Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Houston. Today is gonna be a challenging day. The wait times at the airport are four and a half hours. We've done a slight alteration to today's schedule. Pretty much a lot of it as we present, so at 8:00 A.M., we'll go through the NAM business. We're allowing around about 40 minutes for the presentation, 20 minutes of Q&A. At 9:00 A.M., we'll move over to the SAR business. Again, same sort of broad format. It says there we're going to leave on the bus at 10:30 A.M. Let's make sure we're on the bus at 10:00 A.M., to be frank, 'cause even at that point, I think we've still got a reasonable chance of missing our flight. Fortunately, there is another couple of flights after ours.
I'm gonna first do a quick introduction on NAM and then hand over to Rob. I think we need to address this question right up front. I'm sure it's on everybody's mind. What has been the impact of the Middle East on our operations? Well, to date, that impact has been very limited. We've had some increase, obviously, in oil and with the increase in oil, we've had an increase in freight costs. Let's go through. I really just wanna concentrate on the top one, 'cause I'm sure you can read this slide. What is the current impact on Sims? Well, very limited disruption to bulk ferrous volumes. We don't send bulk ferrous through all the various choke points in that part of the world.
Our bulk ferrous through to Turkey would go down into South America, Mexico, et cetera, and into Asia, so very limited impact on bulk ferrous at the moment. Containerized non-ferrous, I'd say a very similar story. Yes, there's some more complications with flows, but those flows are continuing fine, and we're seeing a very limited impact on that. Some increase in freight costs, but particularly in non-ferrous, you know, relatively mild to the value of the cargo. Where there are higher shipping costs, obviously with the commercial terms, ultimately, higher shipping costs get passed through to a higher sales price, or they get passed through to a lower buy price. My overall summary is the message I'm giving is a very limited or limited impact on our operations currently.
Where the Middle East conflict ultimately goes, none of us know, and we'll deal with that at the time. I've shown this slide and it's in this form for a couple of years now, and what I wanna do is concentrate on the right-hand side. Again, I'm not going to go through in detail each of NAM's strategy in action, but highlight a couple of points. The first one is on customers and suppliers. We have really done a good job in strengthening the relationship with the domestic mills, and that has given us the optionality which we've exercised to sell domestically. There are some, you know, the premiums for shred over export are really quite worthwhile. We've also really expanded our unprocessed scrap.
Unprocessed scrap has been part of the core of growing our margins, and you'll see that NAM has grown its margins nicely over the last two or three years, and Rob will cover off on that as well. If we turn to operational efficiency, it's all well and good to be buying more unprocessed scrap, but you've got to process it. You'll see that the utilization of our plants, particularly shredders, has grown quite significantly over the last couple of years. We've really managed to take that unprocessed material, do what we do best, and turn it into a higher value product through very good operational efficiency. On the innovative and agile, I think the same theme here. We talk about the commercial flexibility between domestic and export markets.
That has been a key to the success of NAM over the last couple of years, finding the best FOB price to maximize our margins. Lastly, a comment I'll make on investment responsibility. The point I wanna bring out there is this disciplined capital allocation focus on returns and asset utilization. I think TCT, which we were going to see today, but unfortunately we no longer will be with this airport situation, TCT is a really good example of that, a really good disciplined capital allocation, a very good deal that strengthened the balance sheet, and Rob will talk with the asset sales, the land sales that managed to free up, as well. My last slide here is just really to summarize the operational reset for NAM.
I believe we can say that that has been delivered. When I look back at NAM two or three years ago compared to today, the earnings stream is much more consistent and much higher, so lower volatility and higher. It's been achieved through cost structure. We've really, really concentrated on getting the structure that we want and reducing costs in NAM, so that even when market conditions are poor, and they have been over the last couple of years, there has been months where it has been poor, NAM is still making a profit. That's about making sure we've got the right cost base. I've already talked about the greater commercial optionality across domestic and export markets. Really, really, really important for NAM.
Frankly, two or three years ago, we talked about export optionality, but really we just had an export path to market. We didn't have genuine optionality in the domestic market. We now do. There's been a huge focus on cash generation and disciplined capital allocation. That's been really important over the last year or so as we've seen non-ferrous prices increase quite dramatically. By definition, we have to put more money into working capital in that situation, but I believe we've managed that well. The business now, NAM business, with this reset is really positioned, I think, well to capture growth. Rob will talk a lot more about that, and we've got further operational improvements ahead as well. The last thing, we are actively progressing inorganic growth opportunities.
There is plenty of potential for us to get bolt-on acquisitions around our feeder yards. You know, I think over the next couple of years or so, there will be opportunities for things maybe just larger than just feeder yards. I'm going to hand over to Rob now with that introduction.
Well, thank you everybody for coming to Houston as well. Joining me later on in the presentation will be Ryan Smith, our Chief Operating Officer, and Chris Cicconi, our Chief Commercial Officer. Just wanted to give you a flavor of the leadership team that's here. You've seen this before. I'll just give you a little bit of a refresher. NAM operations. We operate in. If you think about our footprint versus our SA Recycling investment, we operate in all of the top 20 cities in the United States, so a little bit more focused on the bigger areas. That was predominantly from our past with historical export optionality. That proximity to people, the proximity to populations has allowed us to continue to grow.
We operate in 19 states, 76 facilities at this point, and 15 shredders. I will point out that two of those shredders are for aluminum only. As Stephen said, we've made significant progress operationally and commercially. You know, if you go back to the first half of 2024 fiscal year, our trading margin, we weren't proud of that. We took a very intense look at what we could do to be different and be better at accomplishing a more reasonable trading margin. You can see that growth trajectory continues, and we're pretty proud of the progress we made to date and the things that we're doing to continue to improve. EBIT falls along with it. As Stephen said, you know, we're doing all of the little things.
It wasn't one silver bullet. It wasn't just trading margin, but cost, SG&A, those sorts of things that we had to sort out as well. Not saying we can't have a safe business as well. Our Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate, a little hiccup and just a small explanation in the middle of 2024 and 2025. We acquired three companies at that time, and our safety culture isn't just slogans and discussions. It's actually the way we operate, making sure that our people return to their homes safely, better perhaps even the evening when they go home. Proud to say our FY 2026 result has us back on the right trajectory of an incredibly good, safe operation.
From a transformation point of view and leadership, we have absolutely strengthened what I would call getting the right people in the right seats, aligned with the right priorities, incentivized, and the right accountable culture. I'll let Ryan and Chris introduce themselves later on, but we've strengthened our team with veterans that understand the industry internally and externally, from a talent perspective. The simplified performance metrics, some people call them KPIs. We call them that. We also kind of use a little joke internally as keep people interested or keep people informed. That was something that wasn't existing in our organization, understanding what is expected of people in their regions, what their contribution is to the overall picture.
