Thank you, guys, for joining us today at our Dallas Southwest Ideas Conference. I'm Philip Cooper, Managing Director here at Three Part Advisors. Our next company presenting is Acme United. They're traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ACU. Today, here for the company presenting is Walter Johnsen. Walter?
Thank you, Philip. Acme United is about a $200 million company based on the New York Stock Exchange. We've got two businesses that are very, very good: the legacy business, and you might know from the name Acme United. It's been around a long time. Acme United was founded in 1867, so put that and remember it. It is the largest scissor maker in the world. And you'll probably look, once we're having this presentation, about the scissors you have in your desk, and chances are they say Westcott, and so you're a customer. Our Westcott scissors are in every kind of distribution you can think of. And one thing to remember is when you're the biggest in the world and you've got 150 patents, you've got a very strong cash flow from that position, and we do. The other business is in first aid.
And the reason we got into that is years ago, we took kid scissors, sterilized them, put them in an instrument pack, and it became a medical device. And at one point, Acme was Vendor of the Year to then American Hospital Supply. So it was the kid scissors being bridged into disposable instruments, and then eventually we began to move into the first aid business. We also, at one time, owned a knife company. It was the oldest knife company in the United States called Camillus. And we sold that last year for $19.8 million. Incidentally, we have been spending the cash flow in part on acquisitions. When we bought the Camillus knife company, it was in bankruptcy. I thought, well, it's the oldest knife company in the world. It's in absolute auction. We'll make a market. We bought it for $180,000.
The $19.8 million represents over a hundred-time investment return. And after taxes, we recapitalized the company with about $15 million. So we strengthened our balance sheet. We focused the business, and the return was one that I was very happy with. We're positioned for future acquisitions, and I'll go over some of those in the next slides. So this is a complicated chart, but if you look in the middle, it says cohesive customer base. On the bottom, you'll see Westcott scissors, and then you see Clauss shears and DMT sharpeners. It's all basically the cutting business. It's the legacy business. It's the $70 million scissors a year. And it has financed the growth without raising outside capital from when I took over years ago when it was about $15 million in sales.
The top line is the first aid and medical business, where we've been buying businesses, bringing them together and expanding its market presence. One key part of first aid, especially in the industrial market, is those industrial boxes have to be regularly refilled. And so that refill business, which is high margin, is an annuity. And every time we put a box in an industrial site, and we have, say, hundreds of boxes in maybe a GM site, every time they're up there, every year there's a refill. And every new box that we put in, there's another refill. And the refill business today is about $40 million of our business at very high margins. Last May, well, this past May, we bought Elite First Aid.
And as we were looking at the product family in first aid, it's a very broad definition, and it can be large if you want it to be. So Elite First Aid was for medics and first responders. That's not cuts and bruises. This acquisition saves lives. And every one of our industrial and school and government accounts needs these kinds of products because, for example, there's a serious accident, there's a bleeding event, there's blocked airways. These kinds of things, a first responder, a medic would carry the bags and be there. And so while we bought this $4 million company and paid $6 million for it, as it is, the expansion plans are throughout our entire customer base. The footprint is something that's important. So our last 10 acquisitions, and these aren't big acquisitions.
The strategy is you buy a small one, and then you expand it through sales and marketing and your customer distribution. And so you paid, which doesn't really matter. It's a small amount, but if you're successful in growing it, all of a sudden you've got the multiples of larger entities. And the power of that is, of course, as with Elite, you've expanded either your market presence or your product line. The last 10 acquisitions have been in the U.S. and Canada. You can see on the right, China. About 40% of our products come from China. It's an incredibly strong strength for the company. And we can talk later about tariffs, and I'd be happy to because we see that, frankly, as an opportunity. Here are the financial results.
So you can see in 2011, you probably can't read it, but I will tell you it says $73.3 million, and in 2023, $191.5 million. This year, despite having sold about $12 million of revenues in the Camillus sale, we'll still have a record year, and it'll probably be somewhere between $195-$200 million, up from $191 last year, assuming where we are now continues. I think that's representative of probably, with that kind of trend, what might look going forward. I'll share with you my personal goal. I want to add $100 million to that in the next three years, so to go from $200 million to $300 million. It's not easy. We'll probably fall short. But here's what it does, and here's how we get there. The first aid business is growing organically. It's somewhere between 6%-10% annually.
