Ball Strategy and Business Model

Executive Overview

Ball is one of the world’s largest aluminum beverage packaging manufacturers. Founded in 1880 and headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, the company is far more focused today than its historical portfolio might suggest: after completing the sale of Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems in February 2024, Ball is essentially a pure-play aluminum packaging company. Its core business is manufacturing beverage cans, ends, aluminum bottles, and selected adjacent aluminum packaging formats for global brewers, soft-drink bottlers, energy-drink brands, and other beverage producers. Ball reports three main packaging segments: North and Central America, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and South America, giving it a manufacturing footprint that is designed to sit close to major customer filling operations. In FY2024, Ball generated approximately $11.8 billion of revenue from continuing operations. Strategically, Ball is playing a scale-and-execution game: use plant density, customer relationships, metal procurement, sustainability positioning, and manufacturing discipline to earn attractive conversion margins in a high-volume, repeat-purchase business. The central strategic question is less whether aluminum packaging has a future and more whether Ball can improve mix, utilization, cash generation, and returns as a simplified packaging company.

Ball at a Glance

Logo
Common name	Ball
Full legal name	Ball Corporation
Headquarters	Westminster, Colorado, United States
Ownership	Public company; no controlling shareholder disclosed. As disclosed in Ball’s 2025 proxy statement, Vanguard and BlackRock were the principal stockholders reported above 5% ownership.
Ticker	BALL
Exchange	NYSE - New York Stock Exchange
Market Cap	$16.14B
Revenue (FY2024)	$11.80B
Founding / major historical milestones	Founded in 1880 by the Ball brothers; moved to Muncie, Indiana in 1887; expanded from glass containers into metal packaging over the 20th century; acquired Reynolds Metals’ beverage can business in 1998; acquired Schmalbach-Lubeca in 2002; acquired Rexam in 2016; sold Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems in 2024.
Industry or industries	Metal packaging; aluminum beverage packaging
Key products or services	Aluminum beverage cans, can ends, aluminum bottles, selected aluminum cup and specialty packaging formats, packaging design and technical support
Geographic footprint	North and Central America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and South America
Business segments as officially reported	Beverage packaging, North and Central America; Beverage packaging, EMEA; Beverage packaging, South America
Company website	https://www.ball.com

1. What Is the Strategy of Ball?

1. 1a. What Is the Winning Aspiration of Ball?

   Ball’s winning aspiration, especially after the February 2024 sale of Ball Aerospace, is to be a focused global aluminum packaging company that converts its scale, sustainability position, and operating discipline into higher comparable earnings, stronger economic returns, and durable cash generation. Publicly, management has emphasized portfolio simplification, economic value added (EVA), and disciplined capital allocation rather than growth for its own sake. In practical terms, “winning” for Ball means being the preferred aluminum packaging partner for large beverage customers while improving returns on the large asset base required to run the network.

2. 1b. Where Does Ball Play?

   Ball plays in aluminum beverage packaging, not in the full universe of consumer packaging. Its chosen arenas are beverage cans and ends at industrial scale, with selected adjacent formats such as aluminum bottles and cup formats. Geographically, it plays where it has sufficient customer density and plant scale to support attractive economics: North and Central America, EMEA, and South America. Customer-wise, it focuses on global and regional beverage producers, bottlers, brewers, and fillers rather than direct-to-consumer channels.

3. 1c. How Does Ball Plan to Win?

   Ball’s plan to win is built on a combination of regional manufacturing density, long-standing customer relationships, packaging reliability, sustainability positioning, and disciplined conversion economics. The company does not win by owning consumer demand; its customers’ beverage brands do that. Ball instead tries to win by being the safest, most reliable, and most efficient supplier of aluminum packaging in the regions it serves. That includes keeping plants close to customer filling operations, offering specialty can and bottle formats where customers want differentiation, and using contract structures that generally recover aluminum input costs while preserving conversion margin.

4. 1d. What Capabilities Must Ball Have in Place?

   To execute this strategy, Ball needs a narrow but demanding set of capabilities: high-speed manufacturing; quality and food-contact compliance; aluminum sourcing and recycling expertise; capital-project execution for line additions and plant upgrades; sophisticated sales-and-operations planning; and technical collaboration with major beverage customers. It also needs the ability to run a dense regional network with high uptime, low scrap, tight delivery performance, and acceptable working capital.

