What we do. We are a North American provider of molecular-level chemical solutions. That may sound like a mouthful, but it's pretty simple from a business model, understanding perspective. We buy basic chemistry from all over the world. We get that chemistry and those molecules, we bring them to our very large manufacturing facility in Kansas, and we have a smaller specialized manufacturing facility in Western Canada, just outside of Vancouver, in a city called Delta, British Columbia. We get those chemicals and molecules, and under the supervision of our 240 scientists, chemists, engineers, technicians, we put them in reaction tanks, and we perform chemical reactions under very specific profiles in terms of pressure and temperature and time, and we create new molecules.
Those molecules get used in chemical solutions that we sell to our customers, and I'll get to that in a minute. So those are the more specialized chemicals. There are other chemicals that get blended mechanically under ambient temperature and pressure, and those are sent to blending facilities that we have throughout North America. You'll notice through that narrative, I'm implying that we're vertically integrated. Our company, through its founders and executive management team, even before my time, guys like Ken Zinger were—he's a co-founder of the company, but him and the company spent a lot of time and made some big investments to create a vertically integrated business model. So we manufacture our own chemistry.
We don't have to pay or rely on a third party, so we capture the margins along the way, and we're able to cater and tailor our chemical solution to the very specific requirements of our customers. Again, it's a very unique feature in terms of us being vertically integrated to support both, both our production chemical business and our drilling fluid business, and I'll get into that in a sec. We have a decentralized business model, where we have two large divisions in each of Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., we have a production chemical division and a drilling fluids division, and similarly in Canada, a production chemical division and drilling fluids division. Each of those divisions is run by autonomous leaders that have the ability to hire, fire, run their businesses the way they like.
We work at the executive level and with the board to formulate guardrails in terms of margin requirements, capital efficiency, Return on Average Capital Employed, health and safety, and after that, they get to run their businesses the way they want. There are some centralized functions that we don't compromise on. Things like that would include, financial reporting, legal, HR is a bit of a hybrid, internal controls, centralized, and risk management, centralized. Everything else is decentralized. We have a very resilient and countercyclical balance sheet.
Again, a lot of people talk about this, but you'll notice when I describe the business, we don't build complicated machinery, or equipment that gets manufactured and then gets rented or sold, and then you have to worry about things going obsolete or having to invest heavily in capital, in terms of CapEx. That's not the way our business works. When we grow, we invest in working capital, and then when the flip side happens, when revenue levels decline or activity levels decline, then we harvest that working capital. That working capital, that inventory, does not go obsolete. It is not perishable, and as a result, you'll see that when things go, when activity levels actually pause or decline, our balance sheet improves.
The evidence of that is during each of the downturns over the last 10, 15 years, we've harvested working capital and improved our balance sheet. So, for example, in March of 2020, when COVID started, we were drawn $93 million on our credit facility. By the end of that year, we were sitting on $18 million in cash. We harvested $110 million. That allowed us to continue to invest in the business, keep our best and brightest, go after some of the best and brightest that were being shed from our competitors, continue to invest in maintenance CapEx, and do all those things to allow us to have increased, almost doubled, our market share from the low teens to about 23% in U.S. drilling fluids.
In production chemicals, got in from the probably low double digits to the high double digits currently, and similarly in Canada, continued our very high market share of 35%-40% in drilling fluids and, tied for number one in production chemicals in the mid-30s as well. All of this, we talk about revenue, gross margin, EBITDA a lot, but for anybody that's interested in investing in the company, you should understand that the primary financial philosophy revolves around cash flow. It's all about cash flow per share, cash-on-cash yield when we're looking at valuation and thinking about capital allocation.
If you look at the numbers, we generated CAD 210 million of true free cash flow last year, and that 210, even on our market cap, that's closer to CAD 1.65 billion, is in the higher end of the 10%-15% cash-on-cash yield. So, cash-on-cash yield in the 13% range. We have ROACE in the 23% range, ROIC in the 21%-22% range, and we trade at 5-5.5, probably closer to the higher end of that right now, and 5-5.5x EV to EBITDA. And our closest competitor just got taken out by Schlumberger. That's a company called ChampionX, and it got taken out at 10x. So this information on this slide is a little bit dated.