The balance in ferrous and non-ferrous of volume and, spread or margin at the same time can be accomplished. That ownership and performance at a regional level, operationally, added to simplified decision-making and having those priorities understood, aligning those priorities to longer term goals of our stakeholders, and simplifying those longer term goals into medium and short-term goals, with our team, with their incentives, reinforcing margin, but also performance reviews. On a leaner and more efficient organization, we've taken our geography, and we've simplified it into three regions. Operationally and commercially, we're very aligned with those outcomes in those regions. It's just, say it this way. There wasn't a peanut butter approach. There wasn't one simplified answer to the solution. It was a very regional approach.
Further to that, as Stephen said and alluded to, our planning process needed an overhaul. We're a complex business. We have a complex customer base. We have a complex sales and operations and not to mention a supply base. We've introduced the S&OP process, and really what it is is a data-driven decision-making and analytics approach to our monthly plans. We're always looking at it as a three-month plan, month zero out through month plus two, looking at not only what we can purchase, what we're capable of processing from a working capital point of view, from a capacity point of view, from an operational cashflow point of view.
Always looking at our logistics capabilities, what we can do to get to market, executing on the orders that we've had. Stephen alluded to it with employees. We have, over the period of time that's looked at in the top right-hand corner, delivered on the synergies from the acquisitions, but we've also looked at the need to haves versus a nice to have. We've simplified our organization structure, got productivity gains out of it as well. As you can see in the bottom right-hand corner, operating costs did jump in 2024. That's in line with our acquisitions. You can see we've been holding the line and fighting inflation with operating costs only going up, slightly less than inflation over the last few years.
All the while, those shredder utilization rates going up, and on the commercial side, the purchase and focus on unprocessed scrap moving up as well. I'm gonna pass this over to Chris to talk to you a little bit more about what they've been doing.
Good morning. As Rob mentioned, my name's Chris Ciccone. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer for NAM. As Stephen pointed to earlier today, we spent a lot of time making certain that we have sales optionality into both the bulk space and into the domestic space. The first two bullet points listed below speak to that specifically. The first bullet point speaks to how we go about knowing where the best price is every single month and selling into that best price. That's through normal market discovery, talking with consumers, having relationships with consumers, and being able to execute with that consumer when it makes sense for us to execute, whether it's bulk or domestically.
It's one thing to have the relationship with the consumer, it's another thing to be able to actually go about accessing the markets from our yards. That's what bullet point two speaks to. We've done quite a bit of that over the past several years, whether it's through rail car investments, shoring up our bulk loading facilities, or simply expanding track space in a lot of our yards. We've made investments to be able to enable us to hit these markets at the right time when there's arbitrage opportunities to get into the domestic space. We'll continue doing that. None of these activities are complete. We'll continue working towards moving more and more, having and creating even greater optionality than we currently have. As of right now, there are...
We can certainly move the majority of our shredded ferrous scrap from the East Coast, which was historically sold into the bulk space, into the domestic market on a dime. We can shift into that from month to month, on a month-to-month basis. The last bullet point here just speaks to the discipline in our buy-sell spreads and our trading margins. The sales of scrap is inherently a global activity. We're selling to people throughout the world. The buying of scrap is much more a local activity. Once we know where the sales pricing is going to land, we have to be extremely disciplined in the local markets in which we're operating to make sure that we're maintaining our margins and expanding our trading margins to the extent that we can.
The last point here speaks to robust and rising ferrous markets. When that occurs in these stronger markets, our shift changes to focusing on maximizing our margin per ton, you know, as the price of scrap increases. The second slide is more of a non-ferrous beast. As you can see, our non-ferrous retail volume has gone up. The first point that we are discussing here relates to our acquisitions of NMT and Alumisource. Along with those acquisitions, we acquired relationships in the consumer space. We acquired people. We acquired the ability to move our retail non-ferrous products into homes that are also being sold by NMT and Alumisource. It has strengthened our customer base in North America, certainly.
Secondly, as Rob alluded to or spoke to, we've increased our unprocessed ferrous scrap. When you're buying unprocessed ferrous scrap and putting it through a shredder, you're pulling out the aluminum, you're pulling out the Zorba. Not only is that helping us on the ferrous side from a trading margin lift, it's also helping us on the non-ferrous side from a trading margin lift as well. The third one is pretty simple. Customer-centric retail expansion. Retail customers are smaller customers. They're coming in with less volume.
We're making our yards more pleasant for them to visit, whether that's by setting up a separate scale, setting up separate places for them to dump, concreting different areas, different by location, but it's enabling us to be a better consumer for some of these peddlers that are coming in and out of the yards. That's all that I have. I'll hand it back over to Rob.
Thanks, Chris. I think the next couple of slides, we just wanna talk to you about the demand side of the domestic market here. I'm gonna adjust this first, from Chris. As you all know, the North American market remains one of the largest and most liquid markets for scrap globally. If you think about Canada right down to Mexico, the size of the scrap market is eclipsing 105-110 million tons, with a consumption of probably around 95 million tons. So a very large market, very much stable industrial post-consumer scrap generation, and the domestic and export channels are supporting that liquidity. We've talked a lot in the last several halves about the EAF growth here in the U.S.
Probably about halfway through the journey in terms of the new capacity that's coming online. It's in excess of 20 million-25 million tons now. There's more projects that are being discussed. All new capacity, all brand-new technology are coming online, in an already dominating EAF market scenario. All driven really, whether you sit on the left or the right side of politics by the tariffs that were put in place really three administrations ago and just accumulating now on the latest double down in tariffs. The U.S. trade measures continue to limit imported supply. You can see that on the right-hand side. The second tranche of 25% that's coming online, making the tariff on steel imports 50% + potentially CVDs and anti-dumping duties as well.
You can see that decline in imports being picked up by the domestic shipment increases as well. There's regular demand growth, and then they're picking up the supply that's not coming in as further opportunity to expand their utilization and obviously their shipments. In the bottom right-hand corner, just a couple of key takeaways on this. We haven't had a wonderful manufacturing environment. In fact, you could probably have said it's a manufacturing recession for a little while. The industrial production is starting to pick up. There is new investment. Our consumerism in this country really drives two-thirds of GDP growth.
You can kind of see some of the big-ticket items we're expecting, and the market is expecting to continue to inch up now that with automobile purchases and so on. Expecting continued growth, continued demand for the new capacity coming online. On the nonferrous side, just equally as excited. This time now, if you go back about seven or eight years, we seem to fill in any voids of your traditional non-residential or residential construction. Seven or eight years ago, it was fulfillment centers and Amazon centers that were being popped up everywhere. That turned to renewable energy and electric vehicle manufacturing facilities.
