All right, good morning, everyone. My name is Joe Mondillo, Director of Investor Relations, for those who do not know. Thank you all for coming. I know this takes a lot of time out of your day, so we appreciate it. Those on the webcast, we also appreciate your participation. The last time we did one of these was 2023. A lot of people asked, "When is the next time you think you will do one of these things?" At the time, I remember saying that I think 12 months, the story does not change a whole lot. In three years, it is probably going to be too much. I think that is exactly where we are. Two years was the right time in my thought process. Here we are, a lot has changed with the story.
I think this is going to be a useful worth of your time today. Before we get started, I just want to remind you of everyone of the forward-looking statement, the disclaimer that we have. You're all aware, we're not required to update any forward-looking statements said today. Joining me today, the team, Matt Tobolski, CEO; Rebecca Thompson, CFO and Treasurer; Stephen Wakefield, our General Manager of the AAON Business Unit; Matt Schaub, General Manager of our BASX Business Unit. And we also have here today, who will be participating in the Q&A, Andrew Edmondson, our Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Our agenda today, it's going to be about, it's actually going to be about a two-and-a-half-hour presentation, give or take. We'll have a 15-minute break in the middle. We'll finish with a Q&A, 30-40 minutes or so. Hopefully, we'll get all your questions answered.
I think that's about it. Before I hand it off to Matt, we want to start and kick it off with a brief video for you all.
That mindset of innovation, that mindset of innovation that has been there since the earliest days when Norm founded the business, and it still thrives within our organization today. We think differently. We look further out. We look for ways to disrupt the industry and to really set the bar higher than anyone else is thinking. That drive to push boundaries and to lead the industry where it's heading is something that will never change. We have continually developed solutions, introduced new product innovation, and stayed well ahead of our competition. Our goal within AAON is to redefine what the future of HVAC looks like. AAON, as an organization, is solving problems. We're not just following industry mandates. We push performance limits so that our technology works every time, in every climate, in every market, for every customer. It's about options. It's about features. It's about adaptability.
We do not stop when we reach acceptable. We do not stop when the industry thinks we have gotten to a good enough stage. We simply push and push and push until we reach exceptional. Exceptional is just the beginning.
Maybe turn it on. There we go. Good morning. My name is Matt Tobolski, Chief Executive Officer of AAON. For those of you that don't know me, I joined AAON about three and a half years ago as part of the BASX acquisition, a company I co-founded. It's been an awesome journey to be part of this organization through some tremendous growth, some tremendous transformation. From the perspective of where we're going, we've just got some fantastic technology, fantastic team, and really an exciting future that we're happy to share with you all today. I'm also happy to answer plenty of questions afterwards on kind of where the direction of the organization is going. I always like to start off with really kind of who we are as an organization.
When we think about the HVAC space, as my kids tell me, it's a pretty boring industry. I like to remind them that we're not just an HVAC company. We're not a product manufacturer. We truly are a solutions provider. That's a mindset that this entire organization embodies. We're not out there trying to pitch products and really put those into someone's application. We're trying to solve a problem. We're trying to take a consultative approach. We're really trying to create value inside the marketplace. That mindset is really founded on this just core belief in really driving and pushing boundaries and innovating technology inside the HVAC space. When I look at the mindset of who we are, I mean, we are a disruptor.
That is the mindset of kind of how our team wakes up, how the engineering organization really looks to kind of redefine what the industry is doing. What's really fun is it's that mindset, it's that sort of entrepreneurial spirit that's embodied inside this organization that it's really fun to sit here and say, we're a billion-plus-dollar organization. The entire team, the engineering talent, they're always sitting there kind of like a startup mindset of, how do we redefine? How do we disrupt? How do we change the way things are doing? That mindset, coupled with an amazing best-in-class manufacturing footprint, is really what's allowing this organization to outperform, to acquire market share, and really create a differentiated position in the marketplace. It's a really fun organization to be a part of.
It's really fun to be sitting here and really looking at this as not just being an HVAC manufacturer, but truly solving problems, truly providing value to our customers. As an organization, for those of you that are newer to the story, the organization was founded back in 1988. It was founded on a mindset of bridging a gap between, at the time, catalog products, so kind of the no-frills, no-feature product set, and the custom products. It was really trying to blend or kind of provide that middle ground solution where you could provide a semi-custom solution, really provide a tremendous amount of value, but do it at a very cost-competitive price point. That was really the original foundation of Norm's vision when he founded AAON.
That has really been sort of the value mindset, the driving solutions mindset that is really embodied in the organization today. It is amazing to think of where this organization over the last 37 years has evolved. 1988, 160,000 sq ft of manufacturing space till today, 4 million sq ft of manufacturing footprint across five locations. That is backed by some of the greatest test engineers, some of the greatest product engineers that the industry has. We have the most capable test capabilities in the HVAC space that really supports the mindset of our engineers that are pushing boundaries and driving solutions. As an organization, we really operate under two brands. This is sort of a mindset shift that has kind of been happening over the last couple of years, which is transitioning the way we think about this business into truly two differentiated brands, the AAON brand, the BASX brand.
The organization, fundamentally, an innovation on solutions mindset is consistent across the brands, but each brand has its own kind of unique way of delivering that value proposition. The AAON brand, really, in that semi-custom mindset where the BASX brand is really kind of more in a custom mindset serving the data center industry, clean rooms, and kind of the industrial commercial, where in the AAON space, primarily rooftop units, split systems in the K-12, educational, healthcare, retail markets, but both founded on a common mindset of really delivering innovation to the space. As an organization, we talk about and kind of intro this a little bit. Today, as an organization, we report in segments. Those segments are really defined by geographic boundaries.
As we look into the future and really the conversation today, we're transitioning the mindset from those segments and really focusing the conversation around the two brand strategies that exist. As we continue moving through time and moving kind of throughout this year, we're continuing to put more and more systems in place to be able to really provide a better lens into this organization around that brand strategy because that really is the way we're executing. We're leveraging that manufacturing footprint. We're no longer looking at this business really around the mindset of geographic limits and geographic boundaries from a reporting perspective. As an organization, $1.2 billion in revenue last year, but really supported by an immense amount of interest and demand for our products and solutions, which is really kind of driving that billion-dollar backlog that exists at the end of the first quarter.
Really, from an operations perspective, really strong operations, continuing to drive improvements in our operations and really driving investments and efficiency, which is helping really provide that kind of growth in the margin profile. Something I always focus on that's a little bit unique, when you look at the CapEx and the R&D that we reinvest into the company, this really is an organization that is driving organic growth and driving investments in kind of the value proposition that we provide. A very healthy kind of reinvestment of our profits to really drive that organic growth, to drive that product differentiation, and really fuel the innovation that exists within AAON. Today, really, the conversation is going to be founded around really five strategic pillars that are really driving value from an investment perspective.
These are the pillars that kind of we're operating on from an organizational perspective that really drive the decision-making that we do kind of going forward. I always start with this pillar number one, which is really the mindset of winning with that superior innovation. Number two is really driving results and really trying to empower our leaders to really drive value delivery from our kind of custom solutions and semi-custom solutions in the marketplace. Pillars three and four are really around driving growth through some secular trends, whether the data center solutions kind of off the BASX brand or a lot of the heat pump decarbonization and national account strategies inside of the AAON brand. The final pillar is really the drive to be a best-in-class operator and really kind of do it in a very profitable and really solid manner.
We'll dive into these five pillars kind of in more detail, but this really is the overarching theme of the conversation of really where that value within the AAON kind of organization is going to derive from. Innovation, and we could sit here and you're going to hear this conversation time and time again. You're going to hear it from me. You're going to hear it from Stephen. You're going to hear it from Matt. And you're going to hear almost beating a dead drum kind of on this conversation because innovation is the lifeblood of who we are as an organization. Innovation is something that truly sets AAON apart, both the AAON brand and the BASX brand. It's the mindset of pushing boundaries. It's the mindset of answering questions that the industry didn't even know to ask yet.
If you look at the sort of focus that we have within our innovation, within our engineering team, we have some of the most capable, talented engineers that are looking into the future. They're looking past regulations. They're looking past kind of chasing industry trends in the background. They're defining those industry trends. The amazing part, and you'll hear this discussed more, especially in Stephen's section, is it's supported by the most capable technical lab in the industry. The ability for us to really drive new product concepts, to drive new solutions kind of into the industry and actually validate and support those is something that's allowed AAON to really drive market share acquisition over the last 10 years.
It is going to continue being a major driver for us because we are able to stay ahead of those regulations, stay ahead of those trends, and really redefine what the industry is chasing. That second pillar, and really, this is something that we introduced at the end of last year and really kind of an organizational structure going forward, it is really the reorganization of this business. It is really that rethinking the way we segment the organization, rethinking the way we manage this business. It is trying to decouple the mindset of geographic locations defining how we manage the business and really looking forward to say, what is the value proposition that is delivered by both of our brands? What is the introduction of the product strategy? What is the way that we are providing value to our customers and to the industry as a whole?
Looking at that and saying, that manufacturing footprint, that 4 million sq ft of capacity, that supports the brands. That supports the brand strategy. The mindset is really kind of looking at that and saying, we've got this great tool in manufacturing, but let's focus the way we lead the business. Let's focus the way we think about the innovation around the brand, around the product, and around the value proposition that we deliver to our customers. That really was the reorganization and kind of the two business units that you'll hear Matt and Stephen both talk about.
Their job is really to define what the next generation product looks like, to look at the product management mindset, to look at the innovation mindset, the engineering, and really have a hyper focus on customer care and customer delivery to really provide a best-in-class customer experience both from a technology perspective and from a delivery perspective, and then leverage that capacity, leverage that manufacturing footprint from a best-in-class manufacturing fleet to support both brands. We will talk later in this presentation about what that means. It means we no longer look at Tulsa as being just an AAON piece of the organization. We do not look at Longview as just being a part of the AAON coil products or AAON kind of brand historically.
We look at it and say, given the opportunity, given the drivers that we have as a business, how do we leverage that manufacturing footprint to really deliver value for our customers? Obviously, with scale comes some efficiencies in the way we manage the back office. Really kind of providing a consolidation and providing a much more streamlined back office fueled by some technology investments to really allow us to manage this business more proactively. When we think about the business, we've got our two primary brands, AAON and BASX. I mentioned this earlier, and I'll kind of reiterate it again here.
I mean, the common overlap here, and part of the reason why when AAON approached the conversation with BASX three and a half, I guess, four years ago now in the conversation, part of the reason why we made the decision to sell was that overlap. It was the fact that while we're two different businesses with two different kind of product types and really touching different parts of the market, that mindset of innovation, that mindset of providing a premium value, premium experience, that is core and core to the culture of both organizations. That was one of the big drivers when we made the decision to actually sell BASX to AAON was because of that commonality of culture and mindset and how we actually drive value in the marketplace.
Now, where the two brands are different, number one, big difference obviously is the markets that they're really focused on. Really, the AAON brand is really focused on the non-res commercial HVAC market, driving value with package rooftops and split systems in a semi-custom fashion. Whereas the BASX brand is really built around, I'll say, a high-value customer, data centers, mission-critical applications, clean rooms in delivering value through a more customized approach, a kind of a clean sheet approach to really be able to kind of solve very challenging problems with products that don't exist in the industry or exact configurations and really right-sized solutions to drive tremendous value to the marketplace. Now, today, this is looking at the previous 12 months of kind of where that revenue breakdown is.
Roughly a quarter of the revenue today is coming from the BASX brand, and then 75% of that, three-quarters of that, is coming from the AAON brand. As we look forward, you'll hear this kind of repeated throughout the day in conversation, while both brands have tremendous growth opportunities, the BASX brand certainly has a huge driver in really delivering value to the data center space and delivering a lot of value and growth kind of off that data center demand. As we look into the future, that one-quarter, three-quarter split is really three to five years out going to look more like an even playing field between two of these brands. That really is kind of the story and the kind of way to think about this organization going forward is two equal brands kind of driving value to the marketplace.
Talking about that third pillar, and Matt Schaub is going to dive into a lot more detail around the BASX brand, the BASX value proposition. That third pillar kind of in that growth strategy, value delivery strategy is around that BASX brand. It is really around capitalizing on secular trends inside the data center space. When we kind of step back and say to ourselves, what is the value proposition, the value drivers of the BASX brand, it really comes from that far left item there. It is really that solutions-based approach. It is that mindset that we are truly solving problems. When we go into a customer's office to discuss a project, we are not walking in with a catalog of products that we are attempting to get applied into an overall project.
We're walking into a customer's office with a blank sheet of paper, listening to them, understanding what their drivers are, what their needs are, and then really taking that and providing a solution that checks all the boxes. Matt will give an example of a case study of a project that BASX really won and provided tremendous value with. It was exactly that mindset of basically listening, driving value, and answering questions that nobody else could actually provide solutions to. That is all supported by the engineering teams. It is all solved by that manufacturing footprint. It is all kind of collaboratively solved by a tremendously talented team that can create solutions, validate those solutions, and then manufacture them at scale efficiently. As we look at the past, 40% growth and a market growing 10%, it has been a story about market share acquisition.
It will continue to be a story about market share acquisition inside that BASX brand. Inside the space, and again, Matt will dive into more detail on the actual products, but historically, the BASX brand has been built on airside solutions. It's historically been driving growth in the data center space from a cloud computing perspective. I always like to just pause in this conversation because everybody is excited about AI. The drivers around the data center story, it's all driven and all focused on AI, at least the excitement in the marketplace. I always pause and say, cloud computing growth hasn't gone away. Data center operators continue to invest and build cloud computing data centers. About a year ago, Andy Jassy from Amazon made a comment that less than 20% of services that can be in the cloud today are actually in the cloud.
There is a huge runway of basically investment that is happening around cloud, and we are layering on top of that the AI conversation. As we think about the BASX brand going forward, it is both the airside solutions serving cloud and AI, plus a layered approach with liquid cooling to support AI on top of that. Tremendous growth drivers around product strategy, about innovation, and really allowing our products and leveraging that custom mindset to really provide those solutions going forward. I think we can all agree data centers are growing, but I also like to really kind of put a pin in the fact that the BASX brand, the demand for the product, the demand for the innovation that is provided in the BASX kind of realm and BASX brand of the business is gaining tremendous drive in acquisition of kind of new customers inside the data center space.
This backlog is kind of the example of how that demand is materializing. When we look at the first quarter, when we look at this continued increase in our backlog, that's also happening while capacity is coming online. It's happening while the revenue conversion is accelerating as well. We're sitting here with a tremendous amount of demand with tremendous capacity coming online, really kind of showcasing the value proposition and really how it's resonating within the data center space, allowing this to be a great growth driver for the organization going forward. One thing I also want to touch on is when we talk about the brand strategy going forward, and this is something that's an evolution within the BASX brand. We talked earlier that the BASX brand was launched with this mindset of a true custom solution clean sheet.