Our market, our share price right now is about CAD 7.10-CAD 7.15 per share, all these numbers are Canadian, for a market cap of closer to CAD 1.65 billion, enterprise value of just over CAD 2 billion. We pay a dividend representing a 12% payout ratio and an implied yield that's just under 2%. We're rated B ( positive and B positive by each of DBRS and S&P, respectively, and very strong balance sheet, where we actually have more working capital value than debt. So if you're actually to take a look at our total debt and compare it to our working capital, we have CAD 200 million more of working capital than our total debt. So in terms of how we do it and what our infrastructure looks like, we lead with technology.
We have nine lab facilities throughout North America, over 100 reactors and blend tanks, over 100 patents and trademarks, and as I said, over 240 technically oriented staff, representing over 10% of our 2,300 employees, where two-thirds of them are in the U.S., one-third in Canada. If you look at our trailing twelve months revenue, we did $2.2 billion. But as I was talking about, we've been growing steadily, and if you look at our Q1 revenue and annualize that, it's closer to a $2.4 billion run rate, where just under 70% of that is in the U.S. and about 30% in Canada.
We're in all the most prolific basins in the U.S. and Canada, and we are market share leaders by a long shot in the most important plays, like the Permian and the Montney and Duvernay in Canada. In terms of how we do it, to make it very simple, we work with our customers to identify their requirements, provide them with chemical solution recommendations, provide that chemistry to the customer's drilling site or production site, and then we go back. We go back every day, every week, every month. We get samples. We bring those samples to our labs. We identify what's working well, what's not, what needs to be changed, and then we bring those recommendations back to the customers, and we continue that full service, full circle of service. So that's how we do it.
What we actually do is we help our customers solve their problems so that they could maximize their drilling efficiency, so, for example, their speed. We maximize their production efficiency by removing corrosive chemistry, by removing H2S, by removing scale that would otherwise gum up the infrastructure. It's our technology and our drilling fluid that has allowed the industry to do more with less. If you picture it, these guys drill horizontals that used to go out 2-3 miles. They're going out 3-4 miles plus, and it's very complicated drilling that requires very complicated chemistry, and that's what we provide, and we're in good company. You'll see our competitive landscape in a few slides, but between us, Baker Hughes, Halliburton and ChampionX, we represent the vast majority of the market.
As I was talking about, you can see graphically on slide six that these laterals have gone more and more complicated by going further and further out, and drilling speeds have gotten faster and faster. The nice thing about our chemistry and our product offering is that it's mission-critical for our customers, but it only represents 5-10, maybe over 10% in some cases, when you include production chemicals, of their overall costs. So, we've done very well over the last few years, as we said we were going to. Over the last year, that's been driven off of high levels of service intensity, not price increases, and our customers are getting good value for what they're paying. And again, I talked about the market share growth.
It's pretty easy to use third-party information on the bottom left to, to calculate what that market share is in drilling fluids. You could see that our Canadian drilling fluids business has constantly been in that 35%-40% range, representing a number one market share. Our drilling fluids business in the U.S. has organically, again, organically, not through M&A, almost doubled, actually doubled their market share over the last seven or eight years, from the low double digits to about 23%. In terms of production chemicals, we rely, and a lot of our research analysts, rely on third-party data, including a very reputable third-party research firm called Kimberlite, that ranks us tied for number one in production chemicals in Canada, at about 35% equal to ChampionX.
In the U.S., in the mid-20s market share, and that's just below ChampionX and above Baker Hughes. I talked about the decentralized model. For those of you that are investors or are serious about becoming investors and have relationships with our big customers, that would include all of the major production companies. Many of those may not even know who CES Energy Solutions is if you ask them. But if you ask them who AES is, drilling fluids, Canadian Energy Services, drilling fluids, production chemicals, guys like PureChem and JACAM Catalyst, they'll know exactly who we are. We like it that way because other companies try to bundle products, and that works in very large international markets, but that doesn't work well in North America.
We know that because guys like Ken and the executives have grown up in this industry over the last 15-35 years, depending on the executive, and they know that that's the way it works best with the guys and gals that call the business, i.e., the production engineers and the drilling engineers. So we've done very well in terms of market share because we're very good at what we do, and we service the heck out of our customers better than anybody else. The evidence of that adoption of that technology and reputation is in the fact that when you look at the vast majority of our revenue that comes from public companies, over 80% of that revenue comes from companies with market caps of $10 billion-$700 billion.