5. 1e. What Management Systems Does Ball Require?

   Ball’s management system has long been shaped by EVA and by operating metrics that matter in packaging: safety, line utilization, scrap, quality, customer service, cash flow, and return on invested capital. The reporting structure by geography reinforces accountability because pricing, utilization, freight, energy, and customer mix are regional. The company also needs disciplined capital-allocation processes, because small changes in utilization or capex discipline can have a large effect on returns in an asset-heavy manufacturing model.

2. What Are the Current Strategic Initiatives of Ball?

• Complete the portfolio reset after the Ball Aerospace sale. The sale of Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems, completed in February 2024, was the defining strategic move. It simplified Ball into a more focused packaging company and changed the company’s capital-allocation priorities, investor story, and operating model.
• Redeploy capital through deleveraging and shareholder returns. Following the aerospace sale, Ball publicly emphasized the use of proceeds for debt reduction and share repurchases while maintaining the financial flexibility to invest in the packaging business. This is not just a finance action; it is part of the strategic repositioning of Ball as a more focused industrial packaging company.
• Improve utilization and network efficiency. Ball has been operating in a packaging market that went through a period of capacity additions and subsequent normalization. That has made footprint optimization, productivity improvement, and better matching of production to demand important strategic priorities, particularly in mature regions.
• Grow higher-value mix within aluminum packaging. Ball continues to emphasize specialty formats, premium package designs, and categories where cans can keep gaining share, such as energy drinks, ready-to-drink products, and other convenience-oriented beverages. This matters because growth in higher-value mix can improve returns even when total industry volumes are not booming.
• Use sustainability and circularity as a commercial wedge. Ball’s public messaging strongly links its strategy to aluminum’s recyclability and to decarbonization efforts across the value chain. That includes work with customers and suppliers on recycled content, low-carbon aluminum, and policies or systems that can improve recycling rates.
• Drive productivity through manufacturing and digital improvement. Ball’s strategic initiatives also include cost-out programs, operational excellence, and plant-level efficiency. In a business where conversion margins are earned one can at a time, line speed, scrap, maintenance reliability, and labor productivity are strategic issues, not just operational housekeeping.

3. What Is the Business Model of Ball?

What customers actually buy

Ball’s customers buy qualified packaging supply, not just commodity metal. A beverage producer needs cans, ends, graphics, dimensions, coatings, delivery timing, and line compatibility that work on specific filling lines at specific volumes. Once a package is designed and qualified, supply relationships can be sticky because changing suppliers can disrupt production, graphics, and logistics.

Recurring versus one-time revenue

Ball’s revenue is overwhelmingly repeat-driven. This is not a subscription business, but it is a high-frequency industrial replenishment model. Beverage customers reorder constantly, and large accounts often operate under multi-year supply arrangements or recurring purchase patterns. One-time revenue exists in the form of new package launches or customer-backed capacity projects, but the economic core is repeat production volume.

How pricing power works

Ball’s pricing power is layered. It generally does not earn excess economics from raw aluminum price inflation itself, because metal costs are commonly passed through in some form. The real pricing power comes from conversion margin, service reliability, regional supply-demand balance, specialty formats, and the cost of switching for customers whose lines are already qualified. In tight markets, local capacity can matter; in looser markets, utilization and operating discipline become more important.

Why the business mix matters

The business mix matters because not all cans are equally attractive. Specialty cans and certain growth categories can carry better economics than plain-vanilla commodity formats. Geography matters too: South America can offer better structural growth, while North America and parts of Europe can be more mature and more sensitive to utilization. Ball’s reported segment structure reflects that reality.

What drives margin and cash generation

Gross margin is shaped by plant utilization, scrap rates, labor efficiency, energy cost, freight, maintenance discipline, and product mix. Operating margin also depends on overhead control and depreciation from the large manufacturing asset base. Cash generation depends on converting earnings into free cash flow after capital expenditure and working-capital needs. Because Ball is asset-intensive, capital discipline is central: growth projects must earn acceptable returns, and underutilized assets can hurt economics quickly.

