Good morning, everyone. My name is Jack Reinberg with the Southwest IDEAS Conference hosted by Three Part Advisors. Thank you all for joining us today. Our next session will begin momentarily with Mattr Corp, traded on the TSX under the symbol MATR, and also on the OTC under the symbol MTTRF. Presenting on their behalf today is Mike Reeves, President and CEO, and Tom Holloway, their CFO. With that, I'll hand it over to Mike to begin. Thank you.
Good morning. So this morning we're going to talk about Mattr and so that my lawyers don't shoot me, forward-looking statements, etc., etc. Mattr is a Canadian-headquartered, primarily North American-focused manufacturer of components that are used in the expansion and renewal of critical infrastructure. We specialize in the manufactured products that are used in the most demanding subsectors of industrial infrastructure, oil field, and automotive applications. Wherever temperatures are extreme, pressures are extreme, corrosion is extreme, radiation is extreme, mechanical loads are extreme, that's where you'll find our products. So we serve a very broad array of end customers across a very broad spectrum of broadly industrial end markets. But we make up a very small percentage of the cost of their respective projects, focusing in those areas where the cost of failure is highest, the value creation is highest, and therefore the margins are highest.
As an organization, you can see here, approximately a billion in revenue at the moment, and the vast majority of our revenue is derived from North America, the U.S. being the largest component, Canada second, and then there's a portion of our business which is exposed to European and portions of the Asia-Pacific market as well. We report our business into segments, the Composite Technology segment and the Connection Technology segment, and I'll speak a little bit more about both of those here in a moment. As I mentioned earlier, think of us as an enabler of critical infrastructure expansion and renewal. We're an organization that's been through a great deal of change over the last three years. Three years ago, we were called Shawcor, and we were best known for being an oil field pipeline products and services organization.
We have divested of 100% of our pipeline exposed businesses, and we have retained the four businesses that I'll talk about here today because they play to our core strengths. At our core, our organization is very good at taking materials and converting them into elegant solutions that solve complicated problems, and we are very good at complex manufacturing processes. The four businesses we have retained play to those strengths and also play to key market themes that we think will drive growth in our organization through the rest of this decade and beyond. Population growth, population movement, the need for clean water, the need for diverse, affordable, reliable energy, the need to manufacture products in North America, all of these are supported by our product lines. So on the composite technology side, we offer two primary products. We offer spoolable composite pipe.
This is used by oil and gas customers predominantly in North American land to connect newly completed oil and gas wells to gathering stations and pumping stations. The product has to operate at elevated temperature, at pressure, with corrosive products inside and the potential for physical damage from the outside. The second piece of our composites segment is our Xerxes tank business. We are the number one provider of underground fuel storage tanks to the North American market. Mostly, these are used below gas fueling stations. We also supply tanks that are used to hold water, stormwater, wastewater, and other components that are used to help treat water, improve its quality, and then reintroduce it to the groundwater. On our connection technology side, almost everything we do revolves around electrification.
We are a manufacturer of very highly engineered wire and cable solutions that are used across a broad spectrum of energy generation, transmission, distribution, communications, a very broad spectrum of end users there, but they're all about electrification. And we're also the number two global producer of highly engineered heat shrink tubing, which is used to protect the connection points at the ends of wire and cable solutions. So those two businesses go very nicely together. As I mentioned earlier, we specialize in providing a very small percentage of the project cost, but where the risk of failure is highest and our customers are recognizing that value through the price they pay for our products. I spoke briefly about the businesses. You can see some images here.
The way to think about composites broadly is we are bringing composite materials which are lighter weight, last longer, not subject to corrosion, therefore reduce the risk associated with infrastructure construction activity, and we are selling them into applications that historically would have consumed either concrete or steel or a combination of the two. So we are lowering the time it takes to install, lowering the risk over the lifespan of the project, lowering the cost, the total cost of ownership for our customers anywhere that fluids are being moved or stored, and as I mentioned earlier, on the connection technology side, this is all about electrification. It's a business that historically we've had a very strong footprint in Canada and less of a footprint in the U.S. That's relevant because we've just announced an acquisition that gives us a very meaningful presence in the U.S.