The Westcott scissors, you know, everybody's opening boxes all the time. FedEx packages, either in the preparation of them or, frankly, all the consumers that are getting products and in factories. So the Westcott business is growing organically anywhere from 2%-5%, depending on the year. So when I say 10, it's a little bit aggressive, but let's just do the math. $200 million this year, $220, $240, $260. It's compounding. It's $270. And we buy a company or two, and we hit our $300 million. Directionally, that's what our intention is. Now look at the EBITDA. Last year, we had $18.2 million of EBITDA. This year, for nine months, we're at $16.4 million. So if you were to project out for the year, we're somewhere around $20 million of EBITDA this year, up from $18.2 million.
If you have $20 million EBITDA on $200 million, that's 10% contribution, right? If you add $100 million to it, you're at $300 million. There's $30 million of EBITDA. And let's say, because first aid is a little bit higher margin, we have more refills, and maybe we can become a little bit more efficient. And let's say we get to $36 million of EBITDA, which would be 12% instead of 10%. You do that, you have $4 million shares, that's $9 a share of cash flow, EBITDA, multiplied by 10, you're at $90 a share. And that's directionally where we're shooting for. And I think we can achieve it. The net income, it follows all over, but in 2022, we were hit very hard with container costs. Remember, there was a big supply chain problem.
LA basically was nonfunctional in its ports, and it was very, very expensive for us. Fortunately, most of that's corrected. There were some minor things in the past year with the port strike, and there's one potentially coming, but I think that will be resolved fairly quickly. Earnings per share, again, $203 for the nine months, and we've got one quarter left. So it will be a good year in earnings per share, and we pay a dividend. The history of that is we were a very small company when I got involved, and the only investors we had really were retail, and many of them wanted a dividend. And so we started at $0.01 a quarter, and today we're at $0.15 a quarter.
And every six to 12 months, every 12 to 15 months, something like that, we look at the dividends and increase it a little bit, assuming earnings are up. And I think it's a good discipline. It's not an overly large yield, but it's a good discipline, I believe, to be focused on. The reason we're in business in part is to return to our shareholders. So here's some growth drivers. In the first aid area, what you see on the right is an industrial first aid kit. And it's a big box. And then you've got unitized packages. Within each of those are maybe gauze, adhesive bandages, alcohol wipes, prep pads. And when they're being used, you want to keep track of the consumption.
Because if an industrial first aid kit is empty or is full of expired product, then when the time comes for an accident, you're not prepared to deal with the injury. Secondly, there's so many regulations with OSHA and ANSI requirements and aggressive enforcement of various laws that you just don't want that to happen. So the refill business is not only a nice to have, it's imperative in the industrial sites. The trick for us was how do we get this so we could automatically refill a kit? The current market leader in this business is Cintas, with about $600 million in revenues for industrial first aid kits. And some of you may have them coming into your office where a van arrives, someone carries refills, puts them in the first aid kit, marks it and certifies that it's current and leaves.
That's a very expensive distribution model, and it requires high margin on the components. We don't know what the gross margins are for Cintas on its refills, but we're guessing 85%-90%. So it provides an opportunity for a competitor such as ourselves to look at that base and do some automation in some fashion to get the delivery costs down substantially. And the way we did it was we put barcodes on all of the components. And a little yellow tag, which you can see down at the bottom right, that when the box was a third empty, or two-thirds empty, you would scan it on the box, and that would automatically trigger a refill purchase. And our customers love it. This September, we announced what's in the center of that ring. So this was at the National Safety Conference in Orlando, and that's our booth.
What you're seeing is a first aid kit with RFID coding underneath, and so with the individual components, we put RFID tags on every single one, and the utility patent relates to monitoring that box for anything that's void, for anything that's been consumed. We also code the RFID codes for lot number and expiration, so when there's a product about to expire, what was reading as being present no longer is and also is automatically refilled, so this automatic replenishment might be equivalent to a vending machine where you don't even have to open the box to start to have refills happen because things expire based on time, and it captures the installed base of hundreds of thousands of these boxes throughout industrial North America.