These are results-oriented companies that look for, need, and pay up for technology leaders just like us. In terms of the capital intensity, I talked from a narrative perspective, but just look at the numbers. We typically spend 2%-3% of our revenue on CapEx, cash CapEx, and that number is about CAD 70 million, which is tiny compared to our CAD 2.4 billion run rate, and is way lower than any other most other industrials or energy services companies that you'll find. And again, you could see that we've spent the money where we need it in all the big categories. I talked about our resilient and countercyclical balance sheet, and here you can see it graphically. We did it in 2020.
I've been the CFO for six years, and I was CES's main banker for about six years prior to that. And, you would see if you followed this back, the exact same thing happened during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and it also happened during the last energy downturn in 2015-2016. So this allows us to be very comfortable with our balance sheet. We tend to be at the midpoint or low end of our targeted leverage of 1.0-1.5x , and, have a bond that we did about a month ago that puts out maturities to 2029. And again, very strong financial momentum.
When we presented during the last Sidoti conference in the second half of last year, we told people, "Look, we're putting up strong margins in that 13.5%-14.5% range." We had to increase that range, that target range to 14%-15%. And as we've said publicly, we're going to probably revise that target again when we report Q2 in the second week of August. It's our last quarter had an EBITDA margin of 17.3%. Two quarters ago, it was 15.3%. Three quarters ago, it was 15.0%. So you should expect an increase in that target range. And like I said, it's all about free cash flow, and we talk a lot about P&L metrics, but the most important thing is cash.
After that big free cash flow generation, that allows us to invest in the company, CapEx, growth CapEx, wherever needed, invest in working capital, and very importantly, we strongly believe that our shares are undervalued by any metric. That's why we bought just under 9% of the company last year at an average price of CAD 2.80s per share. Our normal course issuer bid was completed because we bought shares aggressively, and we'll renew that on July 21st. When we do, we'll communicate that again, because we've been saying this publicly, that we intend on buying back up to 10% of the float of the company... over the next 12 months. From a capitalization perspective, I talked about a lot of these metrics. Suffice it to say, we're very comfortable with our capital structure.
We continue to believe our stock is undervalued. The Street started understanding that in the second half of last year. For those of you that didn't see it, we also will be included in the S&P/TSX Composite Index that was announced by Dow Jones Indices after market close last Friday. And, the graph on the bottom is accurate, bottom right is accurate as per our last quarter. But, as of May 14th, that was revised, where we now have our bond that doesn't mature until 2029. So Kyle, that's all I had in terms of prepared remarks. Happy to open it up for any questions, and Ken and I could do our best at answering them.
Yeah, that's great, Tony. Appreciate the overview for CES. A lot of good information. We were already starting to get some questions coming in, but just for anybody else who's listening in, feel free to submit questions with the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and we'll try and get to as many of those as we can. So maybe with the first question, you highlighted how the company has been able to grow market share while competing against some of the really large companies in the industry. Maybe can you talk about how do you compete and win market share against those companies? And maybe you know what stands out for CES and how you can attract those types of customers?
Well, the biggest-
I think it's... Go ahead, Tony.
Yeah, I'll start off. The biggest thing is we don't, like, from a financial perspective and metric perspective, we talk about market share, but we don't chase market share. What ends up happening is we provide as good a technology service as our bigger competitors, but all we do is chemistry. So unlike the Bakers, the Halliburton, and even ChampionX to a certain extent, they have other product lines, and they're way bigger than us. This is an entrepreneurial company that was started by Ken and a couple of partners over 20 years ago, and it continues to be that way. So we're able to use our technology to compete very handily with our bigger competitors. But because we're more service oriented, and we're more entrepreneurial, we react more effectively than our peers.
We're able to attract, retain, and pay our biggest producers more than our peers. For us, a CAD 20 million or CAD 30 million account is a big account, and if there's something that's very positive or an investment that needs to be made in inventory, investment, or a call that needs to be done by the top of the house, like Ken, we get on that. The four of us do, me, Ken, and our divisional presidents. We react very quickly and are able to service our customers better than our peers do.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And then the next one, we've seen a lot of consolidation in the industry. Maybe thinking about this from two different perspectives, when you think about the upstream consolidation that we've seen, one, does that affect CES? And then secondly, do you see opportunities for CES to grow through M&A?
