Thank you very much. This is going to be one of the most interesting presentations you'll have today. I hope you listen carefully and we'll be talking about not only our business, but some of the tariff issues that will impact our business and many, many others. Acme is on the New York Stock Exchange. We're about $200 million in sales. We make two main product lines, cutting tools, and the second line is first aid and safety products. We grow by innovation, but we do a lot more than that. One of the things that's so important is that we deliver on time to our customers every day.
You can imagine right now with tariffs going on in the global markets and we're multinational with sourcing globally, it's very important for us to, number one, understand our costs, two, understand our customers, and three, to continue to deliver value. Just remember, deliver value to our customers at the end is why we're in business. We have a lot of liquidity. We sold a company called Camillus Knife Company and Cuda Fishing Tools a little over a year ago, generated $20 million of basically profit and used that to pay down debt. We threw off $20 million of EBITDA last year in addition. We are very liquid right now. It's a wonderful place to be when there's uncertainty in your supply base and in your markets. Again, the leader in first aid and safety and also in cutting tools.
The Westcott scissors you probably have at home, or if you've got kids, they're probably using them in school. Okay, this is another view of our business. In the middle is the green. That's our customer base. On the left are the first aid and safety acquisitions that we've done. On the right side, on the lower right, Westcott scissors. That's where it all started. It still is a very, very important part of our business. Very profitable, you might guess. If opening packages is important and you're using them at home and you're getting packages or deliveries or at the office, you're cutting and opening with our products. Just the base business is growing at some 2% a year in units. We're the biggest in the world. We have 150 patents in that area. And our customers are a who's who.
We've used the cash flow to buy companies on first aid. In the very bottom, you'll see that we used to make medical instruments. You can picture scissors and then medical instruments. That was a business that we eventually got out of and then we moved right up the chain into value added first aid and safety products for the industrial world. It's very, very important to meet OSHA and ANSI requirements and have a safe workplace. Keeping refills in those kits so that they're always current and always there in the event of an accident is imperative and legally important. That's an annuity. There's about a $30 million piece of our business that is an annuity on the refills at high margins. About a year ago we bought Elite First Aid. That is the first acquisition we did to save lives.
First aid, cuts and scrapes and falls, okay, it's not pleasant. This Elite acquisition is the equivalent of giving our customer base a medic kit. Things that will stop major bleeding, things that will stabilize limbs, things that will help open airways. We're taking this product line across our entire customer base because everybody needs tools to save lives. It's a very exciting long term acquisition. We did that about a year ago. It's fully integrated into our business. This is a slide of our locations. Our headquarters are outside of New York City. We've got a big operation in China. Four sites, location being offices, factories, dormitories, very, very important part of our business. We have an operation in India, we have an operation in Europe and one in Canada.
The last 10 acquisitions that we've done have been US manufacturers or one has been Canadian. As a result, when we're looking at our sourcing complex, it's not like we're tied to one country or another. China is very important to us and they make great product at excellent prices. For certain products like scissors, they have half the world's steel and they sell it at half the world's price. It's pretty hard to migrate to another country and be effective. Other areas like first aid, you can be in Egypt buying gauze, you can be in India buying products. You can be making, as we do, alcohol wipes and prep pads in Florida. It's a broad base. Here's the financial results. I guess you'd call it boring. We keep growing. You can see it sort of flattened in 2023, but that's.
It really showed in 2024 because we sold a business and the business we sold was the hunting and fishing business. As an aside, I love that business. I like the people that are involved with it. I like the vibe with it. It's just an incredibly fun business. We were paid 100 times what we paid for it, we paid down the debt, we focused the business, and the buyer, which is part of a roll up private equity backed, loves the product and brand. It all works. That is why you see a little bit of flattening between 2023 and 2024. We grew in 2024, despite the sale of about a $12 million business. The EBITDA was a record last year at $20 million. Let me tell you what $20 million does for us. It means we do not need money.
It means you can write a check and buy inventory and anticipate tariffs and be there to service your customer when others can't. And you know, we've done that. It means you can buy businesses like the Camillus business out of bankruptcy and then turn around and sell it for 100 times. It means you can buy back shares. It means that in an environment like today where our customer base is facing some turbulence, our supply base is, and our competitors may not be as well capitalized or may not be in a position with the diversification of supply that we are, that maybe this is a time for Acme United to go shopping. And I suspect I will tell you that we are doing so. Net income, again, it was $10 million last year and was fully taxed and earnings per share, $2.45.