The mantra is these data centers that are popping up all along the East Coast and D.C., now in the state that you're in today, in Texas, rapid expansion of hyperscalers. These data centers require not only the steel cladding and the infrastructure, several American football fields long or high, but the extensive amount of copper, aluminum, and wire that's required and the draw to the power grids. In the top right-hand corner, you can see the expectation by Bloomberg is that there'll be a growth of over 65 GW implemented to just keep up with the data center draw.
Somebody a lot smarter than I am has tried to calculate what that might mean for demand for copper and aluminum in the bottom right-hand corner, adding about 732,000 tons of aluminum demand and over 750,000 tons of copper demand just in this space outside of any other non-residential demand draw. I'm gonna give it over to Ryan here really quickly to just talk about our operational ability to perform.
Morning. Ryan Smith, Chief Operating Officer for NAM. We've talked frequently this morning about NAM's broad footprint in dense scrap generating areas and our relationship with supplier base and mills, both foreign and domestic. Operations goal in that is to safely maximize through discipline and analytics those advantages. Some prime examples of us doing that are through targeted CapEx into our logistics platform in rail, barge fleets, and transloading capabilities to have the capability to access these markets, both foreign and domestic, as determined. Also, our KPI with shredder utilization, we've talked about that frequently, to maximize the value chain of unprocessed scrap. Highlighted in the chart to the right, you'll see a small dip. That was a well-documented severe weather case that affected collection. Outside of that, the number is trending and continued to trend.
The most important factor to that, I would say, is the last bullet point, where we have the team, we have the discipline and the assets to scale the capacity to support even higher volumes to gain even more value out of that unprocessed material. On the non-ferrous side, we are equally positioned to capture the high value through the non-ferrous value chain. Our NEMT and Alumisource areas are making mill-grade products and shipping direct. They've also given us insight and further access into the domestic market and shown what we could do from an end-to-end capacity operating perspective to maximize margin. That could be through granulation, or that could be through LIBS sortation for three X, five X, six X aluminum. But it has allowed us to maximize. We also talked about shredder utilization on the last slide.
With that and the room to grow comes our need to operate inside the non-ferrous sphere. To maximize our metal recovery plants in all of our 15 shredder locations. Through analytics and discipline yet again, we are looking to have KPIs and targeted CapEx to get higher volumes, higher returns through those processes. That is where I will leave it.
Okay. I was hoping this would be a little bit of a prelude to your visit, but you're all welcome to come back. Perhaps in the next year, we'll have renovated our our new home. You've seen this before, but the purchase price at $66.5 million we think are reasonable EBIT, EBITDA multiple. A creative acquisition you can see there, adding to an already performing region, adding another $25 million of EBITDA and getting this region a 20% return on invested capital. Adding 350,000 tons, consolidating the market to some extent. And then with a third party, very cost-efficient operation you can see here, robust infrastructure in the picture to the right.
We have an 18-year service agreement with two optional five years. Plenty of time to continue to grow in this marketplace. As Steven alluded, we have a lot of land here. We had plans to develop a property on Mayo Shell Road. As we called it internally, this is sort of our no regrets strategy here, where we don't have to put the money into the infrastructure. We have the infrastructure at our hands, and it allows us to monetize some valuable land. Just to describe what you're seeing in the picture in front of you, the vessel with the cranes, that's a no restriction from a beam perspective, a dock. We can load Supramax vessels there on a scheduled basis.
The slip to the left side, upper left-hand side, that's our dedicated space for handysized vessels, so 30,000-ton vessels and/or barge dock. We're currently, and we were planning to show you today, we are loading domestic barges in that location as well. We have two main parts of the yard where you can see right in front, the piles of scrap. That's where we would stage the material for loading into barges or cargo, a bulk cargo, and/or barge. Then just behind that is a processing area where we will be processing mostly cut scrap. On the very left-hand side, just important to know, we have an unsecure area. Inside of that space is regulated and controlled by customs and really the Coast Guard.
It's called a secure area, so it's very much regulated. We also have an area where we can dump and receive scrap from smaller-sized dealers a little bit easier, as Chris said. Kind of wrapping it up then, just looking at the NAM platform for growth. Proud of the results that we've accomplished. We're not done yet, as Chris said. Looking at growing through network expansion, we've called it from a greenfield point of view or small peddler bolt-on acquisitions, our roadmap. Really looking at it regionally, where are we missing material from a catchment point of view?
Where there are logistics opportunities, ferrous and non-ferrous, to be better and improved from a customer service and also from a capital deployed point of view, what else can we do to drive value through our for our investments? There'll be, just like TCT, opportunities where the stars and the moon and the planets all align, and there's two willing parties that see value in a transaction. We're open-minded to those, and we're looking at those opportunities very targeted in our search and those discussions that we're having.
Continue with our operational optimization and that coordination with commercial, what we can buy, what we can process, what we can get to market in a timely way from an operational cash flow and a cash conversion cycle point of view. The recovery improvements, critically important. How do we demanufacture and recycle society's products that they have no use for? Also look after the recycling needs of the industrial area as well. Then the commercial side, as Chris has alluded to, direct marketing to the most profitable homes. We're fascinated with not shutting the door on any customers, but we need to get the best price. We need to get the best net revenue price for all of our products. Obviously keeping a focus on that spread and that margin, adjusting our buy prices accordingly. With that, I will open it up for questions.
Thanks for that. Rob or Chris, can you talk a little bit about how you come to your buy price? Like maybe the regions that you look at when you're thinking about buy price, how sophisticated the person selling to you actually is and how they change where they go based on the buy price?
Sure. Yeah. See, interesting part of this North American market, Lee, is we're self-hedged, so the market adjusts on a monthly basis, calendar basis. So Chris and his team, and I'll let him jump in with probably more details than I can give you, will negotiate what the mills are willing to pay for scrap on that monthly basis. Like any other business, we have tiering on how we buy scrap. It's usually a bit of a reverse commodity, in terms of, you know, more volume commands a higher price on the buy side. But we tier that down right to the lowest common denominator across the scale with a retail peddler. Anything you wanna add to that, Chris?
Sure. I mean, we're at the same sort of pricing model, right, as the...
Yeah. The only thing I'll add is it's a regional strategy, as Rob said. Whether you're in Chicago, whether you're on the East Coast, whether you're on the West, there's different competitive pressures in those regions. We do have competitors that we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. We're making as many decisions to buy scrap as oftentimes we're making to not buy the scrap, if it doesn't make sense from a margin perspective, which you've seen through Rob's presentation and our own. We're walking away from scrap in some instances, prepared scrap mainly, that doesn't make sense.