In this segment, and I'll talk some more about that in a moment. What we do matters, but how it translates into shareholder value matters more. While we've been going through a transformation, selling off many different businesses, investing in the businesses that we've retained, we've been able to drive substantial growth, not just in terms of revenue, but in terms of EBITDA and EBITDA margins. So an organization that is acutely focused on high growth and high margin generation. And an organization that has set itself some longer-term goals, which we've communicated very publicly before, and I'll restate them here. We are very confident in our ability to grow at 10% or greater per year on average. Not every year will be greater than 10%, but on average between here and the end of the decade, greater than 10%.
To get to and move beyond a 20% EBITDA margin and to get to and move beyond a 70% free cash flow conversion. That's all organic. Obviously, acquisitions get us there faster, and we have something to talk about there. In terms of capital deployment, we take in all of the above approach. Tom will speak a little more about some of these elements here in a moment. But I think it's important to understand what we have focused on in the past and where we are focused as we roll forward. Three years ago, this business had an over-levered balance sheet. So we spent a great deal of focus time lowering our net debt. We're at a place today where our net debt is approximately zero.
We are comfortable with a normal course net debt leverage of up to two times, and we'll talk a little bit about how we plan to manage in and around that. Over the last 18 months, we've focused most of our capital on two things: organic investment. So for each of the four businesses that you saw, we have moved through the deployment of capital to establish new production footprints, all in North America, all with modern manufacturing capabilities, improving our total production output, but in the process, improving the efficiency of our production processes, which is crucial for margin enhancement as time goes by. We will complete that major organic growth initiative as we roll through the first half of 2025. We've also focused a great deal of capital in share repurchases, over CAD 100 million since we introduced our normal course issuer bid.
We've repurchased approximately 10% of the company's shares, and you should expect us to remain active at all times under our NCIB. The final component, of course, is the potential deployment of capital to make strategic and appropriately valued acquisitions. We did announce a transaction that is pending closure, which I'll speak about here in a moment. In combination across these four verticals for capital allocation, we will, at the closure of this transaction, have allocated approximately a billion dollars in capital over the last three years or so. We believe maintaining flexibility and finding the right moments to deploy capital in the areas that create the highest value for shareholders is an important part of our overall strategy. Approximately two weeks ago, we announced that we have entered into an agreement to acquire a company called AmerCable.
For approximately CAD 400 million, we will acquire a predominantly U.S.-based, highly engineered wire and cable manufacturer. We are acquiring this business from Nexans, who have been the owner for over a decade. It is a carve-out from a corporate owner. This was a one-on-one negotiated transaction, and we are acquiring a business at approximately five times trailing EBITDA. I would remind you that highly engineered wire and cable businesses in the public domain tend to trade at 8x- 12x EBITDA. We feel very good about the purchase price here. We were able to acquire this business at that price because it had been declared non-core by its current owner, and they had chosen not to invest growth CapEx into this business for several years.
While it is performing very well, its growth profile was not aligned with other parts of Nexans and not aligned with the Mattr growth profile today. I think we paid a fair price for the business, and with a relatively modest deployment of capital, we expect to be able to drive substantial growth within the AmerCable organization over the course of the next several years. This transaction, in a conservative calculation, will be more than 40% accretive on a per-share basis on day one. The opportunity here is primarily commercial synergies. AmerCable manufactures and sells wire and cable solutions to many of the same end markets that Shawflex, our current wire and cable business, does. AmerCable sells predominantly to the U.S., Shawflex predominantly to Canada.
There are some subtle differences in some of the end markets, but at its core, AmerCable does what Shawflex does, focuses on the design, manufacture, and delivery of highly engineered solutions for the most challenging subsectors of their end markets. What AmerCable brings to us is a very large U.S. manufacturing footprint. Their primary facility is in Arkansas. We do not have a U.S. footprint for our wire and cable business today, and there is a fairly large subset of the U.S. infrastructure marketplace that falls under the Buy American Act and therefore was inaccessible to us. It will now be accessible to us. AmerCable brings medium voltage wire and cable into our portfolio, which we did not have before. Shawflex is a low voltage wire and cable provider.