We talk about how AAON as an organization was founded to bridge the gap between catalog products and custom solutions. A couple of years ago, as a team, we were sitting back saying this kind of aha moment of, wait a minute, why don't we take a page from the playbook of why AAON was founded in the first place? Why don't we expand the reach of the actual applicability of BASX products and BASX solutions going forward? That mindset was basically to say, let's expand our portfolio within BASX beyond just a custom product and actually take that page from the playbook of AAON and launch a semi-custom configurable solution. The reason we do that, the reason that mindset is there is when you look at where the custom solutions really resonate, they resonate with those large hyperscale data center customers.
They resonate with these very large developers that really understand the value proposition of that true custom solution. There are a lot of other players inside the data center space that maybe do not have the same level of focus on driving kind of complete, unique, bespoke solutions. If we launch a software-driven configurable product the exact same way that we launched AAON with the same manufacturing footprint to support it, we are providing access to more of the industry in the data center space and providing more ability for us to provide that value in the data center space. We look at this product strategy and this evolution as an organization where we hold both custom solutions and semi-custom solutions in balance as a huge driver to really diversify our customer base and drive more growth inside the space.
Really, just to reiterate, I mean, when we look at the overall BASX organization, I mean, we're sitting here as a value-driven product, value-driven solutions provider that's really resonating within our customer base in a dynamically growing market. We've got product portfolio evolution from airside to liquid cooling applications, plus additional product introductions around that semi-custom strategy, all that are going to provide a tremendous driver of growth for the BASX brand going forward and really kind of helping support that good growth, not just today, but well into the future. Touching on that fourth pillar, and again, I always have this conversation where we have a lot of talks during investor conferences, and we were in Chicago last week, and I think 80% of the questions, 80% of the comments and conversations were around data centers.
I like to reset the stage and the conversation because when we think about the two brands, we think about AAON, we think about BASX. AAON, the sort of fundamentals, the drivers of growth, the story around the AAON brand is a shining star. The only problem is when we're looking at BASX, we're looking at the data center demand right now, you're staring at the sun. People start to really forget what that story looks like around the AAON brand, and it becomes a secondary conversation. In an HVAC space, in the non-residential commercial space, the AAON brand is and will continue to be the differentiated products inside the marketplace. Huge value, semi-custom strategy that provides tremendous value to the industry in a very cost-competitive level.
It is really supported by some great secular trends around decarbonization, around heat pump, a lot of the innovation we have in heat pumps, around a lot of the technology innovations we have kind of across the board, regulatory environments helping compress price premium. All these things are driving tremendous growth where AAON is in the best position it has ever been. We are sitting here and a little bit of the conversation gets lost just because of the excitement in the industry right now around the data center space, but the AAON brand is in the best position it has ever been. We think about those three drivers, those three secular trends.
First and foremost, the desire and drive to reduce carbon emissions and electrify heating sources, coupled with the innovation that AAON has, is driving a tremendous value proposition inside the marketplace, and it's going to be a huge growth driver from a product mix perspective. Beyond that, regulations, whether it's efficiency standards, whether it's refrigerant, continue to really drive the sort of ability for AAON to be ahead of the market and really provide opportunities for us to really capitalize on great growth drivers. Plus, it's forcing a lot of our competition closer to where AAON has always been in terms of high efficiency standards and better performing products. All of that is combining itself to basically really resonate with the AAON economics conversation. The price premium gap is closing. It's allowing the TCO conversation, total cost of ownership conversation, to become more and more attractive.
Those will all be part of that growth driver within the next three years of mid-single digit growth. I just want to pause when we say mid-single because AAON historically is a high single digit growth company. We as a sector right now, a non-rez kind of HVAC sector, it's a down year. When we say mid-single digit growth, we're not saying the long-term proposition of high single digits is going away. We're just saying the 2025 calendar year has a lot of industry kind of headwinds that are going to push volumes down. Kind of on a go forward basis, that high single digit growth that you've seen of AAON with that noise from the industry out of the way is going to continue to accelerate and get back to where it's always been.
Talking real quick on heat pumps, talking about the national account kind of combination, by themselves, the heat pump innovation that AAON has is a growth driver. By itself, we think about the ability for us to reduce carbon emissions and provide fantastic technology is a driver of growth. You look at what AAON is doing in heat pumps, you look at the industry as a whole that has baseline heat pump products that go to 37-40 degrees Fahrenheit. AAON has heat pump technology that can operate all the way down to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit. We have a portfolio, a three-tiered product inside the heat pump space that can really provide electrified heating across the vast majority of the U.S. No other commercial HVAC manufacturer has a portfolio that can achieve the level of performance across the country that AAON has.
That by itself is a great driver of growth. Now, you take that same conversation and you marry it with our national account strategy, and all of a sudden, you have really just provided a solution to a problem that the industry has been asking for an answer to. You look at the ability for us to go to a national account customer and have a conversation where we say, we have the most capable heat pump, but it is three tiers. We have a version that can be operating in a very cost-effective manner in the lower states. We also have an ultra-high performance version that can provide you electrified heating in the northern states. We can select the right product in that portfolio, the right tier in that portfolio to answer the most economical way to kind of build those products going forward.
That is a huge differentiator. Nobody else has the ability to provide that level of performance. We talk about what that means. We talk about our pipeline, our visibility, what we have. Stephen will talk more on this later on, but national accounts historically have not been a huge piece of the AAON story. We are sitting here with multiple hundreds of millions of dollars of pipeline and opportunity in national accounts. That is incremental conversation. When we talk about where does that materialize, these are longer plays, right? These are not the normal bid, plan, plan, inspect type project where it is a relatively quick conversion from a bid to an overall order. There is a little bit more of a timeline there because you are really providing solutions to really provide answers across the country. It is a little bit longer sales cycle.
Why I'm saying that is that does not all materialize. That few hundred million dollars in pipeline does not materialize in 2025. It will start materializing in 2025, but it is a 2026 and beyond story when you really see these large projects, these multi-year development projects really start to be a huge driver of top-line growth from a sales perspective. We have talked a lot about the refrigerant transition. I do not want to belabor this. You have heard me talk about this over and over again. I just want to start off by saying, obviously, this is an industry-first refrigerant transition in that we had building code implications and we had a regulatory requirement from EPA. That caused a tremendous amount of noise in the industry. We have messaged that for over a year and a half that it was going to disrupt 2024.
It did, obviously, Q4, Q1 results really driven by some challenges on sort of the transition timing in the industry. AAON, as a semi-custom manufacturer, was more susceptible to some of that air pocket compared to manufacturers that are building catalog products to distribution. I want to say and really reiterate, that was a temporary conversation. We talk about, we look at Q1 backlog, we look at Q1 orders growth, we look at kind of how orders continue to materialize, and it's showcasing the value proposition of AAON is stronger than it's ever been. The overall disruption from the refrigerant transition is behind us. There's some hangover on some supply chain across the industry, some little challenges here and there, air pockets here and there. By and large, the big impacts of that refrigerant transition are behind us.
The sales book, the cadence, and the competitiveness of the product has never been better. Really looking forward, we're happy to be beyond this conversation and be able to focus on the future without this transition being a driver or sort of an impairment to the overall AAON conversation. Touching on that final, or touching on kind of what that means kind of in the growth driver in the AAON side, I mentioned the economics perspective. The conversation around AAON and price premium has always been, or historically been, five plus years ago around this premium product that was 15% to 20% more expensive. Through regulation, through a lot of requirements over the past couple of years, the efficiency standard requirements that came into the industry in 2023, plus a lot of other drivers, caused that price premium gap to close.
Now, AAON still sells a higher quality product. AAON still delivers value, better value proposition, better efficiency, better maintainability of our product compared to our competition. Through some of that regulatory change, a lot of costs had to go into our competitors' products to be able to meet those efficiency standards. That helped close that gap. As we look at where we're at, where we're sitting today, that gap has continued to close a little bit. There's been a lot of noise over the last 12 to 18 months around the price dynamics around this new refrigerant equipment. At one point, there was conversation around 15% to 20% more cost going into R- 454B equipment relative to 410A. Did 15% to 20% materialize? No. As time progressed, the messaging in the industry went from 15% to 20% down to 8% to 10%.
Is there more cost in our competitor's equipment? Yes. That gap has closed maybe 1% or 2%. It has not closed. We are not sitting at price parity. We are not sitting at some neutral position with our competition. That gap has closed a little bit. Every little bit that gap closes, the value proposition and the story of AAON becomes that much easier to sell to our competition. It allows us to acquire that much more market share. Why I want to bring that up is as that price premium gap closes, it is not that we are sitting here getting more market share at the expense of overall margin performance. We are doing it with the ability to also execute in the most efficient way possible and getting rid of the noise of Q4, Q1 from the refrigerant transition.
The actual input cost dynamics, plus that volume, will provide not only more volume at a lower price premium, but it'll do it at increasing financial performance. We'll be seeing better margins delivered kind of in that environment. It really is a unique situation where we're not giving up margin to get volume, but we're able to maintain and actually accelerate some of that. I started off by saying this in the intro, but really just to reiterate, I mean, as a brand, as an organization, the AAON brand is in the best position it's ever been. The fundamentals are the strongest they've ever been in the history of this organization.
With that kind of noise around the refrigerant transition behind us, when we look forward beyond a year that's a down year from a macroeconomic standpoint, when we look forward, the brand is in the best position to continue capitalizing on market share acquisition and really in a position to really continue showcasing the great value that AAON provides. Touching on that final pillar, it's really around being a best-in-class operator, really looking at who we are as an organization. Obviously, there's some ear to ear noise in there. This little thing called COVID happened at one point in there. When we look at the organization from 2018 to 2024, we've had great growth in our gross profit margins. In the past, AAON really looked and really set pricing strategy within a desire to really deliver margins between 28% and 30%.
A couple of years ago, we were very vocal that we really reframed the way we look at margins. We want to make sure that when we're pricing our equipment, we are pricing our equipment to properly reflect the value proposition it's providing to the marketplace. We rethought about the way we priced our equipment. You'll see that we actually were increasing our pricing, increasing our margins, while also having some of our price premium kind of sit a little bit smaller than it used to be. We're doing that with improving margins because of the cost that we're putting into the product and really the pricing strategy, coupled with the investments we've made to be a best-in-class manufacturer.
If you look at the efficiency metrics that we stare at on a daily, weekly basis, the efficiency in the organization in terms of productivity in our production lines and really throughput and efficiencies in manufacturing are at some of the best levels they have ever been. That pricing strategy, plus those investments in the operational strategy, has allowed us to continue really moving that margin to sort of a new level within our expectations and really our expectations going forward. We are also looking at saying, from a manufacturing standpoint, how do we make sure we really support those two brands? How do we support the growth drivers of both brands? Really, it is leveraging and making strategic investments to get the manufacturing footprint capable of servicing the needs of AAON going forward in the future.
It's not, as I talked about with AAON, it's not a BASX or AAON story. It's a BASX and AAON brand story. And these investments in capacity are being made to support both brands. They're being made to say, while Memphis is a conversation that a lot of people attribute to data centers, it certainly is a huge driver of the investment we made, but it also supports the growth inside the AAON brand as well. It's a tool to be able to leverage and provide capacity to support the national account strategy that we're focusing on. It's really looking at this and saying, we're going to make the investments ahead of where that demand is driving us so that we have the capacity to really deliver on those solutions, but do it in a very financially responsible way.
We think about that footprint and we think about what it looks like. When Joe was putting the slide together, I laughed and I said, it'll never actually look like that. This is a mindset of the way we think about that manufacturing footprint. It's saying, hey, when we think about it today, what could that look like? We say, hey, based on a lens today, yeah, Memphis could be mostly data centers. Guess what? If we see the traction that we know we're going to see around national account strategy, we might actually move some production from Tulsa to Memphis. That conversation, that these sliders, it becomes a conversation about how do we actually support the growth drivers on both brands.
One of the unique things about AAON and BASX brands, the back-of-house manufacturing equipment that really drives the product and drives a lot of the value we put into our product is the same with both brands. The sheet metal fabrication, the electrical panel shops, the coating systems, the coil manufacturing, all of those systems that support manufacturing are identical between AAON and BASX brands. That means that as we make the investments in really streamlining our manufacturing process and really tuning the system up to be able to transfer technology between one brand to one site to another, it becomes a huge 4 million sq ft tool for us to use and leverage to really capitalize on that growth.
When we think about capacity we're adding, just one little data point, when we look at the last couple of years, kind of a unique thing, when we look at the square footage that we've added between Longview, Texas, and our Memphis investment, roughly 1 million sq ft of incremental capacity has been added inside the overall AAON organization. When we look at that from a data center perspective, that's equivalent to our top three peers combined. Obviously, we're making investments to get a lot of square footage in there, but we're doing it in a way where we're fiscally responsible. The building itself is relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things.
For us to be able to have that footprint, to be able to leverage the investments in back-of-house that we're making to support manufacturing and leveraging the leadership talent at that site is very intentional. We look at the building and buying a bigger building being a very intentional piece of our strategy because it's easier for us to then grow into that than try to have a bunch of smaller disparate locations across the country. To us, building and getting this large square footage provides us a very good platform to really grow into, to put investments into in equipment and fabrication systems and other things, but do it in a way where we have the leadership concentration already there versus having to really look at that limited resource. We look at people as being our biggest bit of sort of value drivers inside the organization.
The manufacturing pieces, the facilities, they're critically important to what we do, but the people are the most important part of what we have in this organization. Leveraging top-tier leadership talent is one of the biggest parts of our strategy and part of why we actually made some of these bigger investments in bigger square footage facilities to really provide us a leverage off of that talent. Just to reiterate, and really you'll hear these drumbeats kind of hit throughout this entire conversation, just reiterating, number one, first and foremost, we are an innovative company. We are driven by innovation, driven by disrupting the industry. We look at those semi-custom and custom solutions as being huge value drivers that are really unique to the organization and unique to the story about how we deliver value to our customers.
The secular trends, decarbonization, data centers, those are what's going to drive that great robust growth. We are going to do it in a very profitable manner with improving efficiencies and strategic investments to support that demand. As Joe mentioned, our last investor day was a couple of years ago in Tulsa. Certainly appreciate a lot more people made the trek to New York than to Tulsa. I think we are probably three or four times more people here than we had in Tulsa. At that 2023 investor day, we talked about the conversation being a 10+% growth story. In that same period from 2022 to 2024, we delivered 16% growth kind of in that timeframe. We had set that bar where we reset the conversation where margins used to be 28% to 30%, sort of the target within AAON.
We kind of reset that conversation to say, hey, at 2022 or 2023 investor day, that 30% that used to be the ceiling is now the floor of our expectations and margin. We delivered 33% during that 2024 calendar year. As we look forward and kind of look at that next three-year target, looking at growth coming off of that 2024 calendar year, top-line organic growth is in that 12.5% range. Now, that's made up of mid-single-digit growth in AAON and about 40% growth in the BASX brand. I do want to just pause once again to say that mid-single-digit growth in the AAON brand in that three-year period, it has one year in there with a relatively soft market. While the current year has some headwinds against it, when we look to next year and beyond, we're back to that high single-digit growth expectation.