Revenue model

Ball’s revenue model is a unit-based industrial manufacturing model. Customers pay for containers and related packaging supply under direct sales relationships, often supported by multi-year agreements, volume commitments, and contractual pass-through mechanisms for key inputs. It is a classic repeat-purchase, high-volume manufacturing business rather than a software, service, rental, or freemium model.

4. What Products and/or Services Does Ball Sell?

• Aluminum beverage cans. This is Ball’s core offering and the main driver of revenue. It includes standard and specialty formats used across beer, carbonated soft drinks, energy drinks, sparkling water, and other beverage categories.
• Can ends and closures. Ends and tabs are critical parts of the package system and are economically important because they are tied directly to beverage can volumes and customer qualification.
• Aluminum bottles and specialty formats. Ball also offers aluminum bottle formats and other differentiated packaging options that can help customers premiumize or stand out on shelf.
• Selected aluminum cup and innovation-led formats. These are strategically interesting because they expand aluminum into adjacent use cases, although they appear smaller than the core can business.
• Technical and design support. Ball works with customers on package design, graphics, line compatibility, sustainability claims, and product launches. That support is part of the value proposition even though the company is fundamentally a manufacturer.

The offerings that appear to matter most economically are still standard and specialty beverage cans and ends sold at scale. Newer or more differentiated formats matter strategically because they can improve mix, reinforce Ball’s sustainability narrative, and deepen customer relationships, but Ball remains primarily a can company.

5. What Are the Key Competitors or Peers of Ball?

Ball competes mainly in regional aluminum beverage packaging markets. The competitor set varies by geography and by package format, and some companies are direct rivals while others are substrate substitutes.

6. What Is the Marketing Strategy of Ball?

Ball’s marketing strategy is primarily business-to-business and account-led. It does not need to build mass consumer brand awareness in the way a beverage company does, because the consumer usually buys Coca-Cola, beer, or an energy drink, not a “Ball” can. As a result, Ball’s marketing is more about sales enablement, technical collaboration, sustainability messaging, and category development than about classic brand advertising.

In practice, that means Ball uses a mix of account-based marketing, innovation showcases, customer technical support, and trade or industry engagement. Sustainability is a major part of the message: aluminum’s recyclability, recycled-content potential, and circular-economy positioning can help customers justify choosing cans over other substrates. Marketing therefore appears to be a supporting capability tied closely to the sales model and customer-development process, rather than a standalone differentiator in the consumer sense.

7. What Are the Key Customer Segments of Ball?

• Global brewers. Beer remains an important end market for aluminum beverage cans, particularly in large-volume geographies.
• Soft-drink bottlers and beverage systems. Carbonated soft drinks and related categories are major volume drivers for standard can formats.
• Energy-drink and functional-beverage brands. This category is strategically attractive because it often uses specialty can sizes and can support better mix.
• Ready-to-drink alcohol and convenience beverage brands. These categories can expand can usage beyond traditional soda and beer.
• Contract fillers and co-packers. In some markets, production and filling are outsourced, so the operational customer may be a contract packer rather than the consumer brand owner.

Ball is diversified across beverage categories and regions, but its customer base is still concentrated in large industrial buyers because the beverage industry itself is concentrated. That makes customer relationships, service reliability, and contract structure especially important. Consumer and government customers are not central to Ball’s model, and distributor channels play a smaller role than direct enterprise relationships.

8. What Is the Sales Model of Ball?

Ball sells primarily through direct relationships with large beverage companies, bottlers, brewers, and fillers. The sales model is built around key-account management, technical qualification, and multi-period supply arrangements rather than transactional spot selling through broad distributor networks. This creates a relatively tight link between commercial teams, plant scheduling, and customer production planning.

• Direct enterprise sales. Ball’s commercial organization works directly with major customers on volume forecasts, graphics, package specifications, and service levels.
• Contract-led revenue. Sales often sit within structured supply relationships that may include volume commitments, pass-through mechanisms for metal costs, and negotiated conversion economics.
• Local delivery matters. Because empty cans are bulky relative to value, channel structure is heavily influenced by freight economics. Plants need to be close enough to customers for delivery to make sense.
• Customer intimacy comes from operations as much as selling. Service failures show up quickly in a just-in-time beverage system, so sales effectiveness depends on planning, plant reliability, and logistics discipline.

