Ron Delia
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Amcor
Okay. Thanks, Michael. Before closing and turning it over to Q&A, just a few minutes on the longer term, starting with our investment case on slide 10. We've maintained a consistent strategy for several years now that's guided how we've evolved our portfolio and developed our capabilities. And as a result, Amcor is better positioned strategically than ever before with a stronger foundation for growth and shareholder value creation.
We've managed the portfolio so that we're now the global leader in most of our chosen segments within the primary packaging space for fast-moving consumer goods and healthcare products. We have absolute and relative scale advantages and a strong track record of performance and that track record relates to our consistent earnings growth and margin expansion and the significant free cash flow we generate every year. And with a strong balance sheet, we're able to use that cash flow to step up investments for growth, including in fiscal '22 where we expect capex will be about 15% higher than last year and we can see that leading to increasing momentum across the business.
At the same time, we're also returning a significant amount of cash to shareholders in the form of regular share repurchases and a growing dividend. Our organic growth has always been a key driver of our overall financial performance and we're actively investing in several areas highlighted on slide 11, that will continue to drive long-term growth. First, we are strategically focused on the most attractive segments and this guides how we prioritize investments back into the business. We'll talk more about these segments in a minute.
Second, we continue to see tremendous opportunities to invest and extend our competitive advantages in emerging markets. We already have a leading emerging markets portfolio that generates roughly $3 billion in annual sales. And we see no shortage of growth opportunities in these markets where we expect mid-single digit growth and good profitability over the long term. Third, innovation and our world-class R&D capabilities remain a clear differentiator for Amcor. Innovation will increasingly contribute to organic growth going forward as we partner with customers to develop more sustainable and high performance solutions for their specific needs and those of their consumers.
Slide 12 takes a closer look at some of those higher growth priority segments. These attractive segments are expected to represent an increasing percentage of our sales mix and contribute to consistent margin expansion. And Amcor has a leading position in each of these categories, which collectively generate over $4 billion in annual sales today and would share a few common features. First, these are large addressable markets, each well over $1 billion and the growth rates are all higher than the average across broader consumer markets, meaning there is significant room to grow.
There are also many opportunities to differentiate across these categories given the need for higher performance features such as barrier, heat resistance and resaleability, which in turn drives higher margins. And in order to fully capitalize on the great potential, we're increasingly allocating capital towards these segments. In healthcare, we're investing debt capacity and capability in Europe and Asia. In this quarter we celebrated the opening of a state-of-the-art medical packaging facility in Singapore to service accelerating demand in the Asia-Pacific region. We recently began ramping up production on new assets [Technical Issues] in coffee segment and we're adding hot fill capacity in our rigid packaging business in North America given the sold-out environment and positive growth outlook. Over time, we expect mid-single digit growth in these segments, which will drive continued sales mix improvement and sustainable margin expansion.
Moving to slide 13, sustainability is increasingly embedded in everything we do and we continue to believe this represents our greatest opportunity for growth and differentiation. We also continue to believe responsible packaging is the answer to addressing concerns around packaging waste. And by responsible packaging, we mean the combination of packaging design, waste management infrastructure and consumer participation.
Amcor, recently commissioned a global survey, which enabled us to hear directly from 12,000 consumers around the world and provided several powerful insights. Among them, recyclability is considered by far the most important environmental attributes of packaging, more important than which material is used or whether the package is reusable. Three-quarters of respondents indicated they would like to recycle more and more than two-thirds said, they're willing to pay more for a product with a package that's recyclable.
Our packaged design efforts have always had the consumer front and center and we're making great progress innovating against those consumer needs. Across our own portfolio, over 95% of our rigid and specialty container packaging -- specialty carton packaging is recyclable today. But our most significant progress over the last few years has been in our Flexible Packaging segment where multiple materials are often required to deliver the required functionality. Today, 76% of our flexible packaging portfolio has a recycle-ready alternative and this represents substantial progress from 56% just two years ago.
An important contributor to this progress has been the launch and commercialization of new product platforms such as AmLite, AmPrima and AmSky. And last week we announced AmFiber, a new platform of performance paper packaging. These technology platforms will be leveraged across our global footprint across multiple categories and from multiple customers to provide the more sustainable and high performing packaging consumers are looking for and to drive growth and margin expansion for Amcor.
Responsible packaging is a critical element of our sustainability agenda. But every company's environmental footprint goes beyond the products it makes. And to lead the way and reach our own ambitious goals, we launched Amcor's EnviroAction program in 2018. And since then we reduced the environmental impact of our operations by continuously exploring new and more impactful ways to reduce emissions, waste and water at every location.
The value created for our customers and the environment through our work on a range of ESG initiatives has been recognized by several independent organizations and Amcor is continuing to demonstrate industry leadership. Last week, we increased our ambitions again by committing to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 with near and long-term targets aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative. We're excited to step up our ambitions to further reduce the carbon footprint of our products and operations and to support our customers, as they strive to meet their own goals for functional high-performance packaging with the lowest possible environmental impact.
And finally, on slide 15 to summarize, Amcor delivered a solid result through the first half as we continue to perform well through challenging and dynamic operating conditions and we've confidently reaffirmed our full-year guidance. We've also increased cash returns to shareholders and expect to return more than $1.3 billion in fiscal '22 through dividends and share repurchases. And looking over the longer term, we've built a strong foundation for growth and value creation over the last several years. We're investing to capture that growth and we're building on our sustainability progress as we use Science Based Targets to define our journey to net zero emissions.
And with that operator, we'll open the line for questions.
