025. With the overarching objective to deliver GDP plus growth. And top quartile returns a recipe for strong EVA growth, making superior value creation possible. Thank you for joining today. This now concludes our call.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the conference call for today. Thank you for your presentation and you may now disconnect.