This channel structure shapes consultant opportunities. Because Ball mostly sells direct, the highest-value commercial work tends to be pricing architecture, contract design, key-account coverage, demand planning, network optimization, and margin management rather than retail shelf execution.

9. In What Geographies Does Ball Operate?

Ball operates through a regional manufacturing network designed to be close to customer filling activity. Its customer base is multinational, but the economics of the business are highly local because freight, energy, labor, and utilization vary by region.

Ball’s major operating hubs are manufacturing plants and end-making facilities rather than a few centralized mega-sites. That is deliberate. In this industry, network placement is strategy, because bulky empty containers are expensive to ship long distances and beverage customers need reliable local supply.

10. Who Are the Owners of Ball?

Ball is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It does not disclose a controlling shareholder. As reported in its 2025 proxy statement, the principal stockholders above 5% ownership were institutional investors led by Vanguard and BlackRock. Ownership is therefore broadly institutional rather than founder-controlled, family-controlled, or government-controlled.

11. How Is Ball Organized?

At a practical level, Ball is organized around regional beverage-packaging businesses supported by a corporate center. Its official reporting structure is geographic: Beverage packaging, North and Central America; Beverage packaging, EMEA; and Beverage packaging, South America. That makes sense because the core product is similar across regions, but the economics differ based on local customer mix, freight, labor, energy, and utilization.

After the Ball Aerospace divestiture, the company became structurally simpler. Instead of operating a packaging-and-aerospace portfolio, Ball now runs a more focused packaging organization with centralized functions such as finance, procurement, sustainability, technology, and legal supporting the regional operating units.

12. How Does Ball Operate?

Ball’s day-to-day operations are built around synchronizing industrial manufacturing with beverage-customer demand. The company creates value by converting aluminum sheet into finished containers at very high speed, with tight quality tolerances and reliable delivery.

1. Demand planning and scheduling. Ball works with large beverage customers to forecast volume needs by plant, package format, and timing.
2. Procurement. It sources aluminum sheet, coatings, inks, utilities, spare parts, and logistics capacity, often through regional procurement systems.
3. Manufacturing. Plants convert can sheet into cups and bodies, wash and coat them, print graphics, form necks and flanges, produce matching ends, and run quality inspections continuously.
4. Delivery and service. Finished cans and ends are palletized and delivered to customer filling operations, often on schedules that require high service reliability.
5. Scrap recovery and continuous improvement. Metal scrap is valuable, so yield, recovery, and recycling loops matter financially as well as environmentally.

The main operational pressure points are utilization, plant start-up curves, maintenance reliability, scrap, freight cost, energy availability, and sudden shifts in customer demand. In Ball’s business, small operational misses can quickly erode margin because the manufacturing base is capital-intensive and fixed costs are high.

13. What Are the Growth Opportunities for Ball?

• Substrate share gains for aluminum. Ball can grow if more beverage categories shift toward cans or other aluminum formats for convenience, sustainability, and recycling reasons.
• Higher-growth beverage categories. Energy drinks, ready-to-drink alcohol, sparkling water, and other convenience-led categories can support both volume and better mix.
• South America and selected emerging-market expansion. Markets with rising can penetration or stronger packaged-beverage growth offer a more attractive runway than fully mature markets.
• Specialty packaging and premiumization. Specialty sizes, bottle formats, and design-led packaging can lift conversion economics and deepen customer relationships.
• Productivity-led growth. In a mature industrial business, growth does not only come from more units. Better utilization, lower scrap, smarter capex, and improved working capital can all expand value creation.
• Selective portfolio or partnership moves. Ball’s history shows that acquisitions and portfolio reshaping can materially alter its growth path, although such moves tend to be strategic and episodic rather than constant.

The main constraints are beverage-demand cyclicality, customer concentration, regional overcapacity, aluminum and energy cost volatility, currency exposure, and the need to keep investing in manufacturing assets without overbuilding. For Ball, the most realistic growth path is likely a mix of selective volume growth, better mix, and stronger returns from a more focused portfolio.