It is a point in time that is kind of skewing that number a little bit. When we think about margins, where in our 2023 investor day, we had reset that floor to be that 30% range, we are kind of moving that needle again. You will see we have reset the expectations from our last investor day two years ago and boosted about 250 basis points more in our kind of top-line growth story and kind of expectations, and also 200 basis points in our overall margin profile that we look at going forward. We really do look at this being a tremendous growth conversation from an industrial perspective, driven by two great brands and really some great differentiation from a manufacturing standpoint. That is going to be a great kind of overall growth story in an industrial space and an HVAC space going forward.
With that, we're going to lead in, and before Stephen comes up, have a little video here on the AAON business unit. From that, Stephen will come up. Look forward to more conversation.
Tell me about your products. What do you guys create here? We create solutions. We want a customer to ultimately get a solution to their problem. It's not an out-of-the-box cookie-cutter thing that fits a manufacturing facility. The vast majority of commercial rooftops are just distributed products where they just build a whole bunch of them down a production line, and you kind of get what you get. We try to tailor our product to every customer's need. Really, where we shine is the fact that we are semi-custom. At that price point, it's a lot closer to the high-volume no-frills product.
We just continue to strive and develop these products to push them further and further to meet the goals of our customers and our clients. Our philosophy in manufacturing and really doing business starts with being flexible. When you are vertically integrated, it gives you more tools to be flexible with. It helps us a lot in terms of speed to market. Like in the case of coils, we are definitely able to really get thorough on the design of the coil, especially as we do heat pumps. In the world of controls, what can we achieve to do things unique that a lot of the industry are not doing? It was always just ingrained within the engineering and product teams to always think about what is next, what more can we do? When we started, most air conditioners were just made in this mass production environment where they did not have any options.
We listened. Let's come up with something that the customer might not even know that they need that is a direct attack on the problems that our customers are dealing with. I started at AAON in the early days. What really is the very most important pinnacle thing that I'm most proud of is the group of people that we've assembled and the way that they interact with each other and their actual motivation. I started in 1996, and I've got a few colleagues who I've kind of worked with my entire time. Even the younger people that we bring in, they do things outside of AAON, and I think it really develops a team environment where we can really work together to solve whatever problems we have. Collaboration is kind of at the heart of what we do.
What we really see within all of our organization is that AAON has a really unique culture where we sort of gang tackle problems and projects. Everybody seems to have that eagerness to roll up their sleeves and get involved and help out with the solution. Our main focus is really, what does the industry need today? What do they need tomorrow? Where do we see things going? When you're focused on that, then we're able to come up with things that really change the industry versus just trying to keep up with the competition. It's not something we're really that interested in. There was a new minimum efficiency standard that went into place in 2023. That caused most of our competitors to redesign their products. We didn't have to do that. So we have products now that most of our competitors aren't going to have for probably several years.
I mean, we've already got the reinforced that is probably the best in the nation, best in the North American market. We are going to continue to work on tools that can help them to integrate our products into their projects. You are investing in a different way of doing things that has continued to be proven sound over and over and over again. What you are investing in is you are investing in a phenomenon.
Good morning. I was just sitting here thinking I could have told my mom I could have been a movie star. My name is Stephen Wakefield. I am the GM of the AAON business unit, and I have been with the company since the 1990s, more than half of my life. For me, I decided to take a moment, make it crystal clear to everybody in the room that AAON is not a job for me.
It has been a part of my life. These are people that are my family. We bled, sweat, and cried together to build this company. I just want you all to know that before I even start technical presentations, I can do that. Motivating you to go to war to build air conditioners, that's my thing. I just wanted to start with that. I've had the pleasure of getting to work for all three CEOs now in the company's history. I can tell you to go from kind of a Wild West in the 1990s to being able to attract a CEO like Matt Tobolski. That's strong evidence, really strong evidence for people that are in your shoes looking at investing in our company. Key takeaways, make this very succinct to start with. Innovation is our thing. Everything that we do, we're thinking outside of the box.
We're thinking, how can we do something that breaks barriers? We're okay with learning from a mistake and pushing forward. We're not afraid to change how the industry does things. We're going to push. We're a solutions-based, best-in-class operator. We've got this magical thing happening right now where our price premium is narrowing. The trends that are happening in the world are playing into our hands. On top of that, we've got a history of very capable leaders that were very much salesmen in their former lives before coming to AAON and therefore knew how to attract and build the very best sales organization in our industry. I witnessed them do this. It was not easy. They demanded supreme excellence and a business partner type of mentality with our company. We have that in spades today.
Please take with you today from my part of the presentation, at least, these key takeaways. A quick brand overview. The AAON brand has about $1 billion in revenue. 80% of that's rooftop units. That's our bread and butter. It's complemented with air handlers and condensing units and parts. 88%, as of right now, of the AAON brand is built in the Tulsa facility. The other 12% is in Longview. These are our gap bridgers. These are the products that we build that are not custom and not cookie-cutter. If you look at these and you look at them through an engineer's eyes like I do, you see that this is a tremendous amount of diversity for a catalog set of products.
Any one of these products on here has dozens and dozens and hundreds and maybe even thousands of different versions and options that can allow a very capable salesperson to apply a particular version of our product to a customer's particular need. What makes AAON brand special? This is what I like talking about. We were born with a fearless, innovative DNA. I mean that. The man that started this company, he did not know how to spell fear. He scared all of us because he did not know what it meant at times. He taught us how to absolutely push the limits and that a lot of times customers do not even really know what they need. Back in the 1990s, it was a thing just to put piano hinges on air conditioner doors.
Here we are 25, 30 years later, and we have created expectations by things that we did even that long ago that have affected what a customer expects in an air conditioning unit. We have a very personal, cherished culture at AAON that inspires great things to happen. We demand that. We expect that. Every person that interacts with another person at AAON, we pay attention to how that's done. If it's not done in a way that advances our company and makes great people like the people on this front row want to come be a part of our team, then we're going to correct that. We have dynamic products. They're very flexible, very dynamic. On top of that, they're also industry-leading when it comes to performance. It's a combination that's really hard to do both. It's easy to do one or the other.
It's very difficult to do both. Why we can't be replicated. This is probably my best slide. So everybody pay real close attention to this one. This is the one I got to sell. This is why they picked me to talk about this. Because you might be thinking, how can we replicate? Why can't another company just replicate what you do? Why can't they just do that? The reason why is because our entire foundation of how we think, how we draw a part, how we put a bend on a piece of sheet metal, how we move parts through our factory was completely undone in the very, very early days of the company because we had an epiphany of a way of doing things that has still not been replicated 30 years later. We built, we undid and rebuilt everything because we were a small company.
We could do it. We could, here again, that fearless DNA. We could redo, set up everything that we do based on this method. If you can imagine that method like sparking a fire and becoming something that was like, whoa, this actually works better than we thought. Us building relationships with vendors that started creating special machines just for us based on our needs. Then we built everything on top of that. Oh, I see Jerry back there. Hi, Jerry. Good to see you, bud. Our entire way of doing things, the engineer's mindset when they look at their computer, our fabricator's mindset when they touch a button on a machine, it is all built on this method that we came up with all those years ago.
To replicate that, they could hire half the AAON team talking about a competitor, and they could say, go replicate AAON. What that team would come back and say is, okay, let's stop doing everything we do. Let's undo it all and start over. Nobody's going to do that. It's going to be an unbelievable undertaking because it affects so many things. Think overhaul of everything you do and learning as you go all the mistakes that AAON learned when we were a much smaller company and we could afford to do so. Here's a basic table of us versus them. When it comes to production, our competitors are going to be mass-produced. They're going to be standard processes. We're going to have soft tools that are automated. We can say, oh, we don't like that one little thing.
We're going to adjust it a little bit, and we can do it that fast. Whereas a competitor, it's an arduous process that they got to go through to change any particular little thing. We can drop the whole thing and change it. I can recall a time in 2005 where we released a product and we just flat out didn't like it. We redid the entire thing start to finish in 60 days. I can tell you just one engineer redid the whole thing. I know the person very well. Sixty days, redid the whole entire product. This is our method. Price. Our competitors are going to be a budget-friendly, affordable price. AAON is going to be a premium price because of the higher quality. Now, here we are in this very fortuitous environment where that price premium is shrinking. Durability.
A novice can go put their hands on an AAON unit versus a competitor unit, and they can tell real quick that an AAON unit is going to last a whole lot longer. It is built considerably different than a typical high-volume competitor product. Customization. Competitors aren't going to do that. It's going to be very limited. An AAON product is very customizable right out of the catalog. On top of that, we have an applications engineering team that can help you do something special to our already semi-custom product, and we do that every day. Maintenance. Here again, this is one of the special sauces that was part of the early days of AAON. We decided we were going to design products around being maintainable.
Now, the theme, the concept, the common opinion in the HVAC industry in the 1990s is nobody is going to pay for that, and the service techs can deal with it. Our team decided, no, we're going to serve the service techs, and that word's going to get back to the people making decisions to buy the product. Our products are designed from the get-go for ease of maintenance. We talk about innovation. We talk about innovation. We talk about innovation. For a long time, we figured out a way to do that with maybe limited tools. That changed when the NAIC, which is a 134,000 sq ft innovation supercharger, when that was commissioned. Now we have more capacity to test than the big famous third-party testers in our industry.
We have the ability to go really fast now because it's in our DNA to go fast. We have a method of doing it. Now we have a way to prove it very quickly that we're in control of. This decreases risk. This laboratory is world-class. There's nothing in the industry like it. It has formidable specs. It's got the largest reverberant sound chamber in the entire world. It's also third-party accredited by, certified by third parties like AMCA and ISO. Now, on top of that, you're going to hear a lot of theme today about us equipping our world-class sales channel. In the early days of the company, we really depended on talented salespeople and gave them a particular niche way of selling our products.
In today's modern-day AAON, we are investing tremendous amounts of energy and dollars in giving that sales team tools to dominate with. Not to win with. We want them to dominate with. We have now commissioned the Gary D. Fields Exploration Center. What this is, is it's an absolutely beautiful showroom that has AAON products and competitors' products sitting in the showroom with no propaganda. There's no propaganda necessary. You can walk in there as a novice, and you can tell very quickly what differentiates an AAON product from a competitor product. I talked about the sales channel. In the early days of the company, when we didn't have a lot of leverage, we struggled to have but just a few good outlets for our products. Today, under the leadership of Norm and Gary Fields, and now Matt, we have a sales channel partnership, if you will.
These are the very most premium companies on the sales side of the business, independent sales reps that look at AAON like a business partner. I called several of the owners of our rep channel a few months ago because of an issue we were having. I expected them to be upset with me. It was a very temporary thing. Instead, what I got back, the feedback I got back from every one of them was, "We're your business partners. We're in this with you. It'll be just fine," in a nutshell. We have this extraordinarily equipped, extraordinarily capable business partner mindset sales channel in full action. Here we are today with the most equipped, most capable sales channel we've ever had. We have a parts and service strategy that is relatively new. We have this customer exploration center.
We have mobile experience, which is a million-dollar semi-truck that can go anywhere and basically represent AAON products. We have a world-class new training academy under construction right now. We have invested in director-led customer experience-focused leadership that is completely focused on improving our customer experience from start to finish. On top of that, and you can take it from me, the old-school AAON person in the room, we have a newfound supercharged marketing effort that is unlike anything I have ever seen in my career. All this is happening at the same time. Market opportunity. This is real simple. There is tons of more market for us to get. 6% total market share right now. Lots of room here to grow for the company. Now, let's talk about this. I look at this as kind of like a fortuitous situation.
All of a sudden, the secular market trends that are happening are pushing the HVAC industry towards what AAON's been doing for 30 years. It's like, well, that's kind of a gift because we already know how to do it. We're already very experienced doing this. When it comes to decarbonization, we've all heard about this word a lot. AAON is emphatically leading the HVAC industry when it comes to heat pump technology. There's no comparison. Nobody can do what we can do. Energy efficiency, we've been doing that since the 1980s. We know how to create a product that will perform very efficiently, not just by a couple of numbers that are labeled like when you buy a new pickup truck and it says, "This is what your gas mileage is going to be." We all know that that's limited and what that really means.
Our engineers are both brilliant and practical. A combination that I can tell you is not normal. They know how to make a product that has a complete total—excuse me—total cost of ownership focus. Now, on top of all this, the government has been regulating to push product towards—can you hear me that? Sorry. Swallowed a frog. The government has been pushing product towards doing things that we were already doing. I have now experienced both refrigerant transitions, the last one being in 2010. We were two years ahead of that, and it was totally smooth. The last one that just happened, like Matt had mentioned before, was not simple because it affected building codes. Good time to get something caught in your throat. This particular time, you have got a mildly flammable refrigerant, which, of course, has got everybody worked up, and building codes are different in every state.
AAON is ready to go right out of the gate. Early 2024, you can order products from us that are R-454B, this new refrigerant. The industry was spooked a little bit. The customer was spooked. What happened is that it was late adopted, which, of course, was like throwing a monkey wrench in our system. They dried us out, and then they overwhelmed us. You can't turn the Titanic in a minute. This is why Matt emphatically said, "This is going to be temporary. It's temporary. And we're great at dealing with things like this, but it's still painful in the meantime." We have been doing this a long time, folks. Competitors are now having to learn how to do it.
What is resulting is a narrowing price premium and more of a spotlight on what we do great because they are a long way away from being able to give a presentation like this. On top of all that, the cherry on top is, while our competitors were working on catching up to what the government is now regulating, and now they are probably trying to catch up when it comes to this decarbonization movement, we decided, let's get more efficient while they are doing that. Under Gary Fields, we compiled a team of people that completely attacked our operational efficiency. I mean, attacked it. You can see the proof is in the pudding and tremendous improvements in our gross margin in a short period of time. This slide, what more can I say?
I've been with the company so long, I can tell you that it's always thought outside of the box and had innovation at the forefront. I can tell you, as a former design engineer that would sit at a computer and look at a design, my mindset was, "It's okay if I get this wrong if I'm thinking in such a way that I'm going to break barriers and do something different than nobody else has done before." Our culture motivated me to do that. It did not motivate me to be scared about making a mistake. It motivated me to do something that would change the industry. From our first day, 1988, having configurable semi-custom products to 2025 release and the most advanced heat pump in the industry that no one else can do, we have a history of innovation, and we've proved it.
The alpha-class heat pumps, you've probably already heard a lot about this. In 2023, we broke barriers, released air source heat pumps that can operate at zero degrees Fahrenheit. 2025, I think shocked everybody when Matt released this at our national sales meeting. We upped it again and said, "Not only do we have a line of heat pumps that can operate at zero degrees, but now we can operate at negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit." This is an extraordinary thing that we believe is going to gain us market share. A great way that that could happen, Matt's already alluded to this, is that the very early days of the company, we had a few national accounts and we were smaller, but that has not been the focus of our company since probably 2000 or so.
Here we are today with secular trends pushing large customers towards products that we exclusively have. What's happening is that we're getting this huge pipeline of potential national account customers that is quite extraordinary in how it's looking right now. Let's talk about current day and going forward. This refrigerant change has just been extraordinarily challenging. I believe in my heart that AAON is the best in the industry at dealing with outside world chaos and change. I can tell you that the industry and the market both were not really prepared to deal with mildly flammable refrigerant. Let me emphasize that we weathered this storm. We did it with gusto on the inside and did not panic in any way, shape, or form, but it certainly affected us in the short term. It is temporary. It is absolutely a temporary thing. This will not last.