To put that in perspective, the stock's selling at $40 and, you know, $2.45 a share last year. It's got a full multiple. I think there's a lot of runway as we expand. You'll see, at least if I can convey it, where we're taking it in the next three years. We pay a dividend and it's been $0.60 a share now in about every six to seven or eight quarters we increase. I have held back a little bit on the increase in dividend until we saw what the marketplace looked like and the stability of our customers. I'd much rather take money from that would go into a dividend and put it into buying inventory that I can then turn around and sell at perhaps a very, very attractive price. Okay, growth drivers.
This is a classic first aid kit that goes into an industrial site. It's on the wall. Each of those little boxes have things like gauze, adhesive bandages, alcohol, prep pads. Some of the items in there we make in the United States in our own factories. You can imagine one aspect of our strategy in today's world is to be looking at the companies that make products that can go into our first aid kit. They've already got a base business. They're probably profitable. We lay on top of that the annuity of our refill business and the volume, of course, to spread corporate overhead and build out something larger. We've introduced something very, very special. You. You've got a picture. Think hard. The white box that says first aid is a big white box on a wall.
You see down at the bottom what looks like an RFID. In fact, it is the concentric circles. Every component that goes into that white box, every component has an RFID tag. The patents that we've developed, measuring what's inside that box, tell us when it's empty. It will say something's expired. It's very important because no other system can do that. If it expires, we know on the RFID the lot number and the date of expiration. It turns off, it's not recognized. It says to the customer, time to buy. If it's missing because it was stolen, it's missing. The RFID is missing. The sensor notes it, buy. Of course, when it's being consumed, because there's been an accident and you're a third of the way through the package, it says, time for a refill.
This box is now being introduced to the US market and soon Canada, to major corporate entities. When you put it on a wall and it's on, the rest is automatic. As it's being used as people need it, as it's being expired, it's issuing purchase orders. Refill me, refill me. It goes to the safety manager, it goes to the seller of the product, which might be, say, Fastenal or Grainger, and also to us. That annuity is a closed loop. Nobody's driving around in vans, nobody's doing anything. You've got a monitor on the wall. The customer saves between 35% and 50% of someone driving in a van and filling these manually. Our biggest competitor is Cintas, which we estimate has about $600 million of business that they serve us quite well. It is very, very expensive.
The customer might want to have a good value. They should look at us in a time like this where prices are going up substantially. This is the time for us to strike. This product is literally at a major trade show as we speak. We've had great interest. We're going to take it the next step. We'll see. Although it looks like a plain white box, what's inside of it is a lot of sophistication with a patented monitoring system. We think we can change the industry. Here's an example of some other items that would go on that wall, and these are for bleed control. You might know that a serious artery cut will bleed a patient to death in 90 seconds. You need access if that happens and you save lives. Here's a number of them.
One is a tourniquet for limbs, another one is for your torso, and another one is for around your lungs. It's a chest seal. For lots of reasons, these things are selling. On an industrial floor, accidents happen. If it's a bleeding accident like this, it saves lives. There's another one that we don't have here, but we've announced it. We're going to be taking on ZOLL defibrillators and that will be on a wall as well. The beauty of that for these industrial sites is you have a safety center with a core of it. We will have the ability to train and monitor eventually with our smart compliance, all the maintenance that's required for AEDs. It's a very, very important value added that's in the process right now of going out to the marketplace.
When we bought Med-Nap in Florida, making alcohol wipes and pads, one thing that made sense to us is lens cleaning wipes. You can do that for goggles, you can do it for sunglasses. Of course, you do it for your regular glasses. This is in Brooksville, Florida. We're working right now on an expansion of a plant and getting distribution, as you can imagine, in both our safety accounts and all of our office accounts. Because we're domestic and price competitive, the tariff world is probably going to be giving this a boost in sales. In the cutting area, here's an example. At the top of a SNP and then high leverage shear, and at the bottom is a steel is a ceramic box opener. Each of these are leveraging technologies. We've got chromium nitride coatings that enhance the hardness.
We've got carbonitrides, which are really, really hard, almost diamond-like for industrial uses. The ceramic box opener is excellent because although it will cut you, it's not like a razor. And the ceramic is a tough cutting surface. Companies like Amazon use these by the millions. It's for opening boxes. We have a home unit which I use all the time. They're available at retail in places like Walmart in the craft area. Last year, that was a major, major growth for us. It's not because you've got in this case a nice paper trimmer or a healable safety mat where you can cut it, use a knife on it and it reforms itself, or that we've got the non-stick scissors that can be used with glues and tapes.