14. What Is the History of Ball?

1. 1880: Ball was founded by the Ball brothers in Buffalo, New York.
2. 1887: The company moved to Muncie, Indiana, where it became famous for Ball home canning jars.
3. 20th century: Ball gradually evolved from a glass-container company into a broader industrial company with a growing emphasis on metal packaging.
4. 1993: Ball separated its home canning and other consumer products operations through the spin-off of Alltrista.
5. 1998: Ball acquired Reynolds Metals’ beverage can business, expanding its U.S. packaging footprint.
6. 2002: Ball acquired Schmalbach-Lubeca, materially strengthening its presence in Europe.
7. 2016: Ball acquired Rexam in a transformative deal that made the company one of the largest beverage-can producers in the world.
8. 2023 to 2024: Ball agreed to sell Ball Aerospace to BAE Systems in 2023, and the transaction closed in February 2024. That sale reshaped Ball into a more focused aluminum-packaging company.

15. What Are the Key Suppliers to Ball?

Suppliers matter a great deal to Ball because its cost structure and sustainability position are heavily influenced by upstream inputs. The most important supplier category is aluminum can sheet and related metal inputs. Ball also depends on coatings and lining chemicals, inks, lubricants, tabs and end-stock inputs, utilities such as electricity and natural gas, high-speed manufacturing equipment, maintenance and spare-parts vendors, and freight providers.

Ball does not broadly identify all major suppliers in its annual reporting, which is common in strategic procurement categories. What matters structurally is that supplier performance affects cost, quality, and carbon intensity. Access to recycled and low-carbon aluminum, in particular, is strategically important because it influences both margins and Ball’s value proposition to customers that are trying to improve packaging sustainability.

16. How Does the Supply Chain of Ball Function?

Ball’s supply chain is strategically important because the business converts bulky, high-volume products in a network where transport cost and reliability matter. The supply chain is best understood as a regional closed loop rather than a single global pipeline.

• Upstream sourcing. Ball procures aluminum sheet and other critical inputs regionally, because lead times, freight, and qualification requirements matter.
• Manufacturing close to demand. Plants are placed near customer filling corridors to reduce delivery cost and service risk.
• Lean inventory logic. Because empty cans are bulky, warehousing and transportation need tight planning. Excess finished-goods inventory is expensive to handle.
• Outbound logistics. Truck and, where relevant, rail logistics are important to move containers and ends reliably to beverage customers on time.
• Recycling and scrap loops. Plant scrap can be recovered and recycled, and the broader recycling ecosystem matters to the long-term economics of aluminum packaging.

Supply-chain reliability, flexibility, and cost are therefore not back-office issues for Ball; they are central to service levels, customer trust, and conversion-margin protection.

17. What Are the Key Assets of Ball?

Ball is an asset-intensive manufacturer. Its most important assets are the physical and operational systems that let it produce billions of containers reliably and at high speed.

• Manufacturing plants and end-making facilities. These are the backbone of the business and represent major fixed-capital commitments.
• High-speed can lines and tooling. The ability to run efficient, reliable, low-scrap production lines is a core barrier to entry.
• Regional network position. A well-placed plant network near major filling customers is a strategic asset in its own right because freight economics matter so much.
• Customer qualifications and long-standing supply positions. In this industry, approved supplier status on a customer’s filling system is economically valuable.
• Procurement, recycling, and technical know-how. These may not appear on the balance sheet as discrete assets, but they materially affect returns.

Asset intensity raises barriers to entry and can create operating leverage when demand is healthy, but it also means returns are highly sensitive to utilization and capital allocation discipline.

18. What Is the Technology Strategy of Ball?

Ball’s technology strategy is notable, but it is mostly industrial rather than digital-product-oriented. Technology at Ball is primarily about making packaging lighter, cheaper, more reliable, and more sustainable, while improving plant productivity and quality control.

• Process engineering and automation. Ball depends on advanced, high-speed manufacturing systems, inspection equipment, and automation to keep scrap low and uptime high.
• Lightweighting and material efficiency. Reducing metal use per container without compromising performance is an important source of cost and sustainability improvement.
• Packaging innovation. Specialty can sizes, bottle designs, decoration capabilities, and customer-specific formats are part of the commercial technology agenda.
• Digital plant capabilities. Data from manufacturing lines can support maintenance, quality control, throughput improvement, and plant decision-making.
• Sustainability-enabling technology. Ball’s technology agenda also extends to recycled-content improvement, low-carbon aluminum collaboration, and broader circularity efforts.