Here's proof of that. You can see that our backlog has already started to recover from the challenges of the spook of the refrigerant change. Here to finish, I want to reiterate what we started with. Innovation is how we think. It's not a word that's on a wall inside the walls of AAON, the buildings. This is a way of thinking that everybody has ingrained in them as an AAON employee. We are here to provide solutions to our customers, and we intend to be a best-in-class operator, and we prove that. We also prove that we don't accept where we're at. We want more. We want to continue to improve. This narrowing price premium situation is absolutely real, and it's kind of remarkable.
Because of our innovation, because of our narrowing price premium, because we can do things others cannot do, here we are sitting on a pipeline of opportunity with national accounts that is unprecedented in the history of our company. All right. Now I get to tell you that you get to take a 15-minute break, and then we will reconvene.
All my exes are not giving in. You say I will try my best. You say you want us here by my side. Darling, your head is not right. I see you are always trying to get me fall apart. Yeah, I think I will be all right. I am working so I will not have to try so hard. Tables have turned sometimes. Most of these. I am not wasting no more time. Maybe you must be outside and got off of a big two-star.
I can't get enough when I get up to let myself do all the things that I don't really want to. Wake up, cut a prango, waiting for the signs to let us all know. Make you know the blinds to press a sambo. Gonna try lies to trust a zango. In the morning, I wanna sleep. I've got eyedrop. I don't wanna eat. Get boxes, not too deep in a dream. Get boxed, I'm not in need of your free. Dreams are gonna get lost. You all are on the nuts, gonna get hot. You're not in the water, but it's gonna be hot. Stop all the drama, and each other will love. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. New day, every new door.
Nights try to hide in my tiny little score. My mind is climbing while I yawn. Why are you lying? I'm so bored and I don't know why, but I know you're me. Everything I'm not supposed to be. What you want? Hard work that comes for a fee. All of our enemies come for free, and we are wasting too much time. We should be out living our life, dripping up, but not sitting inside, losing our doubts, sitting in two lines. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, not anymore. Done with the ones that are making us poor. Done with the ones that are facing the floor. Done with you all, what we're waiting for. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah.
I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. I wanna feel my love, feel my love from each other. Yeah. Fall asleep, dream sweet in the passenger seat. I'm a few hours so we could get someone's feet. Know a place where there's nothing to see, so we can just talk about what we want to be. Work out, we can work out, aye. Time's not a thing, so roll down the windows so we can just sing. Like la-la-la, not a worry in the world and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not really true, but right now it is when I'm right here with you.
We both look our best, but we couldn't care less about the way that we dress. Late to the party, I hope we offend somebody. You didn't even want to die once this week. When you're around, I feel less of a freak. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. I do not care if Snyders say, "Let's get some coffee," so we stay away. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. Falling easily, how about you take a seat with me? Worrying me, and you shouldn't say sorry to me. Something has changed since they got in the way.
I just shouldn't say what I'm wanting to say. Your makeup's running like you're running away, and it's not the best way to be ending the day. Nothing to say, just forgot what we say. Now I'm lost and alone in this big white house on a hill. Some rude boy calls your name, and I don't remember why we came. 'Cause he didn't even want to die once this week. When you're around, I feel less of a freak. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. You're trying to find your heroes, and smiling isn't real. Fall asleep, dream sweet in the passenger seat. Fall asleep, dream sweet in the passenger seat. You didn't even want to die once this week. When you're around, I feel less of a freak.
When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. I do not care if Snyders say, "Let's get some coffee," so we stay away. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. When you smile for real, you make me smile for real. I do not want to be caught in the middle, taking all that I thought, setting it up. Temporal and rainfall, superficial. Our words burn and dull by the ripple. I am just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I am just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her.
I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her. I don't want to be caught in the middle, stepping in the motion artificial. But silently still we talk for a little. Timing reveals no more by the ripple. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her.
I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl. What I came for, not her, not her, not her. I'm just here for that girl, that girl, that girl.
What I came for, not her, not her. Anytime now, fable force a dawn. Anytime now, anytime. Just kick it right down, pillows to the floor. Anytime now, anytime. They come to listen, but it always means nothing. They come in pieces, but it always means nothing. As the sunlight waves beyond the core and. Anytime now, anytime. As expansion, we will reach the shore. Anytime now, anytime. Live, but it always means nothing. They come in pieces, but it always means nothing. They come to listen, but it always means nothing.
All right, we're going to get going. If everyone can take their seats. Prior to Matt Schaub, our General Manager of BASX, coming up and presenting the BASX BU, we're going to start with a video of BASX leading in.
BASX is a solutions provider. We work with clients every day to optimize their thermal management solutions, the equipment that they're putting into their facilities. All of our solutions have varying degrees of custom engineering that are involved. Some of them can rely on some of our existing products and designs, and others are really starting at a blank slate. We have a highly skilled team here that's pretty much ready to tackle anything a customer throws at us. We really pride ourselves on starting from ground up, developing something brand new, taking over a solution that nobody's ever done before. At the scale that the market is growing, being able to produce equipment at volume is really critical to meet these tight deadlines and the rapidly growing market. As we look at the market, it's exponential growth.
As we all know, the data center boom is happening, and it's a great opportunity for BASX and AAON. The growth really spans facilities, people, tools, and processes. Bringing on Memphis, transferring product from one facility to the other takes some effort. Having the space to support the growing demand is certainly critical to make sure that we can deliver a premier customer experience and to be able to support the growth here into the long term. BASX, from its roots, has been an industry disruptor. A custom solution is able to optimize around those customer-specific requirements. We come up with custom solutions, innovative solutions to challenges that our customers are facing today that they didn't face last year. That is really where we pride ourselves and why we've become that supplier of choice.
It's the front-to-back coverage of that customer, ensuring that all their needs are met all the way through. I mean, from developing that solution that is just what is needed to ensuring the quality of the product, ensuring we're responsive, ensuring that we're delivering on time, and then that we have the necessary support for any issues should they come up in the field. As we build out our roadmaps and work on prioritization of different things for the BASX BU, we're also very cautious in understanding that we've got to build this out appropriately. Our ability to rapidly produce a custom solution and then do a full testing on it as well. That has really proven ourselves and proven our abilities. Not only do we have the market to chase the exponential growth, I think we have the talent. We're investing in the capital. BASX does it right.
We do it different. At the end of the day, customers look to us because all of the other choices in the industry fall short.
Good morning. Am I on? All right. Good to be with you this morning. Matt Shaub, and I have the privilege of leading our BASX Business Unit. I'm new to BASX, having just started in this role in January, but I'm not new in industry. I spent the first 25 years of my career in product management, strategy, M&A, and business unit leadership at another prominent OEM in the HVAC space. I sought out an opportunity with AAON, really to be at the forefront of innovation in the market and also to join a company. As Stephen alluded, I perceived this was a top-notch culture. It has not disappointed. It's exceeded my expectations in every way.
I just could not be more thrilled to lead BASX into this next season of growth. What I hope to convey here in the next few minutes is just a bit about who BASX is, what makes us special, and then really how that distinct value proposition translates into economic benefit for the company and our shareholders. You will see a few things. First, as you have heard time and again, we are a fully custom solutions provider. We are tailoring our offerings to the exact requirements of our customers. We thrive on tackling challenges that others steer clear of. We are hyper-focused on our customers, and we really believe that we deliver a premier customer experience in industry.
It is that combination of solution selling capabilities and our focus on the client that has allowed us to aggressively capture market share in industry, and in particular, in the fast and growing data center market, which will be a focus in the conversation here this morning. We will be sustaining that robust growth in the mid to long term. One of the reasons we can do that is because of the additional manufacturing capacity that we are bringing online, really across our entire fleet of factories, but we will zero in with emphasis on the recent investment we have made in Memphis, Tennessee. The history starts in 2014 with the founding of BASX by Matt Tobolski and Dave Benson. It was founded as a fully custom solutions provider in the HVAC space.
While most of our business here in the last few years has been concentrated in data centers, our experience really traverses the full gamut of applications, from commercial and industrial applications to clean room systems to other mission-critical environments. We finished 2024 with $225 million in top-line sales. You'll see the vast majority of that executed out of our Redmond, Oregon facility. Our backlog as of Q1 here was north of $600 million. That's up 123% versus the same period last year. That's certainly a real thrill for us. I'm going to talk about our strategic plan, and we'll really talk in kind of three lenses. We'll talk about our platform, which is distinct in industry. It's also very complementary to AAON. We'll talk about our capacity and manufacturing.
We'll come up a lot in this conversation, not just the Memphis facility, the new space we're bringing on, but also productivity and operational improvements in our existing plants that allow us to maximize throughput and meet the demand from our customers. Finally, we'll just touch on our offerings. Of course, we lead with customized solutions, but we also have a growing number of configurable products that are helping us to win and capture more share. What makes us special? I recognize the BASX Business Unit may not be as familiar to this audience as is the AAON segment. Let me just touch off on a few fundamentals. Think of this as our BASX 101 course. It all starts with customized solutions.
Literally, when we engage with a client, we start with a blank sheet of paper and a customer problem statement. That's how the conversation begins. From there, we iterate around potential concepts to address that need. We're solving for potential solutions in equipment and applications to try to address the concerns. There could be any number of variables that the customer is concerned about. Generally, we're providing a fully customized solution that solves for the lowest total cost of ownership for that particular client. We employ the highest quality manufacturing. Of course, one of the cool things for BASX is that since the acquisition by AAON, we've got all the benefit of AAON's advanced manufacturing automation paired with the legacy of BASX custom craftsmanship in this space. It is a really, really neat marriage. Finally, we'll talk a lot about customer experience.
You've heard it from Matt. You heard it re-emphasized by Stephen. BASX is equally committed to delivering the premier customer experience in the industry that spans pre-sale and post-sale. We are equally committed to that aftermarket experience, walking with the client through the lifecycle of that project. You do not get to be an industry leader in solutions selling if you do not have elite engineering capability. BASX has some of the most creative, innovative, and experienced engineers driving both our solutions development with clients as well as our product development initiatives as well. In addition to the people, our customers love that we have dedicated R&D space that facilitates concept ideation as well as prototyping and validation of those designs with customer witness testing. What sets us apart is the fast-paced and entrepreneurial culture. That hails from our founders.
It's embodied by every single employee in the team. Everyone understands our mission. We want to move quickly. We want to respond aggressively to the toughest challenges in the industry. It really sets us apart. I mentioned already, we go to market primarily through customized solutions. Very frankly, customers often seek us out because they discover that an off-the-shelf product just misses the mark in some way. It either falls short in the area of performance, perhaps its efficiency in the data center space. Power utilization is a key conversation, right? If an off-the-shelf product fails to satisfy the power requirements in a facility, it can blow up the job. We step in and we solve that problem with a customized offering.
Generally, for that client, we're solving for the lowest total cost of ownership, but we can optimize and customize around any and all of the variables that are of importance to the client. Generally, for the facility, we're providing a product that looks superior and is built to last for many years to come. The hallmark of BASX manufacturing starts with superior fan technology as well as exceptional quality in our cabinet design. I would put our products up against any manufacturer with regard to overall workmanship, quality, fit and finish, and durability. That's certainly our pedigree. We also, with the acquisition by AAON, have obtained a higher degree of vertical integration content. That includes our fin tube coils that we produce down in Longview, Texas, as well as controls that are produced in Parkville.
An increasing number of BASX designs are having the opportunity to incorporate some of that content. As you'll hear Rebecca talk about, controlling our supply chain is a really important aspect of our go-to-market strategy. We think it gives us resilience in the market, allows us to serve our customers with consistency. I talked about the automated manufacturing. No one does automation like AAON with regard to sheet metal. A number of our BASX designs have benefited from the capabilities that have come on board with the acquisition by AAON. From a customer perspective, again, we're hyper-focused on customers, and we have a unique sales and delivery model that really creates stickiness, not just with our reps, but with the end clients as well.
In the relatively small data center market, and that might sound like an oxymoron, the number of folks that are actually shaping the market and driving the industry forward, it's a small cast of characters. We know very many of them. Many of those have migrated from company to company. They're advocating for BASX. The word is spreading. Demand for BASX equipment, our capabilities, and our solutions is continuing to expand and garner repeat business for our team. That's a real exciting thing for us. We go to market through the AAON Independent National Sales Network. In addition to sales support, these reps are also supporting our customers with installation and service, which, again, in the data center industry, is essential for winning in that segment.
The last thing I'll just mention is another aspect that sets us apart is our dedicated project management. From day one, when we engage with a client, we assign a project manager to walk beside them and to really narrate and manage every aspect of that engagement with the client. From purchase order through project build, shipment, installation, startup, commissioning, that entire experience, we have project managers that are walking hand in hand with the customer to really curate and deliver a fantastic experience. I regularly get accolades from clients with regard to the capabilities of our project managers. Here is a case study that many of you will have heard about. This really showcases how our innovation and solution selling allowed us to win with a prominent hyperscaler in the data center space.
It goes back to 2023 when we were first engaged to respond to an RFP for a custom liquid cooling solution for a new data center design. In the ensuing three, four months, we engaged with the customer in technical discussion, a lot of problem-solving, a lot of roll up the sleeves meetings where we were trying to address, first to understand their needs, then to address those problems with a potential equipment solution. This happened to be a liquid air application. The result was BASX was selected as the exclusive partner for this project. It precipitated us winning $175 million. That was a record order for us. As a note, that project is now being built down in our Longview, Texas facility. That is where we are producing that. Of course, that was a thrill for the whole team.
Actually, the cool part of the story is what happened when we began to perform, right? Because at that point, it was all just design work. As we began to perform, that's where we began to follow through on the customer experience, deliver on our commitments. It was that performance that actually allowed us to win some pull-through work. Several of those are of significant size. The add-on work has been growing our backlog and allowing us to continue to serve that customer. Let's turn our attention to the market. Specifically, we'll focus in on the data center market where north of 80% of our sales are concentrated. No surprise, the data center industry is large. It's growing at every single turn. It continues to surprise us with regard to its pace of change and just the opportunities that are presented.
Really, it does not matter what metrics you pay attention to. In this case, we are utilizing U.S. Census Bureau data. If you look in 2024, the put-in-place construction has the North American data center market at around $35 billion in total size. Our internal estimates would put about 20% of that, or roughly $5 billion to $7 billion, for total cooling and infrastructure, right? Total cooling equipment and infrastructure. That includes scope that goes beyond what BASX provides. We estimate about 40% of that figure is thermal management equipment that is specifically addressable by BASX. If you just follow that math, we would estimate that we have roughly 7% of a $2.5 billion to $3 billion addressable market. Much of that share we have picked up in the last 12 to 14 months.
BASX is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a really important trend that's taking place in the industry today. It's a shift away from air cooling applications to more efficient liquid cooling applications. Matt touched on this earlier. When I say a shift away from, that's based on pure mix. The actual total number of air cooling installations is still growing. That's just based on the sheer demand in industry based on the data center installations. Today, if you look at the mix of thermal management equipment, it's about 85% air cooling. It's the technology that's been utilized for years to condition cloud compute data centers. Even for a power-hungry AI data center, they still need air cooling. You're not going to have a facility that's 100% liquid cooling application. They still need air cooling for their racks and other ancillary electronic equipment.