What it is is an extension of one item to another, to another of size and material. Last year the craft business pulled the entire Westcott business forward and it had a record year. This is fun. Every year there are 3.8 million kids born in the U.S., and by the time they are in fourth or fifth grade, somebody, maybe it would have been me, is taking a son or daughter shopping and inevitably they look for something that's fun. They look for color, they look for texture, they look for something that catches their eye. In this case, these are Vibes scissors that are going nationwide for this back to school.
Just like last year and the year before and the year before, the 3.8 million kids that had the scissors lost them by the end of the year and they're back shopping all over again. That's part of our business. It's a good business and it's fun. We have a business called Diamond Machine Technology in Massachusetts which sharpens knives and the diamond cutting surfaces are the best in the industry. What's best mean? The diamonds are very, very carefully distributed and the sharpening surfaces are absolutely flat. You can imagine if a sharpening surface is curved, by the time you're done sharpening your knife, you'll have a curved knife and that's not where you want to be. Flat is important.
This particular product, which is patented, is simple and we'd never done it until last year, but we said why not take a simple sharpener design where you can put the blade through and the blades automatically adjust to the angle so you don't have to do anything and give it the diamond based sharpeners from Massachusetts that we make. That's what that does. Walmart picked it up and then Menards and then it took legs and now it's in different shapes and sizes and it's a multimillion dollar product launch that happened last year and with innovations that are coming through this year will be a growth driver for the company. I'm very excited with that and priorities, of course, grow on our solid revenue base. E-commerce is our largest single segment. Amazon is our biggest customer. We're obviously driving big time there.
It is also not Amazon, it is also Walmart.com, it is HomeDepot.com and so forth. The market share gaining products are things like the smart compliance, which we are actively introducing to the market. Now with the patented technology, we have invested heavily in our equipment. I saw this last week in North Carolina. We have six robotic arms that are stuffing the—oh, it might be like an alcohol prep pad that we make in Med-Nap. It comes in bulk. They stuff them in little boxes. Those things then go into our smart compliance kits. It is not one or two. These are thousands and thousands of these things and they are automating what seven people used to do. I was so pleased with it. We bought another one and that is going to Vancouver, Washington to another plant probably in about three months when it gets built.
That's the kind of investment in productivity that comes back to you fast and it helps you to compete effectively. Finally, if we do these things right, we'll have another record year in earnings and we will continue to be increasing the dividend over time. I just want some stability to know what this world is. Finally, we are actively shopping for acquisitions as we speak. Why don't we open it up? I'd be happy to talk about things like tariffs, which we're actively involved in. Yeah, John. With potential targets. How has that varied over the past three months? I don't want to identify specific customers because they all listen. I will tell you that everybody, if you go back just three months, you've had two tariffs for China, 10% and 10%.
Everybody who could went back to their suppliers and got some savings. I'm speaking specifically about China, but it would be across the board. The savings from your suppliers, typically you're getting some pickup in currency because the Chinese currency dropped about 2% during the time Trump was elected until March. You had a pickup there, you had productivity, so that helped. You had a small price increase. That's what we did. In the end, the first 20% has sort of been absorbed in the normal level of inflation. The next level, if it goes up to, well, pick a number, 150% for China there. We're not getting it from productivity, we're not getting it from our suppliers. There's been some talk that China will devalue its currency. If it does, we have buying power.
We would generate savings in our cost and pass that on to the consumer. There'd have to be some piece that would be an increase as well. It's dynamic. It's very hard right now because you've got normal supply going out to all the retailers and companies like us in the world and a tariff that goes from 20% to 150% in like a week. Anybody that's thinking maybe the tariff is going to go down will not want to pick up at the port, say, in China, because they're going to have to pay the 150%. We did something that not everybody did, but we spent millions of dollars after President Trump was elected in November buying inventory, both for first aid and also for Westcott. We have a buffer to be able to work with our customers as we put through price increases.
Also for things like tariffs, now 150%, maybe we tell the factory, don't put it on a boat, hold it until we see where we have some visibility. Maybe the tariff's going to be 25% in three weeks. We'd rather pay 25% than 50%. There are many companies right now who can't do that, and there's many retailers that can't do that. They're in a just in time situation, particularly their private brands where they have a slot on their shelf. They need the product, it's slotted in and they're taking delivery at 150%. Not only aren't they making any money, but if they do it enough, it'll swell their inventory as they replace it by 150%. And many of them are so levered, they'll never make that happen. There's some scary things out there. Walmart will go great. Thank you.