Our low voltage wire and cable customers in Canada have for years been asking us to provide medium voltage, so we see that as an obvious and fairly rapid opportunity for cross-selling and commercial synergy from this transaction. Overall, I think this is a transaction that we would expect will close around year-end, and at that point, we'll have a couple of quarters of onboarding activity that we'll work through, but we believe we'll start to see those commercial synergies emerge as we roll through the second part of 2025 and into full year 2026, and firmly believe that with a fairly modest deployment of capital, AmerCable can meet or beat our 10% per year growth targets. They are already above our EBITDA and free cash flow conversion targets.
With that acquisition, this will be our North American production footprint, as you can see, predominantly U.S., which is a strategic decision over the last several years and I think provides us with some potential upside depending on the policies that may emerge from the new occupant of the White House over the course of the next several years. We are decoupled from China in terms of supply chain. So in the event of substantial changes to the U.S.-China trade situation, we would be impacted to a very, very small degree. So I think in summary, a business that is very well positioned to grow profitably, to generate substantial cash over the years that come, and a business that has a history of deploying capital, I think, in highly accretive ways. And at that point, I'll pass to Tom.
All right, thanks, Mike.
We'll quickly go through some of the financial metrics. So as you can see on this page, this slide summarizes our capital deployment in the organic space. So CapEx deployment over the last several years. When we think about CapEx, we think this business is CAD 10 million -CAD 15 million of Maintenance CapEx a year. You can see that's not really shown here, but that's been the trend. Even with the AmerCable business, we think it maybe moves up slightly to CAD 15 million -CAD 20, but it doesn't move up significantly as that business is about a 1% Maintenance CapEx requirement a year. We have deployed significant amounts of capital over the past couple of years, and we're in the final stages of that.
So, 2025, we expect our number to start to trend down towards the CAD 30 million -CAD 50 million range, which is what we've signaled as our future run rate once we get through this build-out. 2025 might be slightly above that just as we finish some of these. So you might see it to be CAD 50 million -CAD 60 million, but on the order of magnitude, it comes down quite significantly. And then as you go into 2026, we will have finished the majority of our build-out of our organic businesses, I'll call them, and we will have capital to deploy into the AmerCable business, still staying in that CAD 30 million -CAD 50 million range, driving the growth that Mike was just referring to. Our debt journey, as Mike talked about a minute ago, when he joined this business, it was fairly highly levered. You can see that on the left-hand side.
You've seen it trend down. We have rationalized our portfolio. We've sold off businesses that either generated limited cash flow in EBITDA or no cash flow or EBITDA and harvested that for cash, paid down the debt, invested organically. Today, we have a very strong balance sheet. We just renewed our credit facilities. We also renewed our high-yield note, bringing down the interest rate on that note. So we're well positioned going forward to lever that balance sheet a little bit. And as you'll note in the bottom right-hand slide, as of Q3 2024, if you were to factor in the AmerCable transaction, we would be at 2.9x , including leases, 2x if you exclude leases.
We believe that we can very quickly, over the course of the next four to six quarters before mid-2026, maybe by the end of 2026 or even earlier, get that leverage back into our operating 2x or below. We feel like this, again, this transaction is a good strategic one. It doesn't use all of our dry powder. It moves us slightly above our ratios that we've talked about. We have said we would be willing to go above that in the interim for the right deal, and we believe this is the right deal.
We'll be moving strategically from a massive organic investment back to paying down that debt, getting back into the ratios that we would like to be in to protect our balance sheet in our future, and all the while maintaining the flexibility to continue to return capital to shareholders, staying active in our share buyback program, which is on the next slide. We have deployed, as of the end of October, since we announced our first NCIB or share buyback program, we've deployed over CAD 100 million in capital to this. We continue to believe our shares are undervalued, and we're putting our money into it. It's a low-risk investment for us because we know this business, we know what it can do. As opportunities have arisen, we have taken advantage of that. CAD 100 million, 10% of the float, and we will continue to stay active.