Ken, why don't you handle that one?
Sure. Yeah, so far to date, the M&A that's taken place in the market has not had a, I would say, neither a negative nor a positive. We work for most of these companies, almost all the big ones that, who have generally been the acquirers. And in some cases, it's opened doors and allowed us to get a look at businesses where we didn't have business prior. 'Cause every time they do one of these big M&A deals, the first thing they look at is synergy, and part of that synergy is service providers.
Where there's companies where we couldn't get in or haven't been able to break a door down, when they get acquired by some of these bigger companies, we can generally get a shot at taking a look at their work, finding solutions for their work, and showing them what we can do.
Okay, that's helpful. And, you know, one thing that you touched on, Tony, a few times was just maybe just the disconnect in valuation and looking at the price chart. You know, we have seen a rise in the last couple of months, but maybe just more broadly, I wonder if you could touch on maybe what the market is missing and kind of why there's a disconnect there.
Yeah. I, like, I think they're not missing much now because they now appreciate that we're delivering what we said we were gonna deliver: margin growth, revenue growth, market share growth, most importantly, cash flow. One of the biggest things, Kyle, that we noticed was when we were telling this story for the last year and a half, we knew what it was gonna do, and that's why we bought a whole bunch of shares, and frankly, that's why management and a couple of directors collectively own 5.5%. What happened, though, was, a lot of the bigger investors loved the story, loved the metrics, loved the cash flow, loved the margin, loved the market share, but we were too small. So it was very difficult to have conversations with them when we were less than $1 billion in market cap.
When that started, then we got more attention, and then when that continued and we got more liquidity, we got more interest. And then the other big thing, two big things that happened over the last three months is, number one, we've put up a Q1 that we said we were gonna deliver, so very, very strong margins, very strong cash flow. And the other thing that happened before that is that Schlumberger announced that they were acquiring our most comparable peer, which was ChampionX, and they bought them for 10x. At that time, we were trading at 4.5-5x, and that put a clear valuation marker out there.
So now what's happening is we get a ton of people wanting to meet us at your conferences like yours, and the bigger thing that Ken and I have noticed is a lot of the very large investors out of California, Boston, New York, Toronto, are wanting to meet with us. So I'd say, they're understanding it now, and that's why you see the big liquidity. And the fact that we're gonna be added in the index is gonna help provide people the liquidity and check the box that they need on size as well.
And like I said, we still believe, like, you go find me another industrial/services company that has an ROACE of 23%, ROIC of 21%, margin steadily increasing in that 15%-17% range, cash-on-cash yield in the low teens, that's trading anywhere less than 6 or 7 times. You just won't find them.
Great. Well, it looks like unfortunately we're at the end of our time for today, but Tony and Ken, I wanna thank you both for joining us and giving us a great overview of CES. But Tony and Ken, I'll also leave it with you if there's any final words before we close up.
Yeah, I'll start from a financial perspective, and then, Ken, obviously as a co-founder, should finish. Financially, just repeating what we say every quarter, we're gonna continue to do what we said we were gonna do. Management's philosophy is squarely on surplus, strong free cash flow generation per share. And, again, if there are any other questions that anybody has, from a financial or strategic perspective, feel free to reach out directly to our IR email, or directly to Ken and I, or through Sidoti. Happy to have calls anytime.
Thanks, Tony, and thanks for the intro there. Yeah, I guess my only comment is regarding the optimism we're feeling towards the upcoming year. The ChampionX deal puts another big international major into the marketplace. For the past couple of years here, a lot of our growth has come while competing with Baker and Halliburton. Having Schlumberger back in the mix is what we... Something we are looking forward to competing on, 'cause we think we're more reactive, and our decentralized model plays to our advantage. So very excited about the upcoming year as we continue to focus on cash flow, free cash flow, as well as grind down on the business and get costs under control to the lowest point possible, while still maximizing performance for our customers.
Excellent. Well, again, Ken and Tony, thanks again for the time today. Everyone else, I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference, and have a great day.
Thanks, everybody.