From a strategic perspective, we're looking at our competitive nature in each region, and we're seeing what our sales prices are, and we're being extremely disciplined on making sure we're making the margins that we need to make in each of those regions.
It seems that I should be thinking about the buy prices. Ultimately, you look at what you can sell the product for, and then you use that to set your buy price. Is that the way to think about it? Rather than the regional, you know, competitive structure and things like that as to what you should be buying scrap at and then sending it around your network.
It largely depends on the sale price setting our buy price. Suffice it to say the buy price is a critically important part of profitability in the scrap industry. You know, our differentiation, we've talked a lot about logistics and whatnot. Your capability to get to these markets is critically important as well. Saving a dollar there, I don't wanna minimize the sale price, but the buy price is counterbalancing as well with that equation.
Sorry, just going on from that. How sophisticated do you think the person selling to you, like for the bulk of your volumes, how sophisticated are they? Like, how much are they paying attention to the price you're getting them versus shopping around with other offers?
It depends, Lee. I think you know, if we go to an industrial account, like a Ford or a GM, they're very sophisticated. They're buying new steel, so they're very in tune with the goings on in the marketplace. Non-ferrous dealers and processors are very sophisticated and in tune. But right down to somebody that cleans out their garage and not sure what they have in their trunk. The range and diversity of our supply base is tremendous.
Just a final one. The Middle East impact on Turkey. Like, have you... Can you give us an idea of what you would be exporting now versus domestic? Because if you look at kind of the media reports, it would seem that Turkey's back buying and paying again for U.S. scrap. Just how that's changed for you would be interesting to know.
Yeah. We have not stopped shipping to Turkey. Turkey is one destination. It's an important destination as a large importer of scrap metal. Our shift has been predominantly to ship Turkey cut grade packages now. They're not able to pay the premium price for shredded. Predominantly as a rebar producer versus competing with a flat rolled producer here in the United States as being able to fetch a lot larger selling price.
That said, you know, as Chris has done a tremendous job diversifying our sales base domestically, our Global Trade Fairs under Michael Gaillard has done a tremendous job also diversifying our sales base internationally as well. Turkey's a very important client to us, but we ship to all over the Mediterranean, all over Europe, and South America and obviously South and Southeast Asia.
I'll ask one more. I think, Steven, when you started off, you said the NAM piece was largely done on the operational front. Yet I get, I guess part of what came through, Rob, from your presentation was there still seems like a decent pathway of operational improvements within NAM. Do you wanna maybe just unpack a little bit of that? Do you think how far along that journey we think we are?
Yeah. The bones and the structure at North America Metal is very solid, very stable at this point. I think the part that we're alluding to is not, you know, we're giving you a granular number, but it's 15 shredders operating at 70%. Not all are equal. There's still some learnings within the organization that we can transfer. The metal and waste side of it is, as you can see with the pure demand for aluminum and copper, a very motivating factor for us. We're paying to get rid of that failure for us to capture that metal, and that's a revenue stream that we can generate from a cost problem today. Those are the sorts of things that we're gonna work on organically.
Ryan, sure, with his team, has capital investments that he wants to make to make us better or more cost-effective as well. Nothing tremendously different than what we've been doing, but just continuing on the improvement side.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Let me wrap it up.
Okay, thank you very much. So the one thing I'd add to that before we moved on to SA Recycling is for the last two to three years. It's a very valid question around, you know, have we met this operating challenge and now where do we go forward? For the last two to three years, we've had a program internally called the Must-Win Battles, which was really around a transformation and turnaround. For NAM, you know, it was simplify Sims, buy right, sell smart, and operate base. We've had a huge focus on that. I guess what I'm trying to say is I believe we've as Rob described it, the bones, the skeleton, the structure is there now delivering that. I guess internally, I'm introducing a new concept, which is about leaving base camp.
That's kind of the imagery around that, is we've done the work, I think, to get ourselves to base camp. We've got ourselves fit. You know, the metaphor will fall apart over eventually. It's now about leaving base camp. It's about earning the right to grow the NAM business with sensible, disciplined capital investment. I think TCT's a good example of that. Yeah, that's the way I kind of differentiate between where we've got over the last two or three years and where we need to go to now. We will move on to SA Recycling. SA Recycling, I'm just gonna do a very brief introduction before Tyler and Mark take over.
SA Recycling has been frankly a fabulous investment for Sims and for Sims shareholders. We have a really strong relationship with them, and we work incredibly well together, and it is a very complementary portfolio. I think the way to simply really think about the portfolio and the way we think about it, if you draw a line across the middle of the U.S., broadly speaking, there's always outliers of it. Across the middle of the U.S., we operate north of that, particularly on the East Coast and through into Chicago and in Northern California. SA Recycling, broadly speaking, operates south of that, all the way from, you know, Southern California, right across the bottom of the states and up into the southeastern states. Our portfolio is incredibly complementary.
The detail within the portfolio is quite different, though, and we'll talk about that over the next period as Tyler and Mark take us through it. You can see, you know, we've laid out our various operations, and I guess the one that stands out the most is that SA Recycling has significantly more shredders to us, and that provides them some advantages. A very complementary portfolio. As shareholders, I believe that's the way you should think about it. We have a portfolio of assets. You're 100% invested in NAM, and you're 50% invested in SA Recycling. If we look at, I guess, a quick summary of those differences, and I'll draw out a couple of points.
In NAM, in North America, we operate very large-scale shredders in highly populated areas. We've got them in Chicago, Jersey, you know, San Francisco. We've got them in Chesapeake. Very highly populated areas and very dense, and not so much very competitive market from a dealer perspective. In addition, we act as SA Recycling's exclusive ferrous broker, and we are their non-ferrous agent. If I look to SA Recycling, and I use the words dense in Sims, and I shouldn't, because SA Recycling has a much denser network of shredders and a very good position of feeder networks feeding into those shredders. For those of you when we moved to Gwinnett last year, in fact, Gwinnett even takes it one step further.
Gwinnett takes non-ferrous, dirty non-ferrous from some other feeder, some other shredders in the SA Recycling network and further processes it there in addition to its own shredders. It's a very hub and spoke and they've been incredibly successful at that. What does this allow us to do when we combine it? We certainly capture value right across the distinct U.S. structures. Various other points I've listed there. The one I really wanna highlight though, which I think going forward is going to be a real feature in ferrous in particular, is around the way we're positioned to benefit from all of the EAF that's growing in the U.S., what's grown over the last couple of years and certainly what's coming through to 2030.