The case for continued investment in air cooling remains strong. Some of these data centers have matured in recent years. Some of these products have become a bit more commoditized. One of the responses that BASX is leading with is beginning to standardize some of these products for the masses to allow us to attract and win some of this business at more sensitive price points. Another major trend for the market is just the overall growth in the install base. That is both in terms of the number of projects as well as their size. If you look to total installed capacity from 2023 to 2024, we saw a doubling from 2 to 4 gigawatts of installed capacity.
The experts are projecting another doubling here in the next few years where annualized put-in-place construction is going to be in the range of 8 to 12 GW of installed capacity, which is a staggering figure. The macro construction pipelines support the trend. Even if you discount it by 50%, which we're inclined to do when we think about our projections and scenario planning, it's still a huge opportunity for BASX. Of course, as the market continues to roll forward and grow, so does the BASX backlog. I believe we saw this picture earlier. We finished Q1 with north of $600 million in backlog. The other really important statistic just to bear in mind is that in addition to this backlog, we've got well over $1 billion in qualified high-potential opportunities in our funnel.
Those are projects that we're actively cultivating with clients, many of them hyperscalers, a good number of colocation customers as well. The funnel is as robust and as hot as it's ever been. Of course, the demand in industry exceeds what BASX can provide. I suspect it exceeds what all of us can provide put together. It puts us in a position where we can be selective. We can and must be selective in the jobs that we want to take. We want to work with the customers that we want to work with. We want to take the jobs that are ultimately going to deliver value for the company and our shareholders. We want to grow responsibly. It's not just about growth for growth's sake. We want to deliver top-line growth, but we're also paying attention to margins and improving our bottom-line results as well.
We're in a great position to continue to aggressively grow market share. Of course, that's made possible by our comprehensive lineup of thermal management products and solutions. From our air handling units to our heat rejection chillers to our most recent product, our Coolant Distribution Unit or CDU, that's one of our latest liquid cooling solutions that we've taken to market. Really, across the board, we're in a position to serve our data center clients with just about any product or solution they might need inside this space. When we add it all up, we see the addressable market opportunity for BASX to be on the order of $1 billion to $1.5 billion per installed gigawatt of future capacity. As I mentioned, air cooling has been the prominent application. It's been the main driver for BASX success here over the last three years.
Air cooling continues to be really, really important in the industry going forward. It is an important part of our business. Again, even those liquid cooling applications that are serving AI data centers are not going to be sufficient to cool that data center in total. You are still going to need air cooling to support that data center. The big opportunity for BASX, though, is in serving customers with liquid cooling. This is driven by these AI data centers that have 10x the capacity of your typical cloud compute data center. BASX has stamped out a leadership position, as evidenced by that case study, very early on in aligning with an early adopter, one of these hyperscalers. We have proven our capabilities, and now we are having the opportunity to deliver on that. Why the shift, though?
Liquid cooling is by nature far more efficient than air cooling at conditioning these chips that are generating tons of heat. It really could look one of two ways. It could be a liquid-to-air application, as was the example in the case study, or it could be a liquid-to-liquid application as supported by the CDU here that you see on the screen. There was a lot of talk last quarter after DeepSeek, which is a Chinese AI company. They broke their news as to their low-cost AI training models. Of course, there were a lot of questions swirling. I do not doubt that many of you were paying attention and asking some of those same questions.
In the matter of days and the next couple of weeks after that announcement, we saw a lot of value in the marketplace just evaporate as there was concern around where the industry was going and how this news might impact us. We asked some of the same questions. Would these U.S. hyperscalers pull back on their capital spend? What was going to happen to the BASX backlog? Of course, since that time, we have become convinced this is a great thing for the industry. We think it is a good thing. We believe low-cost AI attracts more players into this space that are going to continue to innovate and disrupt and drive the market forward. It reduces the barriers to entry. From our perspective, we welcome this. We see it driving more data center construction as well as increased demand for BASX equipment and solutions.
There's another trend that's taking place right now, which is the shift from AI training models to AI reasoning models. These are the models that are actually drawing inferences. They're actually getting at the heart of application and use cases for consumers and businesses alike. We've barely begun to scratch the surface here with regard to what that total demand profile is going to look like in the coming years because we can barely imagine what the application and use cases will become. Again, we see the number of data centers that will be supporting application and inference dwarfing the number of data centers that were put in place to support AI training. BASX has the lineup of thermal management equipment to be able to support those customers and continue to capture market share as that growth moves forward.
Of course, with the rise of AI and this continued growth, we have been investing aggressively in manufacturing capacity to make sure that we can perform and win at scale. I just want to talk about our manufacturing strategy. If we look at our mix of production, looking at 2024, the vast majority of what we produced was built in our Redmond, Oregon facility. That was the original BASX founding location. We had Longview, Texas supporting. In 2025, Longview is taking on a larger portion of our mix from an overall production perspective. Memphis is coming online. Memphis, as you will see along that top shaded color—I cannot tell you what that color is—but that top row, Memphis becomes the dominant producer, we expect, of BASX branded product here in the next few years. Overall, we are doubling our BASX production capacity.
We're doubling it here in the next few years. Memphis becomes that really important player in the mix. The other thing that I think, Matt, you may have touched on this, we're also retooling our processes and our staff to make sure that we have the flexibility to leverage the fleet and build BASX branded products at any AAON factory. Why is that important? It gives us flexibility. It gives us optionality with how we serve customers, whether it's on a regional basis or to simply adjust as we have demand. We think that really gives us a competitive advantage. If we drill down on these three sites, Redmond is full. Make no mistakes about it. We are at capacity.
Our strategy in Redmond, which is roughly 240,000 sq ft of available production capacity, our strategy there is maintain top line, continue to enhance margins, focus on throughput, productivity, and drive improvements in our bottom-line position. That is essentially the play in Redmond right now. In Longview, Texas, we have just come off a major expansion there. We put 250,000 sq ft in place dedicated to BASX production, capable of supporting about $500 million in annualized revenue. We are only utilizing about 70% of that capacity right now. Of course, in the next two, three years, our plan is to continue to push, expand that, sell that capacity, optimize those lines for performance. Memphis, of course, is the news story. We acquired this facility back in December 2024. We are already in the process of trying to build that out.
490,000 sq ft of dedicated manufacturing space to data centers today. We fully expect this is going to have the potential to outperform the other two put together based on how we're setting it up. We've just barely begun to utilize the space. We'll be ramping that here over the next three to five years. Now, how does this manufacturing strategy support economic benefit for the company? It's no secret we've been investing a lot in manufacturing expansion. We're now beginning to reallocate demand to these new facilities that have space available to support our strategy. There's a cost associated with moving products around. There's a cost associated with starting up new production lines. Our margins of late have reflected this pressure. Throughout 2025, Longview, again, growing in its manufacturing capacity, taking on more of the mix from a BASX production perspective.
They'll be optimizing their margin performance. Redmond, again, continuing to improve coming off of a challenging 2024 as we had a lot of CapEx investment there. We saw a marked improvement in throughput from Q4 of last year to Q1 2025 in Redmond. Our manufacturing buildout and our progress in each of these facilities is tracking to our expectations. The key year to pay attention to will be 2026, where volumes are hitting their stride. We're achieving productivity in Memphis. That's when we believe we'll be getting back to our 30+% margin targets. I've touched on Memphis now a couple of times. I can't hide my enthusiasm for this facility and just the overall program of standing this up. It's obviously central to our BASX growth strategy. It's just going to be a fantastic asset for AAON.
I'm convinced it's going to be one of our flagship facilities. Not only is it centrally located in the U.S., it's in a vibrant labor market. We're just thrilled with the talent we've been able to place there. We've got several directors that we've placed that are top-notch in their field that have a long track record for performance. We're really excited about the team we're building there. The facility itself has great bones. It's going to facilitate our manufacturing. Of course, we have a blank canvas to work with in optimizing it for data center production. That's thrilling as well. It's an approach state business. We've got a fantastic chamber there that's been very supportive. We've got new manufacturing and technology partners that are moving into the market because they're excited about all that's happening in the Memphis area.
We're thrilled about our choice to be in Memphis. We'll achieve meaningful production by the end of this year. That's our goal. We actually began producing in February, which was far sooner than we imagined. That was really just in response to the extreme demand we had in our Redmond facility. We had to shift, move some product down to Memphis to be able to capitalize on the space that we had. It actually serves as a great runway and ramp-up for training of the staff that we're hiring there. I also want you to note, the facility is 787,000 sq ft. I mentioned that roughly 500,000 sq ft is committed to BASX. That means we've got approximately 300,000 sq ft that's reserved for flexible future use. That could be additional data center business.
It could be additional solutions and products under the BASX business. Or as Matt mentioned, it could be that we utilize that space for national accounts and other AAON opportunities. We are looking at this with kind of an arms-open approach to say, where are we going to steer this business going forward? We have got optionality. Of course, we are really pleased that we purchased a facility that gives us some flexibility for future growth. Now, to understand our growth trajectory, I do want to step back and just look a bit at the clients that we serve. The data center market broadly segments into three classes of customer. We have talked about the hyperscalers already. You know these guys by name. These are the Googles and the Microsofts.
They dominate the headlines because of their massive investments, right, as well as the massive power that's required to run their facilities. Of course, they love us because we solve problems for them that no one else does. We approach those problems with a solutions mindset. We're delivering custom solutions to address the specific challenges that they have. The colocation customers are the ones that are essentially leasing their spaces to others, other data center users. What's important to them is versatility and flexibility in the infrastructure. They look to BASX to support them with the unique challenges that come around that flexibility. Finally, you have enterprise customers, which essentially are small hyperscalers. Their data centers are owned and operated by a single facility for their own use.
I mentioned hyperscalers, and I want to focus on them here because today a disproportionate amount of our business is actually concentrated around a few large hyperscalers. They love us for what capabilities we can bring to bear in solving their problems. We love them because they bring us a lot of volume. Make no mistake, it's been a real win-win relationship for us. In addition, partnering with the hyperscalers has actually put BASX at the very tip of the spear where we're partnered with early adopters where we get to learn and iterate through technology, which we can then leverage with some of our other customer conversations. It's been a fantastic partnership.
As we look forward, we are intentionally expanding and diversifying our customer base to bring on new and oftentimes smaller customers such as those in the colo space or even enterprise clients. That is made possible because we have got additional manufacturing footprint to work with. We will also talk about some of the configurable products that are actually going to serve some of those clients at more attractive price points. Of course, the one big advantage, a theme that is ringing through all of our presentations, is the strength of our AAON National Sales Network. That is the channel that is going to avail us of some of those new relationships. I have talked a lot about data centers. I do want to remind you that the BASX foundation, our hallmark, is really in custom solutions of all kinds, regardless of industry. Our experience traverses multiple end markets.
Yes, 83%, I believe 83% of our business is in data centers in 2024. We still have an important segment of our business that's focused on clean room. We did 13% of our sales in clean room systems in 2024. Here we're serving pharmaceutical and medical. We're serving the semiconductor and chip fab markets. Of course, that business has been dwarfed by the shiny object of the growing data center business. We remain committed to staying diversified and continuing to diversify both the portfolio of offerings as well as the end markets that we're serving. One of the opportunities is in commercial, where we've only got about 4% of our business today. We've got engineering teams that are actively working at solving for new configurable products that would allow us to increase our exposure and serve that market in a stronger way.
While BASX is all about custom solutions, that's not going to change. We do see productization as a path toward achieving greater scale and achieving that diversification that I talked about. There are really two ways that this is taking shape inside the company. One, we are beginning to cost reduce and standardize some of the data center offerings, right? Again, we're a custom solutions provider, but we've seen the opportunity to standardize some of those offerings, which we think puts us in a position to serve a more price-discriminate customer, such as perhaps some of the small colo guys. You'll see examples on the page here of our air side, our fan cooling wall, as well as the liquid cooling solution, our CDU. The second opportunity, though, is with the semi-custom configurable air handler that Matt alluded to earlier.
Here's a case where pursuing this project puts us in a position to grow our presence in the commercial space, which would put us in a position to penetrate more healthcare, higher education, say some government end markets, which would be analogous to some of the end markets that we're serving on the AAON side. Here again, we're taking a page from the AAON playbook. We're leveraging parametric 3D design, automated manufacturing to deliver a feature-rich, very configurable, mass-customized product. We put that in the hands of the most capable sales channel in the world. Now all of a sudden, some really special things can happen that allows us to achieve scale without necessarily needing to task all of our custom solutions engineering, which is a very high-touch support model.
I trust I've been able to convey a bit about what makes BASX special, who we are, and really how that distinct value proposition is helping us win in the market and aggressively capture share. Just to summarize again, we're a fully custom solutions provider. We deliver the premier customer experience in the industry. It's really that one-two punch, the combination of those two things that's allowing us to aggressively grow our market share, specifically in the data center space. We're in a great position to sustain that winning track record and to continue to grow, continue to gain share. A big piece of that is the manufacturing strategy that we're executing right now, which includes significant improvement in all of our facilities with the expansion and doubling of our footprint that supports BASX.
All of that's going to contribute toward us sustaining that 40%+ CAGR here into the next few years. At this point, we're going to queue up another video before I invite Rebecca Thompson, our CFO and Treasurer, to the stage.
Looking to our overhead crane extending out over the railroad tracks, proceeding south, looking at the facility sitting on 13.4 acres prior to the commencement of work. Since the leveraged buyout in 1988, AAON has invested millions of dollars to upgrade its manufacturing capabilities. We'll take you inside the cavernous 180,000 sq ft plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where AAON designs and assembles its rooftop heating and air conditioning units. It was the Wild West, to say the least. Our founder was an extremely gifted manager, created a mindset that we're going to invest everything we've got into this special product idea. That worked in spades.
The history of AAON is just simply innovation. We always stay ahead of everyone else on the development curve. As AAON continued to grow, Norm wanted to be vertically integrated. We acquired Coils Plus in Longview, Texas. They have been our coil manufacturer ever since. When you look at AAON's history, we like to own our supply chain for all the unit production. In 2003, we wanted to improve the efficiency of the cabinets. We decided, hey, this would make a great differentiation for AAON to be able to have these two-inch double-wall foam panels, the best cabinet in the industry, and just continue the path of innovation that we've always been on. In 2015, they brought Gary Fields onto the board of directors. In 2016, he was named President of AAON.
You can see from our results as we continue to grow and grow that from leader to leader, we did not slow down. You look when we bought Wattmaster Controls in 2018, that was really game-changing for the organization to be able to build our own controls. At this point in time, we have the fundamentals pretty well in place. We are going to have to be the state of the art in efficiencies, whether it is the machinery we use or the manner in which we do these things. Efficiency will be the name of our efforts for the next couple of years. The more things we can test and try and have in our tool belt, something that maybe is not advantageous today may become advantageous tomorrow.