We're pretty excited about it, and I can tell you that our customers are excited, and we'll see what happens because we have zero sales in this product. It was introduced in September. There's a lot of sampling going on. For next year, it's not in my forecasts, but it could be a really interesting upside. I have a feeling we'll look back at this as a kind of a seminal event in the company, but we'll see. Here's an example of some items that we sell a great deal of: bleed control. When you think of first aid, you die from, you know, heart problems, you die from airway congestion and strokes. Bleeding can be just as deadly or more so because if it's a serious accident or a knifing or a shooting, you could die in 90 seconds when you bleed out.
Having products readily available on site where someone can be treated either for a chest wound, and that might be a chest seal filled with a clotting material, or a tourniquet for a limb, or something for your torso is absolutely critical in treatment of industrial first aid. But it also, and you can imagine, we sell to schools, we sell to police departments, fire departments, government agencies. Every one of our customers should be having at least this basic product family, and it's being shown. Here's an example on the right, one of the industrial first aid kits and underneath a two-go kit. This is for an industrial site, and each of the items on the left in the open package is color-coded for the specific injury that's being treated. Of course, bleed control is in part of that.
If you remember back to the acquisition of Elite First Aid, where you've truly got life-saving components, well, those will be going in those emergency response bags that hang off the first aid kits. So there's a lot of leverage in that acquisition, and we're actively working on that on every one of our customer bases and online. Here's a category that spans the consumer business as well as the industrial business: lens care. We bought a company about four years ago called Med-Nap, and they make alcohol prep pads, BZK wipes, hand sanitizers, all in little foils. So for example, if you are going to a doctor's office and getting an injection, they might take a Med-Nap two-by-two and wipe your arm and then give you an injection. So it's broadly distributed.
The lens wipes are the same equipment, but they're there for the industrial and the consumer to be wiping safety glasses, goggles, eyeglasses, sunglasses. And this category has been a substantial growth driver in the past year. And it kind of bridges, you know, the Westcott distribution, which would be retail, and very, very much the industrial distribution. Getting into the growth drivers for cutting, on the left is a ceramic box opener. It looks sort of like a toy, to be honest. It's plastic. It's got a little ceramic blade, but it's cheap and it's safe. A few years ago, when we were introducing this, I showed it to our board and I said, you know, the alternative to this, which is true, is a metal-handled razor box opener. And if you slip with that, you have a serious cut. You could cut your finger off.
You could do a lot, so I said, but look at this one. The blade is ceramic. It's designed to cut through tape on boxes, slash through boxes themselves, but it won't cut you, so I took my hand and I went like that, and I cut every one of my fingers, so just to be clear, it's not that safe, but if I'd done that with a razor, I probably wouldn't have the fingers, and I learned also, don't make that demonstration again because it's a mess. Now, the other two, the one in the middle is one of the best-selling scissors on earth. It's the Westcott non-stick titanium scissor. There's more patents than that than you can dream of.
We were talking earlier among ourselves before the presentation about how Milton Friedman said, look how hard it is to make a pencil and all the components that go into it, whether it's the rubber or the wood or the brass and the transportation. Well, that scissor is very similar to that. It starts with the steel and the steel alloys and the tempering of the steel. The patents on that particular one are titanium nitride, chromium nitride coating optimized for hardness. And that hardness is 35% titanium nitride, 65% chromium. It's all also optimized for the thickness of the coating. You'd think, well, how could that happen? The more, the better? No, it shears. At 0.35 microns thick, you optimize that. The utility patent on that applies to anything that cuts. And we then extended it again and again and again by using carbon nitrides, which were even harder.
We used those on some of the industrial shears. Then we developed a Sol-Gel, which is a ceramic-based non-stick. All this is patented, which went on top. This little scissors cuts incredibly well. It generally doesn't rust. I use it on my boat. It cleans up quickly. In the kitchen, eggs don't stick to it. In industrial sites, Velcro and glues don't stick to it, of course, in the craft area. Guess what? It's one of the best in the world. The cost of that is not particularly high. The selling price gives a customer an incredible value. That product might retail for $12. On the right is an example of a high shear scissors. This particular one is used for cutting herbs and flowers. The Clauss business dominates this little segment called the florist market.