We are well-positioned between the two entities around all of those or virtually all of those EAFs and in a position to really become strategic suppliers and capture that value in the chain from that EAF expansion. I think that's enough talking from me on SA Recycling. I'm gonna hand over to Tyler, first of all, you know, to give us a really good run through around the way he thinks about SA Recycling.
All right. Good morning. Thank you, Stephen, and thank you for having me. My name's Tyler Adams. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at SA Recycling. Let me see, make sure I understand how to work this. All right. As many of you know, SA Recycling is a joint venture with Sims, predominantly operating in the Southern United States. Approximately 4,000 employees across our portfolio, operating in 15 states. Approximately 150 locations. 22 shredders, 9 copper granulating machines, again, across the United States.
Want to start first obviously on the safety side, and this is gonna point a little bit back to what Rob was alluding to when they had a blip in their safety is that when you experience excessive growth, oftentimes it's difficult to implement your safety programs, your safety culture. You can see on the blue line here on the left side, that is the growth trajectory of the number of locations. You know, we're currently operating at over about 10 million man-hours per year. That's adding anywhere from 1-2 million man-hours per year. So as our workforce has grown and our portfolio has grown, it's been a little bit more challenging to institute that safety culture rapidly. That's a huge focus of ours.
You can see on the black line, as that slowly trends up, it's really those new facilities really contributing a little bit more to the recordable rates. Really our legacy business, which is an important point, the more mature our operations are and the longer that our employees are part of our safety program and culture, we're really seeing phenomenal safety results throughout, you know, again, our more mature portfolio. You know, Rob spent a lot of time talking about the U.S. market drivers, I won't spend too much time on it. Certainly we're seeing, you know, robust dynamics in the U.S. domestic market. Everything from copper consumption, aluminum consumption, steel demand, et cetera, very strong dynamics going on in the U.S. domestic market.
Again, multiple administrations now have been supportive of whether it's the Section 232 tariffs and really creating an environment in the U.S. domestic market that we've been really well positioned to capitalize on. That's contributed significantly to our performance over the past several years, and we expect that trend to continue. As Steve alluded to EAF capacity, his slide, you know, we see almost 6 million tons of EAF capacity coming online in the next several years. I'll get into a slide on really our overlay with much of the EAF consumption. Again, our portfolio and our growth strategy largely has been centered around developing a platform that can really feed into the U.S. domestic market, both logistically and from a supply perspective.
I wanna talk a little bit about just our network and you can see here, again, Steven mentioned a little bit about our density. When I look at our operations, you'll really see we have basically 15 operating entities. They're not perfectly aligned with what these circles represent. The circles are really more of our hub and spoke type methodology. The light blue circles being really our feeder yard networks that are sourcing and collecting scrap really at the base foundation of the supply chain, which is from a lot of small customers. This whole network strategy allows us to source, you know, hopefully the cheapest units possible within the marketplace.
While we maintain processing capacity at virtually all of these facilities, it's really centered around feeding into our shredders, feeding into our aluminum hub yards, and really capitalizing on sourcing, again, the cheapest scrap as possible to maintain the highest margins across the platform. I like to look at all of our 15 operating entities almost as individual entrepreneurial type entities in the sense that, you know, they're really fighting and establishing, and this goes back to Lee's question on really setting pricing, but it's really a base level decision-making process where they can establish their buy prices and maintain their margins independently. Really highly effective in again maintaining the margins and reducing our buy price.
Similarly, you know, the unprocessed volume that we're able to procure across this platform, again, because of our, you know, peddler yards and the facilities that are sourcing that material, again, has allowed us to really maintain a very stable trading margin. Also going back to the hub and spoke methodology, you have the hubs and spokes, and we really have a much larger hub network. If I can go back to our network here. Again, you guys went to Gwinnett. We can send in and process all of our ASR from these remote shredders, and it allows us to capitalize on the investment. The investment in our non-ferrous recovery technologies are obviously very large. For example, in Phoenix, Arizona, we also ship and send our other shredder aggregate all the way into Phoenix.
We use our logistics network to capitalize and increase our recoveries, and really get the last bit of metal yield out of that ASR. From a geographical standpoint, here's a map of the EAF footprint, you know, across the United States overlaid with our facilities. Optionality has been brought up, you know, a lot today. When I look at optionality across SA Recycling's portfolio, you know, we have bulk loading access on the West Coast, we have bulk loading access on the East Coast, and we also have bulk loading access in the Gulf. From a bulk perspective, we have plenty of access to Gulf markets. When we look at the domestic demand, we're seeing, again, significant demand in EAFs. From both sides of the country, we can access that domestic market, you know, very easily.
We've been increasing our rail car capacity. You know, our rail car fleet's now pushing close to 1,000 rail cars, internally and privately owned rail cars. That allows us now to shift what was historically an export-oriented business, for example, out of Los Angeles, where we traditionally were loading, you know, anywhere from two to three bulk cargoes per month, we're now down to about one bulk cargo a month, right? Most of that volume is now accessible to the domestic market, and we're feeding those tons all the way back east, really. We're going all the way into the Mississippi River from the West Coast. The footprint really allows us to shift and shuffle our tons and our volume.
Our commercial strategy has been one that now allows us to really flip and shift tons based on what mill outages we're seeing across the country and really where the demand shifts are happening. Oftentimes, the Southeast market could be very strong, or subsequently we may see strength in, for example, the Midwest market. This picture really allows us to kinda shuffle that our supply to really capitalize on changes in the domestic market on a monthly basis. Again, you can see the breakdown just between our domestic volume in the first half, you know, probably the highest percentage of domestic sales volume that we've seen, certainly in recent years.
Talked a little bit about logistics, but again, you can see the rail map here on the left-hand side as well as the river system on the right-hand side. Obviously, you know, I mentioned the bulk loading capacity. You know, we're a very large container shipper. We can ship containers export, obviously across the country, but more importantly, we have access to rail service facilities on the NS, the CSX, the UP, and the BNSF. That, again, really gives us the power and the flexibility to shift our volume to whatever region is where we can maximize our sale price on an FOB basis. We have barge loading capacity in along this river system, so we can ship to the Mississippi River from either the Midwest or from the Gulf.
We're increasing our barge capacity, hopefully in Miami. Again, that will allow us to funnel scrap even from South Florida all the way up into the river system or in the Atlantic. From a consolidation perspective. Excuse me. Strategically, we've been heavily investing and expanding, you know, again, into this optionality, whether it's acquisitions for bulk capacity in the Southeast, or expanding our non-ferrous processing capacity. We've invested tremendously on bolting on to this regional framework that we have that really allows us to take much more of our sourcing, and captively own much of our feedstock across the portfolio. That's been a key strategy of ours over the last decade. Our hubs have been strengthening over the course of the past several years.