Prior to having the NAIC, we spent a lot of time doing just stuff on computer, not a lot of test capability to really prove off that everything worked. Now with the NAIC here, we're able to really push the spectrum, testing different products and different concepts. They do kind of build the tool belt is the way I look at it from the engineering perspective. If you go and you look at our history and our numbers after Gary got here, he expanded the overall concept of what AAON was. By doing that, it brought extreme attention to our company. When we acquired BASX, that really opened doors to diversifying our products. BASX had already established relationships with data center customers. It allows us to leverage scale.
It allows us to broaden our portfolio, have a larger customer base, but yet still leverage some of the key engineering components that we have at AAON. It was exciting to be a part of AAON whenever we crossed that million-dollar point. That growth has caused us to expand our team just to take on the added workload of the increased units that we're putting out the door. That starts happening. We realize quickly that that's still not enough. We do a nationwide search. Where else can we expand to? Boy, it becomes crystal clear quick that Memphis, Tennessee is the place to go. Now we're Tulsa, Longview, Parkville, Redmond, and Memphis, Tennessee. Here we are. The Tulsa company that is known around the world for its leading-edge technology is also the company that makes rooftop equipment to keep the climate inside malls and superstores just right.
AAON, exploring new ideas, meeting the challenges, and mastering technology for the new millennium. A team of people that builds something so great can meet a Matt Tobolski and immediately know that he's the right leader. What he brings to the table is business acumen and sophistication. He doesn't have to come into AAON and come up with a way of doing things or build a culture. What he simply is tasked with is how can we empower all of these great things that we have on a higher scale. The company will still continue to grow at a very healthy pace. AAON's in such a good position that we can still take market share in a down market because our price premium has really lowered and we just have a better product compared to our competition. We want to be the best value to our customers.
As we see the market change and shift, we'll always maintain that. There will always be a push on the engineering side to keep the R&D side moving and innovating and creating new products. With the products that we're working on, as well as the market we're able to capture, not only do we have the market to chase the exponential growth, I think we have the talent, we're investing in the capital, and as well as the strategic plan is to capitalize on that. The growth that I foresee for AAON within the next five to ten years is representative of what we've already done. I think since we've already proven that we've done it once, why can't we do it again? I think the future is almost scary bright.
You know, I've been through a lot of changes and a lot of things in my career because it was part of a really a startup company in its early days. There's not a lot of selfish ambition at AAON. There's a lot of collaboration and teamwork. God, you equip that and you empower that. What can happen?
All right, good morning. Is this working okay? All right. I am Rebecca Thompson. I am AAON's Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. I have been with the company since 2012. I came in as our Chief Accounting Officer and then transitioned into my role as CFO in 2021. I do want to take a moment just to note not just how far we have come as a company, but also how far our finance organization has come.
One of the most notable things that this group will have seen is the hiring of Joe Mondillo and really just the increased shareholder engagement we've had in the past several years. Joe has really taken our investor relations to that next level. We're doing these events like today, Investor Day. We're doing investor perception studies, and we're participating in conferences throughout the year. Another thing that we've never done is closing on the BASX acquisition. This was the largest acquisition in the company's history, and it really gave us a chance to create a playbook for our future M&A opportunities. If you've listened to any of our earnings calls in the past several years, you will have heard Gary talk about standing up an FP&A team.
Now, while this primarily serves us internally, it has also improved the quality of our earnings calls and the clarity of the information we're able to put out to the public. The last thing I want to touch on is our treasury. When I became Treasurer in 2017, AAON had a $30 million line of credit that we never used, and we were just building this war chest of cash. You know, when you fast forward to today, we just closed on a new $500 million syndicated loan agreement. You know, that's really setting us up for our future growth that we've been talking about this whole day. That's all to say that we're not just growing and investing in our products, but we're growing and investing throughout the whole organization.
You know, with our new organization structure, moving into the two business units and the creation of shared services, we're going to be able to drive those best practices throughout the whole company, which will create value for us as an organization, but also value for our shareholders. Our key takeaways for today, as we already discussed, the AAON and BASX brand will drive us to a new three-year CAGR of 12.5%. We have a new margin target of 32% to 35%. By the end of 2027, you'll see the leveraging of SG&A down to 13% of sales. While our capital allocation strategy will remain consistent, you will see lower CapEx dollars after 2025 upon completion of our expansion projects. When you look at this slide, you can see that we consistently deliver results.
When we completed the sale or the purchase of the BASX company in 2021, from 2021 to 2024, our revenues increased 125%. During this timeframe, we have been able to maintain healthy gross margins in some of the most challenging times of the company. When you look at 2020, we won during COVID. We were an essential business, and we were able to deliver products with superior indoor air quality during a pandemic when all of our competition was shut down. We did struggle with inflation and supply chain disruption in 2021 and 2022. As you can see, we rebounded nicely in 2023 with record gross margins. All of this to say that we provide a healthy return on our shareholders' investments. We want to reaffirm our outlook that we gave at our first quarter earnings call for 2025.
Sales will grow in the mid to high teens. Gross margin is expected to be consistent with 2024. SG&A, you'll see leveraged slightly, 25 to 50 basis points, and CapEx is still expected to be elevated with an estimated $220 million. I do want to take a quick moment to provide an update on Q2. We've talked a lot about these investments in technology, and one of those investments is a new ERP. Now, our strategy for going live with our ERP is to go live site by site. On April 1, we went live with our Longview, Texas location. We were intentional in picking Longview, Texas because it represents a good cross-section of the company in that it produces the AAON brand, the BASX brand, and coils. While the solution is technically sound, it has caused some disruptions and slowed production at that facility.
As a result, we do anticipate our Q2 will be softer than what we guided to. When we're affirming our three-year targets, Stephen talked about our opportunities at the rooftop market are boundless. The AAON brand is well positioned to take market share with our Alpha Class heat pumps that can lead the industry in energy efficiency and decarbonization, as well as their position for national accounts. These opportunities will grow the AAON brand in the mid single digits. The opportunities in the BASX brand in the data center market will grow the BASX brand approximately 40%. Together, these will result in our new CAGR target of 12.5% plus. Now, when you look at our new margin target and the puts and takes to get there, we've been doing expansion projects for the past couple of years at all our locations.
As these projects become complete, it'll be less disruptive to our production facilities, and you'll see increased growth, increased revenues to leverage those fixed costs and drive margin expansion. Additionally, we'll continue to right-size our head counts. With our new reorganization structure to have a global shared manufacturing service, we can drive best practices and efficiencies across all locations. Now, while we can't control everything, and we anticipate there could be some headwinds like inflation and supply chain disruptions and volatility in government rules and regulations, we have policies in place to quickly identify and address these so that we can preserve our target margins. Lastly, as I just talked about, we are wrapping up some of our large technology projects that have weighted heavily on SG&A in 2024 and 2025.
As these projects are completed, we can expect to see the leveraging of SG&A down to 13% of sales by the end of 2027. A couple of things I like to point out about this slide. The first thing is that all these numbers are organic growth. The second thing is that we have a history of setting ourselves up for future growth. When you look at 2021, we are focused on creating solutions to deal with hyperinflation and pressures on our gross margin while also negotiating and completing the acquisition of BASX and making strategic changes in leadership. All of these things set us up for double-digit growth in 2022 and 2023. Now, again, when you look at 2024, we've had an intentional focus on reorganizing the company, completing the integration of BASX, and expanding our facilities to accommodate future growth.
You can see here in the past five years, we've been able to take market share. A lot of this is what I referred to earlier with the beginning of COVID and being able to operate and deliver product while the rest of our competition was shut down. As Stephen has talked about, our price premium in recent years has narrowed, accelerating those share gains. As Matt touched on, the BASX' strong CAGR is a result of its solution-based approach, leading to deeper customer relationships and better outcomes. Over the past five years, the rooftop business has increased, or AAON's share of the rooftop business has increased from 5% to 7%. We are well positioned to continue to take market share, given the high efficiency standards and increasing focus on superior air quality. Additionally, our shrinking price premiums make our product more competitive and more mainstream.
When you look at the BASX brand, a lot of that growth comes from the acquisition with AAON. So prior to the acquisition, BASX had relationships with many customers, including hyperscalers, but because of their size, they could only get orders in the $5 million to $10 million range. After the acquisition with the AAON name behind the BASX brand, they became a much less risky option for those customers. And as a result, are now able to get opportunities in the $30 million to $200 million range. As we discussed, the rooftop market is expected to be slightly down to flattish in the coming years. And this is primarily driven by current macroeconomic factors such as higher interest rates and slower construction starts. But we still believe that we can take market share during this down market.
The AAON brand will gain this share through its national accounts and our alpha-class product that is well positioned to take advantage of the growing interest in highly efficient units with zero carbon emissions. We also look to price our product to the market. We have talked about this historical price premium of 20%. In the past several years, our competition has put in much larger price increases for inflation, for compliance with the DOE standards in 2023, for the new refrigerant change in 2025. All their price increases were much larger than ours. With a smaller price premium, we will be able to accelerate our share gains and maintain our new target gross profit.
As Matt has already discussed for the BASX brand, cloud computing will continue to drive data centers on the air cooling side, while AI data centers will drive even more growth for liquid cooling solutions. We entered the first quarter with a record backlog of over $1 billion. This is split pretty much about $400 million with the AAON brand and $600 million with the BASX brand. That represents a 45% and 123% year-over-year increase for the AAON and BASX brands respectively. When you look at the AAON backlog, we traditionally like to see a quarter's worth of sales. At the end of the first quarter, that was slightly extended due to supply chain disruptions with the refrigerant change.
We anticipate that brand will be able to ramp up in the back half of the year, bringing down our lead times and bringing down that backlog to a more normalized level. Now, the BASX backlog is slightly different from the AAON backlog in that customers are looking to secure future production given the data center demand. That business can also be lumpy in nature. We anticipate as that business grows and as that backlog grows, we'll be able to smooth some of that business out and also have the flexibility to schedule that production across our entire fleet of locations. When you look at our margin expansion opportunities, all of our expansion projects in Redmond, Longview, and Memphis will provide increased sales that will leverage our fixed costs and provide margin expansion.
The reorganization of the company to drive manufacturing best practices across all locations will improve productivity and efficiencies. You'll also see a shift in our product mix to more BASX product and national accounts, and those high-volume orders will drive higher revenues and better overhead absorption. All of these things together will lead to our new margin targets of 32% to 35%. Let's talk about our capital allocation strategies. We always like to reinvest back into the company with CapEx. We like to increase our shareholder value through dividends and stock repurchases. While we've traditionally not been an acquisitive company, we are always on the lookout for an opportunity that has a strategic fit and purpose. Our top priority has been and still is investing dollars back into the company through CapEx.
When you look at the timeline that we have here of our continuous investment in the company, it starts in 2020 with the build-out of a new building for Longview, Texas, that added 220,000 sq ft. When you fast forward to 2024, we doubled that building, adding another 250,000 sq ft. Also in 2024, you had additions in Redmond for a new weld shop and additional office space. At the end of 2024, with this large $200 million data center order, it created the need for additional capacity. That is when we sought out our plant in Memphis, Tennessee, which closed in December of 2024 for $64 million. Now in 2025, we are wrapping up our expansion projects in Redmond and in Longview and really looking to get that Memphis plant up and going.
Going forward, we expect that these projects will normalize and we'll have a lower level of spending in CapEx. Over the years, we've clearly demonstrated that our investments in growth have certainly paid off. When you look at our ROIC, it has increased every year until we took a dip in 2021 with the acquisition of BASX. You can see it recover in 2022 and 2023 as we get the return on that acquisition until again we make a significant investment in 2024 for the plant in Memphis. We evaluate all our capital projects and look for an internal rate of return of 20%. We have a long-term strategy for capital, and we're not looking for short-term gains. We continually evaluate the capital needs of the business and look to balance our uses of cash. We do not like to provide a specified dividend payout ratio.
Instead, we rather look to provide consistent and regular increases in our dividend. We also look to do share repurchases when we have excess funds on hand and when we believe our stock to be undervalued, providing yet another good return on your investment. Under our current authorization for share buybacks, we have $70 million remaining. We do plan to take a different approach to M&A. We are formalizing our M&A strategy to help us assess the market, identify potential targets, and develop those relationships that could lead to opportunities in the future. We do not want growth just for growth's sake. We want to be intentional with our acquisitions and find opportunities that will complement our current product portfolio and help us do what we do best. Lastly, we love vertical integration.
I know one of the things Gary always says is, "We do not assemble units, we manufacture them." Any opportunity that we have to purchase or improve our vertical integration will always be a consideration. One of the ways AAON has also always won is through our strong balance sheet. Being conservative and low-levered has put us well in times of financial stress and allowed us to take on opportunities when our competitors could not. Now, we have taken on borrowings in recent years, but you can still see that it is very conservative and we are lowly levered at less than one times EBITDA. As we grow, we will have additional working capital needs, and we will have this increased CapEx that we discussed that will cause temporary borrowings to increase, but still be very conservative. We prioritize the paying down of debt above dividend increases and share repurchases.
We also continue to evaluate our business needs for future liquidity and the future growth of the company. In summary, our new three-year CAGR target is 12.5% plus. We set a new target margin of 32 to 35%. We will proactively manage the business to see leveraging of SG&A down to 13% of sales by the end of 2027. You will see a more normalized CapEx spend starting in 2026 as we have completed our expansion and investment projects. With that, I will now turn it over to Mr. Tobolski to wrap things up.
Just touching in on the incentive drivers. We have to reiterate those incentive drivers of our overall kind of focus and incentive driving value in return of shareholder investments. From the number one piece, and again, just hammering this home, it is that innovation. It's that drive on product differentiation that is core to who we are, that is core to why we grow, is core to why we differentiate ourselves in the market. That really materializes itself in that premium product offering and really a value-driven sale in the organization. When we look at the growth opportunities in front of us, again, really looking at this from a brand perspective, what is making up that 12.5% kind of growth target, 12.5+% growth target?
When we think about that and bifurcate that, that mid-single-digit growth, one thing I want to touch on that does not really build into it the assumption that our tariff surcharge goes forward. Again, I say that just because there is a lot of uncertainty from a political policy standpoint. Our 6% surcharge is essentially assumed at some point to come back off. It is not assumed to be kind of in perpetuity given the volatility we have seen and sort of also some of the stabilization and some of the pricing dynamics. That is not baked into that from the sort of mid-single-digit growth mindset in the AAON brand. That mid-single-digit growth is really looking at it from a standpoint of a relatively stable flat year within 2025 and then going forward, getting back to that high single-digit growth rate from a market share acquisition standpoint.
To put it in perspective and just thinking about the AAON conversation for a minute, this is a challenging market from an overall kind of general commercial non-res perspective. As a data point, commercial rooftop sales volumes as an industry were down 24% in the first quarter, with AAON picking up share against that. The share dynamic that occurred, the disruption that occurred in 2024 around the refrigerant transition is behind us. When we look at where AAON stands in a 2025 conversation, it is in a position where we have an attractive price point, a differentiated product, and will outperform and get back to a market share acquisition story kind of in that 2025 calendar year. Beyond that, getting back to that normalized high single-digit growth rate perspective.