And so between knives where, you know, they're cutting bulbs and they're cutting roses and cutting flowers for Valentine's Day, these are all winding up there. And it's just a little niche, but it's part of the overall business. In the craft area, this year, we've added several million dollars of new business. For years, we worked on this category, and finally, we cracked through with multi-million dollar new business accounts. And so when I said earlier, Westcott grows 2%-4% organically, this year, it'll be more than that. And it's really gratifying to see because when you move the needle on the biggest supplier in the world, it matters. Here's an example of some rulers. And I want to make the example not only of rulers, but what it means with tariffs. So these two are kid scissors.
Kid scissors under the Trump tariffs had a 25% tariff because they were called engineering tools. Now, I don't deal with the classifications. We live with them. Okay, so they're 25% tariffs. We moved the products to Thailand. Thailand has a lot of rice, and they have the woody parts of rice plants that are wasted. Those rice husks can be reformulated into something that approximates wood. Our marketing team looked at that and said it's recycled. Our movement from China to bring this to Thailand saved 25% tariffs. The labor in Thailand for an average worker is about half of the similar factory in China. When we repositioned this, we had a higher-end recycled product made with rice husks in Thailand without tariffs. We got it placed at major retail for next year.
I mean, none of this was what was supposed to be the outcome of the tariffs, but it spurred looking at new sources. It also spurred new locations, and here's an outcome. Here's just a fun thing. It's the Vibe scissors. So we sell 10 million kid scissors a year, and you know, there's 3.8 million kids born in America each year because we're global, so it's a much bigger number. But just take the U.S., 3.8 million. So it's kindergarten, first grade, second, third, you know, it keeps going, and every year, it seems, the scissors disappear. They're lost. I don't know what happens with American families, but I remember when my son would, every year, we'd be out shopping for a new set of things at back to school, and that's what happens with this category.
So if you can do something like these Vibe scissors, and they've got plastic and they've got overmolds, which are soft. We have another one, which is spongy and gooey. Kids pick them up. Whoever it is buys it, and they drive the sales. So that piece of our business is not an annuity, but it's pretty darn close because it's purchased each year. It's lost each year. And the next year comes in, it's a little bit different maybe. And every time it's different, you know, you raise your price. Here's a ceramic folding knife. So the customer that is buying this is a big online retailer. And it started with 12 of its distribution centers, then 50, then 200. You can imagine this is a pretty big online distributor.
They've helped us design other items that could fold in your pockets so that, again, it's cheap and it's safe. Not entirely safe, but pretty safe. It's a product line that our customer is telling us, help us. So with a big online distributor, you might imagine, well, there's retailers like Walmart and Target and Home Depot and Safeway, and you can go down the list. What works for one for opening boxes puts some runway for others. Again, this is in the Westcott product family and is part of the organic growth that's happening. If you have a scissor or you have a knife, especially if you don't have one of ours, it needs to be sharpened. We bought a company called Diamond Machine Technology a number of years ago. It's diamond-based. It's the best sharpening, we believe, in the world.
But nobody knows how to use sharpeners, at least consumers. Honestly, you look at knife blocks, and most of them have dull knives because nobody knows how to sharpen or doesn't have the confidence to sharpen expensive knives, so they get dull. So here's the solution for that. You take the knife, you put it in the V, you pull it through three times. It's sharp. That's it. These are now being distributed throughout Walmart and Menards, and it's a category that in the past year has grown by multi-million dollars. In January, I'll be in Germany as we introduce that into the European arena. And I think it's got legs. So our priorities, solid revenue growth, drive our retail and industrial first aid, our craft market expansion, things like the DMT or other products, work on cost savings and productivity.
I didn't talk much about that, but there's about 2 million of productivity improvements going on right now. It relates to in our warehousing, optimizing the pick flow and the box sizes. We'll increase the dividends regularly and looking for tuck-in acquisitions. So that in a nutshell is Acme United. Love to answer questions. Yeah, so we've bought about a third of our shares in over the years. More of that was in the past because somebody would be stuck with a block and then they'd get a margin call and we'd make a market that may be a little bit under market and would buy them in. That doesn't happen that often anymore. But we've got about a 200,000 share buyback in place now, but we're not using it.