Much of that is still coming to fruition, I will say. You know, oftentimes we're buying undercapitalized assets. They're strategic in the sense that they're, you know, they're operations that have been in existence for a long time, but they do require capital investments, and they require, to some extent, a maturation period before we really see them reaching the point of an ROI where maybe our more mature assets are able to achieve. We're seeing significant growth in that area, and I think we have a long runway in terms of opportunities to continue to grow and really expand into the networks that we've created.
If you rewind, you know, maybe, well, really it's about 11 years ago, you wouldn't have seen an operation that SA Recycling operated that would have been east of El Paso, Texas. Today, when you look at our map, obviously, we're almost more concentrated in the east than we are in the west. The size and scope of our business on the East Coast has grown tremendously. You know, really, we have growth opportunities almost in 360 degrees of many of our hub and networks throughout our eastern portfolio. Again, much of our acquisition strategy, you can see we had, you know, roughly, you know, 52 yards added up until about 2020.
We're seeing this accelerated growth cycle where we've been able to add 76 yards, you know, more or less in the last five years alone. It's been accelerated growth, and we're really trying hard to build upon a platform that allows us to, again, exponentially grow and add into, you know, the portfolio that we've been able to establish over the last decade or so. From a utilization perspective, you know, we estimate our shredder utilization capacity somewhere to the tune of about 50%. Really that's based on the idea that, you know, we have a lot of shredders, right? At 22 shredders operating today. We have several idled shredders, you know, across the marketplace.
These are shredders that we've consolidated within a market that, you know, really don't make sense because they're either, again, undercapitalized or they're not in a market where, you know, it makes sense to operate, you know, multiple shredders. We have a tremendous amount of capacity that's available. The question is whether or not the supply is available. When we think about our utilization, it's really more about scrap availability and whether or not, you know, our shredders can sustain at healthy margins an intake level to support, you know, running at a higher utilization rate. We've seen instances, you know, that being said, where maybe a competing shredder goes down, and we'll see our volumes double overnight, and we have zero issues handling, you know, literally double the volume within a one-week period.
We believe we have a tremendous amount of capacity and much of our, again, strategically, we're looking at trying to source and control that feedstock so that we can increase that utilization rate. You know, outside of that, we certainly spending a tremendous amount of CapEx investment just on expanding the opportunities that are existing within the domestic market. There's a lot of talk today and or in the market today about, you know, aluminum demand and copper demand. Again, we've seen a lot of our investments going into high-grading, you know, aluminum and copper products, whether that's investing in our chopping lines or increasing our MRP or non-ferrous shred recovery technologies.
We've recently commissioned our LIBS line, for example, in Gwinnett, specifically targeting on high-grading Zorba into whether that's Vesper and ginger, and then further segregating Vesper into, you know, shredded six X, five X, and three X. Similarly to Alumisource, with our Harriman operation, you know, being able to create and produce shredded three and five X to meet, you know, very specific aluminum demands. Much of our growth strategy is not only in expanding our operations, but improving the operational capacities that exist within our existing locations. We talk a lot about hub and spoke from a ferrous and a shredding capacity, but it's a much different picture when you look at the hub and spoke methodology for our non-ferrous processing yards.
Again, we have a much more complex hub and spoke methodology when you look at our non-ferrous platform, but we've seen tremendous growth in the non-ferrous retail space. Our ability to procure and secure, you know, high-margin non-ferrous items have really allowed us to increase our throughput and our capacity from a non-ferrous, ferrous perspective. Margins have been very healthy on the non-ferrous side, and we're seeing really companies with strong balance sheets and strong liquidity really have been able to, I think, more capitalize on the working capital demands that exist in the non-ferrous space. Obviously, copper trading at $6 requires a tremendous amount of more free cash flow than, you know, copper at $3.
We've been able to really capitalize because of our balance sheet and our access to capital to widen and expand, you know, our availability to get and gather, you know, non-ferrous commodities. I already spoke to, you know, our M&A growth and the runway that we have. You know, we still think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunities out there. We have a very robust acquisition pipeline. It's really coming down to identifying, you know, which ones we wanna prioritize and how quickly we wanna move. There's a tremendous amount of opportunities and consolidation available out in the marketplace, which, you know, we will continue to pursue over the coming years. On that note, I will hand it to Mark Sweetman, and we'll try to leave plenty of time for questions.
Thanks, Tyler. Good morning, everyone. I just have a couple of slides for you here today. I think we covered a lot of SA in the back of the presentation in September, so just really a little refresher on a couple of aspects. SA's balance sheet, you know, I have to say I feel really good about SA's balance sheet and where we're at. We've built up a $2 billion sort of assets over the last 18 years.
You know what I really love about it is that, you know, when you think today with the gearing rates at 0.48 and SA's gearing has basically never exceeded, you know, 50%, we have completed in excess of $1.5 billion worth of acquisitions, you know, since SA was formed. But maybe more importantly from a gearing perspective is about, you know, $1 billion worth of those acquisitions have happened in the last six years. We've closed on about 41 acquisitions over the last six years, where we had 31 in the first 12 years. You know, to be at that pace, you know, with less than 50% gearing, I think is pretty good.
A couple of comments that I always feel are worth making about the balance sheet, especially talking to Australian investors, where you guys are used to using international GAAP. I think one significant difference to US GAAP is our balance sheet here. We're amortizing away all the goodwill. We have, when you look at that AUD 2 billion worth of an asset base, it's worth noting that all of the acquisitions basically that we did through pretty much 2020 of the AUD 190 million worth of goodwill or intangibles left on our balance sheet, only about, I think, AUD 8 million of that relates to acquisitions prior to 2020.
Those assets that existed at 2020 were running an average of about $140 million worth of EBITDA on an annual basis, and there's just no intangible on the balance sheet associated with them. The other, you know, issue that, you know, and Sims obviously we're here in Houston have just liquidated some properties that, you know, have significant off balance sheet value. Well, similarly, you know, SA has a very large property portfolio. We own over 100 of the 147 locations that we're running. Of course, a lot of that property is in places like California and Florida.
As we stand today, you know, I can very conservatively estimate that there's, you know, about $350 million worth of value in excess of the book value of our land. My view on the sustainability of this earnings growth and, you know, in general, how do I feel about where SA is and our potential to, you know, to keep this going? There's just a lot to be very positive about for SA. You know, Tyler's talked about, and we've talked here about the dense regional networks that SA operates with.