When you look at that and you kind of look for certainty in that, I really do think the bookings cadence and the backlog that you see at the end of Q1 and the bookings cadence that we see going into Q2 continues to reaffirm that positioning and that kind of growth and stability within the AAON side of the business. As we look to the BASX side of the business, really driving 40% plus growth rate inside that fully organic growth rate over the next three years, that's driven by that product differentiation and the strategic investments that we're making inside the overall capacity inside the space. That 40% growth rate inside of the data center segment is well beyond the growth rate of the data center segment.
Once again, reaffirming the conversation that that differentiated product and that value proposition that product provides is really fueling that 40% growth over the next three years. When we think about then, how does that materialize itself into that sort of margin profile? Really, again, 32% to 35%, well above the historic kind of mindset of AAON, well above what we set from a 2023 target. Keep in mind, as we grow, there's pressures on margin on that BASX segment. As that BASX segment continues to grow, there's just some pressures along the sort of, I'll say, margin pressures ahead of the capacity coming online as you ramp production.
What you'll see throughout that three-year period is continued improvement inside the BASX segment margin, but really a very strong and stable AAON performance in that mid-30% range with that BASX segment kind of growing and impacting the business as well as growing kind of its margin performance. When you look at this from a holistic standpoint where this sort of conversation around margin is coming from, it's a very strong and stable AAON margin. It's a growing and strengthening margin within the BASX segment on a dynamically growing business kind of over that three-year period. Really, when we look at that from an industrial perspective, from a peer group perspective, really looking at this from a strong growth perspective, strong growth story inside the HVAC space, driven by the two best brands in the marketplace within the AAON and BASX brand.
Really, from a standpoint of this three-year story and beyond, getting back into that great strong growth, that great financial performance, operational excellence, and really outperforming the marketplace going forward. With that, we're going to spend a couple of minutes and just get some chairs set up here for Q&A. Just give us a couple of minutes to get the room set up, and then we will get the group up here to answer your questions.
If the money get low, low, low, we want everything closed, closed, closed. Yeah, that's just one thing I need the most. Give me all that body, I need you close, close. Let's turn the lights down, ooh. Way down, way down. Can't keep my eyes off you.
All right, before we get started here, I just want to mention specifically to the webcast participants, there is opportunity for you to ask a question. I'll be managing that. If anybody on the webcast has a question, certainly put that through and we'll try to get that in. We'll just get things going. Whoever wants to start. Let's start over here with Tim, and we can go with Ryan next.
Hey, Tim Wojs with Baird. Thanks for all the information today. Just maybe two questions. On the data center growth, I mean, if you take 40% plus out a couple of years, it gets you to like a $600 million to $650 million business. I mean, that's effectively your backlog as of Q1. Maybe you just talk about what you see in that kind of out year because I guess mathematically it does imply some slowing in the data center growth in 2026 and 2027. I just want to kind of confirm if you're trying to say that or not.
Yeah, I guess the way to think about it is the 2025 calendar year obviously has a large uptick that you're going to see kind of in that materialization. That backlog kind of in the data center space, I mean, it's representing out to 18 months kind of in a backlog perspective. You are going to see a huge impact in 2025 with the sort of materialization of the Longview capacity coming online. You certainly won't see that again. I mean, if you get down to the math, I mean, roughly looking at that one order, it more or less tells you that you're doubling year- over- year from 2024 to 2025. Part of the reason why that can happen with bringing capacity online and seeing that come that quick is because Longview was a facility that had a lot of infrastructure in place.
Just to kind of use that as a baseline, when you think about Memphis, yeah, you drop in 787,000 sq ft, but it's not a plant that's been operating. It doesn't have a lot of that system in place. Its ramp to revenue is different than that. To your point, yeah, it implies that, hey, we're going to see a big uptick in 2025. It's going to slow, but it's still going to be in 20% plus kind of growth rates going forward off of that new base. When you look into the sort of that carrying out, it still kind of gets back to the same conversation of in that three to four-year period, getting the data center sort of segment, the BASX segment, around $1 billion in revenue. That still does kind of drive that same conversation.
We're not changing that outlook. It's just sort of the way this capacity is going to come online to support that. It's not going to be quite as flip of a switch that you see in the Longview capacity coming online.
Okay. I guess just on national accounts within the AAON business, hundreds of millions of dollars of pipeline is pretty significant. It is a lot bigger than I would have thought. What does pipeline mean to you in terms of what it is definitionally, and how would you kind of judge success in converting that pipeline to revenue?
Yeah, just high level. I'll touch on pipeline first and let Stephen kind of dive into some of this as well and Andrew as well. Pipeline to us is basically defined as value of active conversations. And so it's people in which you're engaged in a conversation with. Now, we certainly don't expect to see all of that materialize. We look at that and say there's a certain amount, but that's sort of like scale of conversations that you're having. In a traditional commercial HVAC market, non-national accounts, 30% success rate is considered a relatively good success rate in converting an order, pipeline to order. We think national accounts obviously have a bigger impact there. That's sort of at least how we frame the pipeline conversation. I guess, Andrew, I guess you can dive in first on success and what success looks like.
Yeah, sure. I mean, that's the current what we have visibility to, like Matt described in terms of customers that we're speaking with that our reps are courting and communicating our value proposition to. Certainly, the win rates in that area are much higher than the typical plant and spec. We're not one bidder of four or five, but rather we're having a detailed conversation around total cost of ownership, carbon goals, to what degree they want to achieve carbon reduction and balance their total cost of ownership. Those are very rich, deep conversations where we're already in close alignment with helping them make that value proposition decision. Therefore, the win rates are much higher.
At the same time, coming out of our national sales meeting, which was referred to earlier today, we had a lot of conversation with our reps about the opportunity to grow into national accounts. Out of that has gained a lot of momentum with additional national accounts being pursued. While that is the current visibility we have and have listed accounts and opportunity size, that is continuing to grow as well.
I'll touch on the kind of operational side of that question. That is whatever % comes in, the way that's turned, the way I look at this very much from an operational perspective is when you have a national account, you have considerably less diversity. What happens is that the management of that allows us to offset our very diverse product line that we have. You can take a plant like Memphis or an area in the plant in Tulsa, and you can do something very consistent. It will allow you to buffer tank manage and set up quickly to execute that product, if that makes sense.
Hey, guys. Ryan Merkel.
You may have to turn on.
That work? Okay. Hey, Ryan Merkel, William Blair. Thanks for all the details. Really helpful. I want to start on gross margins, which I think is probably the main issue today. Can you talk about the assumptions that you're making at the low end for the 32% and then also the 35%? Matt, you mentioned BASX is going to have some pressures as the factories are ramping. I think that might be what the street has missed here. Specifically, what are you assuming for BASX in the outlook for gross margins?
Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think I always start off by saying, and as Stephen talked about in his presentation, the AAON side of this business, it finished last year at 35%. It's got a great strength kind of inside that operational strategy. It's had pressures on volumes, but get rid of that noise for a second. That organization, the process, the pricing strategy, all that is going to drive that mid-30% margin inside the AAON segment. Today, over the last 12 months, that represents 75% of the revenue. BASX represented 25%. Over that same kind of window, the BASX segment is more in the high 20% to low 30% level. As we think about that, it is reflective of some of the manufacturing investments and, frankly, manufacturing efficiencies that exist at BASX.
When we rewind and say, let's think about a growth cycle, the growth cycle is going to put pressures because if I say I'm going to turn a manufacturing line on, to do that means I have brought in personnel well ahead of that line producing revenue that is going to put pressures on the margin. I'm going to have investments in DNA that is going to show up and hit the books before it's at 100% utilization. Those things create pressures on the margin that you're seeing inside the BASX segment. As you think about that three-year period where BASX is ramping at 40% relative to a mid to high single-digit conversation year- over- year kind of in the AAON world, that is going to put pressures on the consolidated margin.
When we think about this in a future state perspective, how did AAON get to 35% margin? It got there by having stability. AAON in Tulsa, we were not putting on 200,000, 300,000, 700,000 sq ft of capacity. They got to 35% margin, to Stephen's point, by having the time available to drive efficiency programs inside there to really make those materialize. When you look at the BASX side, yeah, we are learning from all that. We are taking a lot of that logic around the efficiency programs that we are building into these investments and these new facilities. During the ramp, there are just fundamental pressures that exist from a financial statement perspective that really burden a little bit of that BASX side. As it grows and becomes more relevant, that is where that, I will say, the lower end of 32 kind of gets to.
Now, as we look forward, there's no reason BASX can't get to a margin profile that is looking similar to AAON. There's no reason that all the things we've learned inside the AAON organization over the last 37 years can't materialize in margin improvement. You just have to get past that dynamic growth cycle to be able to truly sit there and capitalize on that.
Okay. Great answer. Thank you. My second question, you mentioned 2Q is a little softer. Could you be a little more specific? Did those orders just push then into the second half?
No. To dive into it, I think most people in this room, if not everyone in this room, knows we have made investments in technology, one of those being an ERP implementation. We were very calculated on how we launched our new ERP. We were very calculated to go one site at a time. We went live in Longview with a very intentional method because Longview is actually the most complicated site because Longview has both AAON business unit and BASX business unit product plus the vertical integration with coil manufacturing. We went live the first day of Q2 in Longview with the new ERP system in Longview only. That did fundamentally, the solution is correct. I think we can all acknowledge anytime you roll out a large systematic change in technology, there is a learning curve.
That learning curve is going to slow productivity. It put a little bit of pressure kind of inside the Longview segment. I will say in the counter to that, it reaffirmed the strategy that we took, which said, let's only go live at one site. Let's minimize the blast radius. Let's minimize the impact of that kind of go live strategy, which it certainly did. It did impact some of the productivity in Q2 and put some pressures on that Longview kind of throughput, primarily in the AAON branded products. There is a little bit of pressure that's in there. That is just why we're saying there's a little bit of, I'll say, a little bit of headwind kind of inside the Q2 conversation. Frankly, we want to make sure we get that out here today and just have that conversation.
It's not a drastic, massive impact. It just has a fundamental impact inside the Longview kind of operation.
Okay. You reiterated the year, so it's contained.
Oh, the year is 100% contained. Yeah.
It's just pushed.
We are being very, very strategic, very intentional in how we roll out any other site to ensure that the lessons learned, the process, everything is kind of built to minimize impact going forward. Yeah, we look at this from a yearly perspective and say, yeah, some of that softness that we are seeing, some of the delays, if you will, or the reduction in productivity in Longview is just going to extend kind of the overall delivery schedule in the product. Fundamentally, on the overall year, we do not have a change in kind of our outlook.
Over here, Brent.
Great. Thanks, Brent Thielman with D.A. Davidson. Just wanted to come back to BASX. Appreciated the slide where you ultimately want to hit a broader swath of customers into the future. My question was, over the next three years and within that 40% sort of growth rate you described, how much of that is still dependent on the few kind of key large hypers that you have? If you get hyper number four, number five, is it incremental to that growth rate?
Yeah. I'll let you take that one, Matt, if you want.
Yeah. I would say at least 30% to 40% of that is still going to be focused on hyperscalers. We're intentional about trying to expand our customer base. Going back to Stephen's comment about national accounts, these hyperscalers allow us to deliver a consistent product built time and time and time again. We're intentionally expanding customers because we think it de-risks our business. The variation in design, the changeover from model to model to serve these expanded customers does look different when you're operating inside a factory. We see the benefit of continuing to serve those hyperscalers. That's where a lot of the demand remains. Whereas today we're 50-60% of our business concentrated with hyperscalers, we would see that pulling back to perhaps 30% to 40%.
Okay. Second question, Matt, for you, just really sort of officially taking this over, did talk about possibility of acquisitions. How does that look like under you relative to the prior two CEOs? How mature is the pipeline? Any flavor for the size of businesses you might be looking at?
Yeah. Really, I want to start off on the conversation around M&A to reset one thing, which is you're not going to see a major acquisition in the next 12 months, probably not even 24 months. I mean, we're going to build out, I'll say, the process and some of the tools inside to really more proactively be looking at opportunities. The reason I say that is if you look at that organic growth opportunity, you look at kind of what we have going on as an organization, it would be frankly irresponsible to make a big acquisition right now. It would dilute the ability for us to execute on the organic strategy. It would dilute the ability for our leadership team to be able to really manage the growth and drive best practice in this new operating model.
The next 12 to 18 months, it is 100% focused on executing, on really refining our operating engine that exists inside this organization, and then building the toolset to be strategic and be able to start proactively looking at opportunities. Now, to the one comment Rebecca made, if something falls in our lap around, especially a vertical integration conversation, that is something that we would always be looking at because we do truly look at the vertical integration play being something that does differentiate AAON. Whether it's coils, whether it's controls, whether it's fans, these are things that drive kind of a unique differentiator inside of our products and our manufacturing strategy. We're always eyes open to those type of opportunities. They're smaller in scale relative to kind of a bolt-on.
Really, when we think going forward and sort of the midterm kind of conversation, that's when we're going to be proactive on looking at what is in the marketplace from an M&A perspective. The lens we look at M&A around, kind of in that sort of the growth driver in organic kind of conversation, it's really around the similar mindset and culture, right? You think about gates that you have to go through, and the sort of product style, the product strategy has got to align with kind of how we go to market. The sort of ability to leverage our very strong independent sales channel, those two things, those are the initial gates. It comes down to what do we look at? We do not look at growth for growth's sake. We do not look at trying to buy market share. That's not sort of the mindset.
We're looking at what can we add that's got a similar flair in product strategy. Is there a tangential product that we don't have in our portfolio that we can leverage our sales channel? Is there a market that we're not heavily engaged in that can be a great growth driver, diversifying kind of the overall exposure inside the marketplace? Those are the big conversations and the way we think about M&A from an inorganic kind of growth perspective. Again, that's going to be a couple of years out until you should expect to see that kind of materialize.
Thank you.
Julio. Yeah.
Thanks, Julio Romero Sidoti and Company. Thanks so much for all the color today. My first question is on CapEx. It sounds like Memphis won't come close to capacity anytime soon. You talked about that undecated space. I guess that implies CapEx steps down in 2027. Are there going to be machines, equipment, marketing, and other CapEx initiatives that would drive CapEx as a percentage of sales to kind of remain at a double-digit percentage run rate?
Yeah. I'll touch on the Memphis for a second, and Rebecca can kind of follow on that. When we think about, to your comment, we can't flip a switch and bring on 787,000 sq ft. We could do it. Don't get me wrong. We could do it very irresponsibly, and you would see a heck of a lot more margin conversation around that. When we think about how that looks over the next couple of years, we'll be aggressive 100%. We're going to be aggressive to bring on Memphis. We already are, as Matt alluded to, and actually assembling product there back in February. You think about the machinery and what truly makes a manufacturing facility a manufacturing facility, that takes time to come in place. We're progressively putting in more machinery throughout this year.
But some of the lead times, I mean, when we talk about strategy on increasing our vertical integration capacity, increasing our coil manufacturing capacity, that's a longer play. That's not a six months to get all that equipment. That's an 18-month conversation. You're going to see that's where in that 2025 and 2026 calendar year, you're going to see elevated CapEx kind of around the build-out of Memphis. A lot of that is able to still support that additional 280-some-odd thousand sq ft. Again, we have commonality in manufacturing process, which lets us leverage that. There might be some incremental kind of accretive investments that happen in 2027 and beyond. From an overall scale perspective, when we think about the existing fleet, there's definitely basically a reduction in overall CapEx kind of in 2027.