As I said, even with the acquisition, we will maintain the capability to continue to put money into this space. I'll finish on this slide, which is just a view of where we've been, where we're going, and why we view our shares as undervalued. If you look, I'll start on the right-hand side, just jump to the punchline. We are trading sub 5x EBITDA, and we believe that's largely because of the history, because of the phase we're in, because we were an energy services business, and more importantly, a pipeline service business. Our peers who do what we do on the industrial side trade anywhere in the ranges you see, and that's quite a wide range. But even on the low end, it's more than double where we trade. So we see the opportunity as quite significant here.
And as Mike walked you through, the organic growth is there, the inorganic growth is now there with the acquisition we've just announced. And I would point you to the fact that we have deployed capital effectively over the last several years. And you can see that through on the left-hand side in the middle part of the page, how our debt leverage ratios have come down, how our CAGRs on EBITDA have moved up, and we're very excited about the future of this business. So with that, I will go to Q&A. [audio distortion] Yeah, so I'll repeat the question. The question was, who would be buyers of our product? Obviously, it varies by end market, but when we look at the industrial space, we sell a great deal of our wire and cable into power and utility end users.
So in North America and in Canada, Bruce Power, OPG, Hydro-Québec, Hydro One, and their equivalents across the U.S. We also sell through distribution partners, so Rexel, Wesco, companies like that. So anywhere that you see industrial consumption rising, you should generally view that as a positive for demand for our products more broadly. In the automotive space, we sell to tier 1 assemblers who use our products to make the wiring harnesses of vehicles, but our products are specified by all the major OEMs. So Tesla, Ford, GM, VW, et cetera, et cetera. In the oil and gas space, our customers are the large oil and gas operators. So the Chevrons, BPs of the world, both Canada and the U.S., as well as select international markets. And then on the underground tank side of the business, we sell to mostly fuel retailers, 7-Eleven, Circle K, or Couche-Tard.
There are quite a lot of those operators who are private, not public, but Murphy is also public, so I would say take a look at their public statements about their expectations, and I think across that spectrum, you will generally see that there is an expectation of elevated activity and therefore elevated demand for our products. Was there a question on this side,
about your share buyback and where you stand on that and are you targeting a certain percentage per year, [audio distortion]
so we are allowed to renew that program once a year, and the maximum that the TSX allows us to do is 10% of the float, so we're exercising effectively 10% of the float a year, so I would expect to continue that, so the question was, how much visibility is there in our demand pipeline?
Again, it does vary by product line, but I would say on average, we are working off backlogs that are in the range of three-six months. And that's fairly typical. When we are at the upper end of a cycle across all industries, that may extend to six-nine months. I'd say we are on average probably at the midpoint of a cycle across all of our businesses. So three- six months is about right for where we are. Yes, sir. Yes. Yep. Yep. So the question was our nuclear business. So our participation in nuclear today is through our wire and cable organization. And most of what we do is the supply of very specialized wire and cable that's used inside the reactor housing for CANDU design nuclear reactors. So that is the nuclear reactor design used across Canada and in select international locations.
Our product is typically replaced every one and a half- two years. So it's a constant stream of demand that is enhanced whenever there is a new nuclear reactor construction project or a major refurbishment project. What we see across Canada today is broadly heavy investment in refurbishment to extend the lives of existing reactors and recently approved expansion projects to put multiple new CANDU reactors into service. We're also seeing the same thing in parts of Eastern Europe. So in terms of scale, tens of millions. So it's not a large percentage of the organization, but it would be at the very upper end of the margin range of what we generate. So an important piece of our business and one that we are growing. So we made an acquisition about two and a half years ago, a fairly small Canadian company called Kanata.
And we did so because they were already certified and approved to support CANDU reactors outside of Canada. So it has opened up our opportunity to participate in the non-Canadian nuclear market, which we have started to take advantage of. And internally, our development has included products for light water reactors to further expand the end market. CANDU reactors make up 2%-3% of global nuclear reactors. So while it's an important business for us, we are far from mature in our total market participation. But the demand for premium wire and cable that just does not fail in that environment is not going away. It's rising, and we think that's a growth opportunity for us over time. I'm happy to take any other questions. But if not, we wish you all a great day. Thank you for your time.