You know, when you think about the fact that SA is running 22 ferrous shredders and two aluminum shredders across the country. There are three or four other major players in the U.S. handle approximately, let's say, 5 million tons. You know, SA is handling those tons with 22 shredders, and as we said, with the 50% utilization rate. We have this excess processing capacity. For us, adding additional acquisitions and bolt-on feeder yards, we already have the processing capacity. It gives us the ability to, you know, to adding capacity if you want at a lower cost because the processing cost has already been spent and the processing capital is already there.
You look at SA's growth on the non-ferrous side, you know, over the course of the last 15 years, our non-ferrous business has grown at a much faster rate than the ferrous business. We're now one of the largest, if not the largest, non-ferrous player in the United States. We're handling, you know, about 1.6 billion pounds of non-ferrous a year. A huge portion of that's obviously aluminum. As Tyler mentioned, you know, we've just installed some advanced processing capacity on the East Coast for the aluminum side. You know, there's a lot of excitement around the potential for aluminum in the coming years, which the various speakers have discussed, and we're just really nicely positioned with a high volume of that product for further processing.
Our ability to earn incremental margins is, you know, something to be excited about. We, you know, have, as I did mention, the utilization that we're, you know, really at 50%, and so there's great opportunity there. When you think about the fragmented market and, you know, our acquisitions, we are probably somewhere in the region of maybe about 8% of the business in the United States. There's obviously a lot of runway there. SA exists in 15 states with a lot of excess capacity. There's still, just even domestically here in the U.S., really tremendous runway and tremendous opportunity across the United States, even within our own just existing footprint to add bolt-on acquisitions.
A lot of the acquisitions that we've been doing in the last few years have been just all within the existing footprint, adding feeder yards. You know, there's been commentary here this morning about the incremental ferrous capacity that's being added in the U.S. Obviously, you know, we're extremely well positioned there. You know, I feel certainly very positive about our potential. Maybe the last comment I'd, you know, make in terms of the sustainability of it would be, you know, if you looked at SA, let's say 15 years ago, we were a West Coast export ferrous business.
You know, really in that last 15 years, it's the diversity maybe is the most exciting part about SA, is just the diversity of the platform that has been built in the last 15 years. Where you know, we were you know, in the past, if the export ferrous market on the West Coast had gone in the toilet, we were in a lot of trouble. You know, today, as Tyler commented, we redirect that material domestically, even off the West Coast. We're now you know, I think it's 55% East Coast, 45% West Coast today. We have a huge diversity in our logistics platform. If the export market is there, we have three docks.
You know, if the domestic market is there, we have a big rail and trucking network. If the Mississippi River is frozen up, we can put the material in rail cars. There's a lot of diversity built into the business. Of course, the ferrous, non-ferrous mix, where we would have been 90% ferrous 15 years ago, or seven, 16, 17 years ago. Today, you know, we're almost 50/50. In revenue terms, actually, we're about 55% non-ferrous, 45% ferrous. With that's really it for me. I will turn it over to questions and answers, hopefully. Yeah.
Thanks for that. Tyler, do you wanna talk about the economics of high-grading nonferrous? Can you give us an idea of what it costs you to upgrade the product and what you get from a sales pricing in response to that?
Sure. When you think about high-grading non-ferrous and really value-add items, it really comes down to which category we're talking about, right? Whether that's on the non-ferrous to shred side, which, you know, obviously is largely gonna be mechanically sorted and separated. You know, you're at high volume, high throughput, whether it's LIBS technology, X-ray technology, et cetera, in terms of taking a what would otherwise be a mixed, you know, amalgamation, if you will, of non-ferrous items and segregating out the copper, the stainless, cast aluminum, rod aluminum, et cetera. From a cost perspective on that side, you know, we don't expect that it's really more than a couple pennies, right? It certainly is a significant capital investment.
Outside of that, you know, the machines are largely mechanically separating those products, you know, with relatively minimal amounts of labor, right? You're processing, you know, many tons per hour with, you know, really a marginal increase in your labor demand. Outside of that, when we look at our non-ferrous retail side, this is really where our retail and our peddler business, I think, adds a tremendous amount of value, is that, you know, you're buying across the scales again, a lot of, let's just call it number two copper, right? There's a lot of upgrades that those materials can be cleaned and segregated. You're pulling a lot of non-ferrous items out of your tin piles.
By sourcing a lot of your material from the public, we're able to upgrade and high-grade so many of those non-ferrous items, and that's a significant contributor to our overall margins. When you look at you're paying, say, $0.07 a pound for steel, and out of that you're recovering. We track a lot of metrics on really the upgrades from our tin piles and our steel piles. We'll put a lot of our yards against one another in the sense that, let's see who can upgrade the most material, right? By tracking that metric, you're really adding some of your highest margin commodities throughout our platform are coming right out of our steel piles. But again, that's much more expensive process because it's all manual, right?
You're physically pulling and cutting electrical cords and pulling copper out of refrigerators, you know, et cetera. I would argue that when you're looking at the cost from that perspective, you know, you're more $0.05, $0.06, $0.07 a pound, right? Your upside may be $2, $4, right? You have significantly more upside on that. It's a more labor-intensive process, and it's gonna be more expensive. There's a lot of value to be added from, you know, the manual sortation of non-ferrous items.
Excellent. Thanks. You have in terms of the. You talked about the capital spend to do that. Like, what's the free capacity in that part of the network? I mean, I take it clearly some of it's manual labor, but the equipment that you've installed, is that similar utilization rates to the shredder capacity that you have?
I think in some of this technology, right, and there's been some disruptions in the aluminum market, right? The fires that we've seen in Novelis, for example, have really put a lot of turbulence in the aluminum markets, especially domestically. We haven't necessarily seen the demand catch up to the products that we're capable of producing, right? You know, Vesper, for example, that ReMA now has coined, you know, they didn't even establish the name for that commodity until less than a year ago, right? It was at ReMA 2025, where they even established what this commodity was gonna be called. There's a lot of discussion around it.
There's a lot of hype around it, but I don't know that really the aluminum consumption has caught up to the availability of this product in the marketplace. You know, there's been several months where, you know, we've even taken the line down just for improvements because we haven't seen the demand there yet. When I think about the utilization there, you know. I think long term, there's a lot of demand for those products. We're not really seeing the utilization rate on that equipment yet, even to what its current capacity is. That's really by choice and because of the lack of demand and the premiums that are available for a Vesper product or a shredded six X, for example.
I think even our shredded aluminum business where we're targeting specific sheet products, you know, there's been months where we're intentionally reducing our intake and flows because there's just not a demand for the shredded 3X and 5X, right? At a price point at which it justifies really running at full capacity.