Yeah. I would just say when you talk about growth versus maintenance CapEx, right? So 2024 and 2025, most of our CapEx has been for growth. Going forward, we're looking more at a maintenance mode until, say, we need additional capacity and need another building. You're really looking for that to come down as a percentage of sales starting in 2026.
Great. Thanks so much. My second question is around clean room products. Those products are more complex, larger, longer product duration. Just talk a bit about how do you price those clean room products. Talk a little bit about the margin differential between clean room and data center. Would it ever make sense to expand clean room manufacturing beyond Redmond? Would that make sense in a place like Memphis?
Yeah. I'll touch on it. And then, Matt, you can definitely dive in. One of the things when you think about pricing strategy perspective, again, some of the discipline that we talk about that we're adding in, we talk about we're fast, we're agile, but we're backing that up with some kind of process improvements and sophistication in the organization. And some of that is around pricing. It's around product management. It's around understanding the value proposition. And so when we look at clean room environments as an example, it is a market with fewer players, with higher kind of value that's kind of driven into it. And pricing reflects higher margin. So we do historically price clean room products to reflect that sort of unique nature of the product.
When we think about growth strategy going forward, I think you made a great comment that they're bigger products, they're bigger projects. That is a fundamental constraint. We think about that 13% of revenue in the BASX business unit that you saw in 2024. That is reflective of exactly that comment that they are bigger. Fundamentally, they're slower-moving products to build. As we balance market dynamics, we just fundamentally did not have the space to really support that. If you looked at it and said, in blinders on for a second, hey, the margin that we would sort of bid in the project on a clean room may look higher, it would actually end up netting if we tried to reprioritize some of the Redmond space. It would have netted lower margins as an overall segment because we would not be able to push the volume through.
It just moves slower. When we think about blending that, there's an opportunity for sure to leverage the right space that's built for purpose around clean room products. Memphis is a conversation that we've certainly had. I mean, I wouldn't even just say Memphis. I'd say we rewind all the way back and say, we've got 4 million sq ft across multiple sites. Where is the right spot? That's part of the evaluation. We do see clean room continuing to be a meaningful conversation inside of our business. We're going to continue. We made investments in Redmond, actually, on a separate satellite building to support some of the clean room environmental controls in kind of its own space, really driving its value proposition.
Going forward, yeah, we're going to keep looking at that on a business perspective, saying, where is the right spot to build this stuff and really make sure that we do kind of maintain diversification in the overall brand strategy.
Yeah. I think the only thing I would add, and this is something that Andrew and I have to solve for here, but as we continue to build relationships with the AAON rep channel and understand where they have gaps and opportunity for selling clean room solutions, I mean, that's part of how we want to try to win with our reps as well is understanding how BASX can bring more capabilities to bear to help them grow their firms. It's balancing manufacturing. Of course, we didn't touch on engineering, but we've got limited engineering bandwidth.
You see our priorities where we're allocating focus today, which includes also productizing new semi-custom air handlers and capabilities. Clean room is important to us. We want to keep diversified. We've committed some dedicated manufacturing space, which I think is the right play for now. We're going to have to assess the demand from our rep side and how we can best complement and build that into our growth plan.
Great. Thanks so much.
We do have a question on the webcast. Does the target of mid-single digit % organic growth within AAON segment include any potential market share gains within national accounts?
Yeah. I mean, I would say it includes market share gain fundamentally. So built into that is market share gain. But again, I just rewind. I mean, we look at the current year, the soft macroeconomic environment, volumes down 24% in a quarter is pretty substantial in the commercial HVAC rooftop market. I mean, that is a big downturn. That is going to be a little bit of an anchor on kind of the year's growth rate. We're guiding to a flattish kind of overall performance, which is telling you we're seeing market share acquisition in this year and that backdrop. As we think going forward, yeah, definitely the national account is a piece of that. The national accounts, a couple hundred million dollars in pipeline.
Again, we do not assume we get all of that, but we certainly see there being potential to get a couple of good wins in there that will provide some opportunity. Certainly, if we get some bigger wins in there, there is upside to the conversation for sure.
Just a quick follow-up related to national accounts. Would this be an incremental revenue stream or cannibalistic to your existing business at all?
Oh, it is 100% incremental. I mean, when you look at what AAON is doing today, we have some national accounts. I mean, if you look at the scale of national accounts, they're very small. They're quick trip type locations, like fast serve locations, things like that. Some of these large wholesale locations, some of these large distribution warehouse owners, these large retail owners, that is incremental. These are customers that we do not play with today. It is an add kind of incremental perspective.
Hi. Excuse me. Adam Seessel with Gravity Partners. Matt, Rebecca, Joe, thanks for a very helpful day. Two quick ones for me. I was somewhat surprised to hear you say that industry volumes would be flattish over the next few years. What are some of the headwinds that are there?
Yeah. I would just, again, go back to the current calendar year. I mean, if we look at this calendar year 2025 and we look at the ABI, which is a 12-month kind of leading indicator, we look at construction starts and how that's actually materializing in material spend and material kind of growth, they are both showing a slowing market, not a growing market in the current calendar year. You take that plus a lagging indicator in the AHRI rooftop data being down 24% in the first quarter, and that tells you that the current calendar year is the depressing starting, not depressing. It is the anchor that is slowing down that growth rate.
If you look at that data, that data suggests that this current calendar year is going to be down in volumes, high single digits, just mathematically is what that data would tell you in the commercial non-res rooftop market. That is where we say that is your starting point, and then we anticipate the rebound off of that. Just that on a 2024 starting base relative year is just the math that is going to drive in that sort of conversation.
Good. Somewhat in jest, but somewhat not, I see on your LinkedIn page that you are a commercial helicopter pilot. Anything we should be worried about there?
I don't remember every fiber imagine. I think I was an airplane pilot. I was academy bound. Unfortunately, back in the day, LASIK was still considered experimental. My lack of vision was kind of a deterrent. That was a little passion fill, kind of just trying to balance the original life goals in the world. I don't fly too much, unfortunately.
I could ask yourself right here, and I probably should. I think I'll buy my time.
Yeah. We do have another question on the webcast if no one else has one. Can you expand on the emerging productization of your BASX offering? What does that exactly mean? How big of an opportunity can this be? Is this primarily data center related or outside of the data center?
You know, Matt, I'll let you kind of handle all this because, yeah.
Yeah. So specific for data centers, we really have two projects afoot. One is there are a handful of our air cooling solutions that we're standardizing, what I say for the masses. The way we'll go to market with these is through pre-engineered configurable offerings that are pre-designed. They're supported with selection software, collateral, and tools that our independent sales channel can use to self-perform the design, selection, pricing, submittal process. We're able to get scale in that way because there's very little of that workflow that's going to have to travel through our solution engineering department, right? We can continue to be focused on delivering high-value contributions with our hyperscalers or other colo customers that are looking to us for customized solutions. Meanwhile, we're able to get leverage in our fleet of factories by growing product sales through our national sales reps.
Not all of our customers are going to respond to that type of an offering, but we like the diversification and some optionality that gives us. It is a heavier engineering investment upfront because we have to pre-design and think through all of the configuration, flexibility, and features. It is a relatively lower support model thereafter once it gets in the hands of our reps. That is the first piece. That is kind of data center oriented. The second piece, which takes us outside of data centers, is really a complement to the work we would do in the data centers. That is the semi-custom air handling offering, which we believe could support data centers, but actually moves us and opens up further penetration in the commercial space. Same concept, though. Pre-engineered using all of the automation and manufacturing, the capabilities that we can muster.
We think through that offering. We put it in the hands of our reps with a flexible offering that is going to appeal to the consulting engineers, the contractors that are serving more of that commercial space. We think that that gives us more diversification in end markets and product capabilities. Those are really the two major projects that we have that are kind of in that productization category.
Any other questions in the room? We do have another webcast question. For the AAON business, you lost share in 2024. How have orders trended through the early part of this year? Specifically, how has that continued into Q2? Do you expect to regain the share that you lost in 2024?
Yeah. I mean, the simple answer there is yes. But when we think about the order trend, we look at the end of December orders, $150 million came in in a five-day period in the end of December. And then you look at the continued uptick in orders and backlog really inside of Q1, which continued to show strengthening order cadence kind of coming off of that disruption kind of on that refrigerant transition. And so we look at that and really shows good strength in kind of the value proposition, the order cadence. What I'll say is the orders continue to stay in a good position kind of in Q2. There's obviously, again, there's some dynamics in the macro market that certainly it's not an explosive growth conversation, but it's stability is what I would say in Q2.
We have one last webcast question. You spoke of how it is very difficult for your peers to mimic your business model. Can you please explain that again and provide a few factors of why that is, especially given your company competitors, sorry, are so much larger and have more capital?
I feel like there's no one better to take this passionate answer than Stephen.
I feel like they heard me say this is my slide and want me to do it again. Let me try to use a metaphor that makes this clear. Imagine you're building a 20,000 sq ft super house. The foundation that you pour under that, you realize that there's a better way to do the foundation when you finish framing the whole house. What you would have to do to mimic AAON is you would have to remove all the framing, take the whole thing down, all that cost, all that time, all the red tape convincing that you got to do. You'd have to go back, break the foundation up, rebuild it with this new method, and then reframe it. Imagine the bigger the house gets, the more difficult it is to undo and redo.
Because when AAON came up with this method, it was not anything anyone else was doing. The machinery required, the manufacturers of such never thought of doing it that way. We kind of developed it with them when we were small and able to implement it in such a way that it did not show up that much to the outside world. It was just kind of blood, sweat, and tears. And when I say kind of blood, sweat, and tears, I mean it. Blood, sweat, and tears to develop a system internally. We had a check and balance system that a design engineer would come up with something, and then it would go through this filter, and that filter would push back. It is funny because one of those filters is now a very good friend of mine because we have worked together for so long.
Back then, he was not nice to me. He would come back and he would say, "Can't do this, can't do this, can't do this." You had a very difficult dynamic between human beings to manage. You had a whole lot of undoing to build a new kind of method or foundation to your entire design process, fab process, and assembly process for the finished product. Why is it hard to replicate? Because you have to undo everything you do, break up your foundation, learn how to build the foundation, this other kind of secret way we do it, and then start all the way over again.
Question number?
Hey, Kevin Zhu with Ranger Investments. Your ERP rollout in Longview on April 1, I'm expecting you guys are going to roll it out to the rest of your facilities at some point. Do you guys have an update on that timing?
We do not. I mean, from our perspective, it is being very driven by ensuring there is 100% stability and the impacts are all resolved in one site before you go to the next one. While it is easy to get excited and start thinking about what each one of those steps looks like, the internal discipline that we have is we do not make those moves until not only have we gotten the facility that went live operating how it should, but also all of those lessons learned built into the solution at the next site, including the training and sort of try to make each one a less impactful conversation. Really maintaining that discipline is something that Rebecca and I have very often with some of our team because the ERP, if you really get down to it, is going to enable a lot of great things within AAON.
There's a lot of excitement around this ERP because it's going to provide us visibility that we've never had into this business. I mean, if you get right down to it, forward-looking, the ability to do a lot of things from a financial visibility and understanding perspective, they just don't exist in sort of some of that legacy ERP that we have. There's a lot of excitement in getting it on and getting it online, but really making sure that we don't make those decisions, make those moves until the previous site is fully stable, operating as it should, and everything has been trained out from a lessons learned perspective.
We have another question on the webcast. For BASX, are there any holes in the portfolio that customers would like you to fill? What is your exposure to direct-to-chip versus immersive cooling? How do you see those technologies growing? Are you agnostic from a price and margin standpoint?
You want to ask what was the last question?
Are you agnostic from a price and margin standpoint?
Agnostic.
Do you want to go to that first, Matt?
Yeah. Let me start with the first part was around liquid cooling, I want to say.
Does your sales channel, do your customers feel like the portfolio is well-rounded, or is there any products to fill?
Yeah. I would say as we're working with our AAON channel, they have other partners on their line card besides BASX. Of course, we're fighting for more wallet share every single quarter. Generally, we've largely filled all of the holes that are of most importance to them. Remember, we approach solving problems with a custom solution. It's not so much that we've got a menu or a catalog of offerings that they choose from and they identify we've got two or three gaps. They bring us challenges. We put pen to paper and we solve those problems. That's how so many of our offerings today have proliferated over the years. Generally, we're plugging those holes as the opportunities come forward. With regard to liquid cooling, the majority of what we're involved in supporting today is direct-to-chip liquid cooling.
That seems to be where most of our customers are orienting either current designs or the designs that we're partnering with them to engineer for their facilities. I would say if the question is around, are we agnostic to price and margin, meaning might we entertain offerings, products, or solutions that would challenge us or stretch our margin expectations, we take a look at those on a case-by-case basis. Ultimately, you saw our goal to be delivering blended margins of 30% plus. All of that includes both our data center solutions plus the configurable products plus the clean room offerings that we continue to manage. We look at it on a blended basis.
Yeah. Just to add one little piece there too is, is there stuff that our customers say, "Hey, I'd love if you made this"? Of course there is. We are also very pragmatic in ensuring that we're not chasing number one growth for growth's sake, and we're not kind of throwing good money after things that really are kind of not the right opportunity. One example of that conversation, we've had many a customer come to us and say, "Man, I'd love if you mass-produced an Air-cooled chiller.
That's a great example.
If you look at it and you look at our peers in JCI and Trane, I mean, a lot of their growth in data centers is on Air-cooled chillers. There is a lot of commentary saying, "We'd love if you went after that." When we step back and say, "Where's the market going, right? Run where the ball's going to be thrown, not where it's sitting today." That is a conversation that we really get into with them because as you move into liquid cooling, the thermal management strategies look different. The conversation around chillers looks different because when we move to liquid cooling, we're actually changing the way we actually design thermal management solutions. We're moving the fluid temperatures higher is really kind of a backbone of that.
In doing that, you start saying to yourself, "There's a point in time where an Air-cooled chiller isn't the right answer." When we sit here and say, "How much money do you want to throw trying to build out capacity around Air-cooled chillers in an evolving market where we don't see the long-term play providing the same growth story?" that's the wrong investment strategy. When we have those conversations where they say, "Hey, there's a hole. We'd love if you filled this," we're going to be very open at where we see the opportunity, and we're going to make the smart investments and develop strategies to answer where the market's going. Because yes, could we make a chiller? By all means, we could make chillers.
We do not see the return on capital deployed in building out chiller production capacity being a long-term growth conversation for the overall BASX brand. We are focusing the energy of our capital, of our talented team, on the opportunities that we see really where the market is evolving to, not where it is at.
Anyone else have any other questions? Nothing on the webcast, so going once, going twice. All right. I just want to say thank you, everyone, for attending. We appreciate everything. If you have any other follow-up questions, need to get a hold of us, my information's on the website if you don't already have it. Thank you and safe trip home.
Thanks, everyone.