But then there's a time when the market is crazy, and when it is, we'll be at the other end. So our balance sheet, we've got a $75 million line of credit and mortgage. I think it's about a $10 million mortgage and $65 million line of credit. Our debt at year end will be about $21 million, and our EBITDA is about $20-$21 million. So I mean, we're very unlevered. And we're looking for acquisitions, and I'm sure, you know, every year we work on something. So we'll find some good thing to do.
Yeah. Are you working with a certain set of bankers for these acquisitions? Do they come to you? I mean, you said you bought some things out of bankruptcy. What are you looking for?
So the question is, what are we looking for in acquisitions and are we working with bankers? We love bankers.
We also generate most of our deals internally. So for 15 years, we've been looking at companies within our spaces, contacting them, knowing the management, being at shows, making offers to buy companies, and then maybe we're priced too high or the expectation is too high, but then the company grows or somebody wants to retire. These things develop. The database is internally generated, and most of our deals are internally generated. One banker showed us a deal that we bought, and that was a number of years ago. He retired. He's now on retainer with us to find deals, and he's a terrific, honest person, and I enjoy working with him. Most of the deals are internally generated. In the next part of the question was, what are we looking for? It's not a multiple of cash flow.
It's really, what can we build with it? And when you're looking at small companies, if you can see a way to grow quickly or reduce the cost quickly, then that becomes maybe pretty interesting to us. So for example, with the Elite First Aid purchase, $4.2 million in revenues, we paid $6 million. It made maybe $800,000. So, you know, it was reasonably priced on a cash flow basis. But what we did afterward with it is really where the value added is. First thing we did was we put our marketing team to learn the products, figure out how to get the items online because we've got a very strong presence. Amazon is our biggest customer. So online, so a lot of content, a lot of work there. Second, what products can be placed in what form across our entire customer base?
Because these were things used to save lives, and they were meaningful first aid products, so big effort to do that, so that's on the top line, then there was product cost, well, we have direct sourcing in Asia. We make our own products. For example, all of our alcohol wipes and prep pads are made internally at Med-Nap, so we were able to squeeze out on this $1 million company about $150,000-$200,000 in product cost, then you look at the plant, well, it was a small plant and a very good one with excellent workers, but we didn't need the plant. We closed the plant. We offered everybody a job in our facility in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where we make first aid kits, and the net of that is about four people joined us. Others found other jobs.
But now we had a product family, placement, content, margin. And it was an incremental product within our production line. And there's an example of an acquisition that you could say, yeah, you paid a reasonable price, which we did. But the real value was afterward. And of course, when we bought the Camillus Knife business, that was in bankruptcy. So there were no sales, but it was the oldest knife company in the world, I mean, in North America. And I thought we could do something with it. We grew it to about $10 or $12 million in sales. And then when we sold it, it was sold last year for $19.8 million. And we used the cash to pay down the debt.
Tell me a little bit about the management team that sits behind you.
Yeah. That's a really excellent question.
I've been running the company for about 20-some years, 25 years. It was a small company. It's a little bit bigger. Right behind me is Brian Olschan. And Brian has been side by side with me as a partner most of that way. And he's younger than me. And he's very different. He's incredibly. I'm a nice guy. Brian is a lot firmer. Money sticks to Brian. Money sticks to me, but it gets spent. So it's a little different. Brian is incredibly innovative, and he's an incredible merchant. And he knows how to say no to salespeople. So he's right behind me. He's younger, and he's absolutely hands-on. Our CFO used to be CFO of Gallo Wine in Asia and eventually general manager of the Gallo business in Japan. And when he came back, he joined us in the finance department. He's now CFO. He's in his 50s.
The person behind him is in his 40s and is grooming himself, and we're grooming him, should something happen to our CFO. So that leaves me. And my plan is to run that business for the next three years to get that extra $100 million. And we'll see what happens. Health is excellent right now, and hopefully that stays. If I died like tonight, well, then that would be bad. Just saying, I don't think I'd like that much. But maybe I wouldn't like it at all. But life would go on. The area where I think would be missing is some of the deal identification, not the execution of deals, but the deal identification. So, you know, in time, we'd have to change that model. But the team is solid. And they've been with us a long time, which is terrific.
Some of our competitors have a lot of management turnover, and it's interesting because the priorities change from one side to the next and back and forth, and that kind of change is maybe not as consistent as, look, here's where we're going, and everybody lines up, and we just try to do it. How are we doing on time?
Thank you so much.