Technology is therefore more an internal enabler of competitiveness than a separate customer-facing software offering. For Ball, better technology should show up as better yield, higher reliability, improved mix, and stronger sustainability economics.

19. What Is the Finance Strategy of Ball?

Ball’s finance strategy became especially important after the 2024 sale of Ball Aerospace. Publicly, management emphasized using sale proceeds to reduce debt and return capital through share repurchases, while retaining flexibility to invest selectively in the packaging business. That capital-allocation pattern supports the broader strategic shift toward being a more focused packaging company.

• Balance-sheet management. Deleveraging after the aerospace sale was a core priority because it improves flexibility in an asset-heavy industry.
• Shareholder returns. Ball has used repurchases and dividends as part of its capital-allocation framework, especially after the portfolio simplification.
• Disciplined capex. In a business that can overbuild capacity, the returns on plant projects matter enormously. Ball’s finance strategy therefore has to be tightly connected to demand realism and utilization targets.
• Cash conversion and working capital. Aluminum inventory, receivables, and payables can move meaningfully with volumes and metal prices, so working-capital discipline is essential.
• EVA orientation. Ball’s long-standing use of EVA reinforces a finance culture that looks beyond accounting earnings to economic return.

At a high level, Ball’s finance strategy is to convert a simpler corporate portfolio into better returns, not just to report lower leverage. That makes capital allocation a central part of the company’s overall strategy.

20. What Major Acquisitions Has Ball Made?

Ball has used acquisitions selectively but meaningfully. It is not best described as a constant small-deal roll-up; instead, its history includes several large moves that reshaped the company’s scale and geographic coverage.

• Reynolds Metals’ beverage can business (1998). This deal strengthened Ball’s position in U.S. beverage packaging.
• Schmalbach-Lubeca (2002). This acquisition materially expanded Ball’s presence in Europe.
• Rexam (2016). This was the transformational deal in Ball’s modern history, creating one of the world’s largest beverage-can platforms.

Portfolio reshaping has also been important. The announced sale of Ball Aerospace in 2023 closed in February 2024 and was not an acquisition, but it was strategically at least as important as a major deal because it reset Ball’s identity and capital-allocation priorities. The broader pattern is that Ball has used M&A and divestitures to sharpen where it plays, build scale, and simplify the portfolio when needed.

21. How Companies Like Ball Leverage Independent Consultants through Umbrex

Ball’s agenda spans strategy, operations, procurement, sustainability, technology, finance, and organizational design. That is exactly the kind of work where a company may want top-tier consulting capability without bringing in a full traditional consulting team. Umbrex has built a global community of more than 8,000 independent management consultants in over 50 countries, including alumni of McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and other leading firms. Companies like Ball engage Umbrex when they need that level of training across Strategy, Operations, Organization, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Technology, ERP, and AI, but do not need the overhead of a large consulting team.

• Regional footprint and capacity-utilization review. Assess whether Ball’s North America, EMEA, and South America network is optimized for freight, utilization, and customer service.
• Aluminum procurement and supplier strategy. Redesign sourcing, pass-through mechanisms, recycled-content strategy, and supplier-risk management for a more focused packaging portfolio.
• Key-account pricing and contract architecture. Improve price realization, escalation clauses, and commercial terms for specialty formats and customer-specific programs.
• Plant productivity diagnostic. Run a line-by-line review of overall equipment effectiveness, scrap, labor productivity, maintenance, and changeover performance.
• Post-divestiture operating-model redesign. Reassess the size and role of the corporate center, shared services, and decision rights now that Ball is a more focused packaging company.
• Growth strategy for high-value beverage categories. Identify where Ball should prioritize energy drinks, ready-to-drink products, specialty cans, and aluminum bottle opportunities by region.
• Circularity and recycling roadmap. Build a practical strategy around recycled content, low-carbon aluminum, policy scenarios, and customer-facing sustainability propositions.
• Digital manufacturing roadmap. Define a plant-technology plan covering data infrastructure, quality analytics, predictive maintenance, and targeted AI use cases.
• M&A screening, diligence, and integration support. Evaluate packaging assets, partnerships, or regional tuck-ins and support integration planning where relevant.
• Working-capital and cash-conversion improvement. Improve inventory policy, receivables discipline, production planning, and freight coordination to lift free cash flow.