Okay. That makes sense. Rob and Stephen this morning talked about the journey that they've been on with NAM and optimization. Like, where do you see the opportunities in your business to try and push that buy-sell spread?
There's a maturity level that, you know, some of our operations require to get to, right? We still have a tremendous amount of investment capabilities in the existing platform, right? And whether that's, you know, adding shearing capacity for cut grades or adding baling capacity for nonferrous items. Again, we're acquiring oftentimes distressed and undercapitalized assets, and these aren't assets that we can just deploy an unlimited amount of capital in instantaneously, right? We wanna justify them. You know, Rome wasn't built in a day, right? It requires kind of a maturation in the business. We need to grow the volumes enough to support the capital investment. We're seeing there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to invest in our existing assets and our newly acquired assets to really expand the processing capacity.
It's hard to do that until you can justify and prove out the volumes and the intake that you can establish within that business model. You know, we could probably go out and spend double our CapEx budget on improving our existing business, but we can't necessarily justify it yet. That's why I think that we see a lot of the opportunity. It's really more on along the lines of can you grow out a network that can support and justify the CapEx investment within that business.
Yep. You talked in some of the slides just about the number of acquisitions that have been done over the last five years. Like, what do you think is a sensible number that we should be thinking about the next five years?
There's a joke in our company that we've never seen a scrap yard we don't wanna buy. You know, I think that, you know, to the extent that the acquisitions that we continue to purchase and acquire can continue to be accretive to our bottom line, which we expect that they can. As long as we maintain, you know, discipline in our acquisition strategy and we continue to drive and add EBITDA, I would expect that, you know, we're gonna see a continued, you know, growth trajectory.
I really don't even necessarily see it as linear in the sense that the more acquisitions that you can establish, the stronger moat, if you will, that you can build around your platform, then you know, the more exponential you can get from really a growth trajectory, right? You know, we're very aggressive when it comes to that. You know, really my father and my brother Calvin and I, you know, really are negotiating all of these deals, really simultaneously. It almost becomes a challenge as to who can pitch the better deal, right? Then we can go out and really justify which acquisition we wanna prioritize over the other one.
I think I'd also comment to that one. I didn't mention it in terms of the balance sheet and the other side of the balance sheet. We're actually in the process of refinancing our credit facilities at the moment, and that is an update from September. We previously had a you know a property revolver and then like a working capital revolver. We're bringing both of those together and hopefully closing maybe towards the end of this week, so by March 31st. We'll be closing on a AUD 1.25 billion credit facility that'll be made up of a AUD 850 million revolver and a AUD 400 million term loan. That facility will add an additional AUD 200 million worth of capacity.
I think it's probably fair to assume that if we've you know processed $1 billion worth of, and I'm talking more like the enterprise value of it, but let's say $1 billion worth of acquisitions in the last six years, that I would expect the pace to be continued at something similar. Somewhere in that region of $100 million-$150 million worth of acquisitions annually would seem likely based on our past number of years.
And-
Sorry. Just one other thing I'll add is that, you know, we did also liquidate several facilities, especially up in the Ohio and Pennsylvania area. Really that was an effort to really reposition ourselves in what we would consider our more core and strategic markets. We sold the shredder to Tenaris. We sold the shredder in Columbus. We sold, you know, in multiple transactions, we've liquidated and to try to recapture some of that capital so that we could redeploy it elsewhere. We're really trying to again, maintain some type of structure and diligence around, you know, really sticking with our core market areas where we see the most growth opportunities.
On the property side, like you've clearly built a pretty enviable property position. How would you think about surplus property, if any, in that network?
Yeah. We're pretty aggressive about liquidating excess properties. There's really very little excess. There are a couple of small facilities, but there's nothing of significance, unutilized within the portfolio at the moment. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Excellent.
I would say it's relatively insignificant at this point in terms of underutilized properties. You know, we liquidated our the Mansfield property, for example, as part of our Cleveland-Cliffs acquisition of FPT South Florida, right? We're trying to use some of our excess property as leverage in some of these transactions, which we were successful in doing. For the most part, you know, we really don't have a bunch of excess.
Thank you.
Excuse me. My question is on the pricing of copper and aluminum. When trading between COMEX and the LME, how do you approach pricing division across the two markets since both the indexes in the exchange can move very differently? What tools do you use to protect margins and the spread that is attractive but unstable?
You know, obviously the past 18 months, let's say, there's been incredible volatility and arbitrage between the two. To be honest, there's a lot of months where you really just need to get in the back seat and pause, right? You hit the brakes and really try to understand what's going on. Much of our copper is priced, you know, generally on COMEX, especially domestically. During much of that volatility, we saw a lot of people that, you know, no longer wanted to price off COMEX, right? They're shifting their contracts from COMEX to LME-based. You need to manage the spreads, right? The spreads have widened out tremendously, and again, that could change in a moment's notice. Oftentimes, when we experience that extreme volatility, we're really just pausing, right?
We're giving immediate direction to everybody. Look, we're pricing off of the most conservative scenario because we don't wanna be in an overexposed position where we're because the markets are moving so fast, right? Many of our customers are very savvy, right? They're sitting on several loads of copper, and they realize that all of a sudden they can't position themselves, right? Whoever's slowest to understand those market dynamics could get stuck with 5 loads of copper that all of a sudden, what you thought you were selling at $0.25 spreads is now $0.75, right? Really our strategy is always over communicate what's going on in the market and always use the most conservative scenario when it comes to the current market dynamics.
We do have long-term positions, so we lock in many of those spreads. Except we conserve those spreads for what I'll call, like, naturally, natural inbound material. We know that we're buying X number of loads per day, and we know that we have a position on those. We don't wanna waste those positions on, you know, getting one or two, you know, whole loads from one specific customer. We really go and take the most conservative approach to, you know, those dynamics. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Tyler and Mark. Great presentation. Just some concluding remarks from me. The first one is that the queue's gone to four and a half hours at Houston, so I thought we're all looking forward to that little exit out of here. My second comment is, when I sat back and listened to the presentation, the way I think our shareholders should be thinking of how you should be thinking of your investment in North America is, as I said, very much as a portfolio. The combination of Sims and SA Recycling, the way we work together really does deliver us an extremely strong position right across the United States, which is I just think fantastic.
I can say internally, we don't really think of it very much as NAM versus SA Recycling. We don't think of it as a portfolio and how do we think we can benefit across that whole portfolio. I'd like to leave you with that thought. Thank you for the Q&A. That was fantastic. Look, with a little bit of luck and fair wind, we will see each other again on the video tomorrow in Nashville. Plan B would be, we'll maybe have to do it by a split video conference across Nashville and Houston, but let's see how we go. We're gonna all head to the airport now. Thanks very much.